Wild Turkeys are common year-round residents at Fair Meadows. Breeding season begins in March, but most active courtship occurs in April and May. Adult males, known as gobblers or toms, are resplendent with their colorful skin ornamentation and bronze-colored, iridescent feathers that are on display as they gobble and strut about in the presence of females with their tails fanned and held erect and their wings lowered. Gobblers can be very pugnacious, and sometimes they will fight fiercely for the favor of the hens. Here is a description of this behavior in Birds of the World: “Fighting begins with mutual threat and progresses to striking with wings and kicking. Eventually one bird grabs the other's beak or snood [a fleshy protuberance at the base of the bill], and birds entwine necks, pushing against each other with breasts.”
One year in late April, Penny and I witnessed such an encounter when we spotted a pair of toms grappling with each other in one of our prairies. Here is an excerpt of the contemporaneous notes that I made:
The heads of the two toms were locked off and on for about 30 minutes. One of the birds had grasped the lower beak of the other turkey with its mouth, and we watched while they wrestled each other until they suddenly gave up and walked away together.
We never learned the eventual upshot of that encounter.
After courtship is over, hens and toms part ways, and the hen selects a nest site on the ground. Most of the nests that we have discovered have been shallow depressions in dead leaves in open woodlands, often under a concealing bush or at the base of a tree. Clutch size varies widely but averages about a dozen eggs. It can be a heart-stopping moment to happen upon a turkey nest in the woodlands. The hen sits tight as she broods the eggs, only to explode from the unseen nest when the unsuspecting intruder approaches within a few feet of it. The precocial young turkeys (poults) leave the nest shortly after hatching and are tended by the hen. After several weeks, larger family groups consisting of many hens and their poults often flock together.
Wild Turkeys were extirpated from Wisconsin in the late 1800s due to habitat loss and unregulated hunting. After multiple failed attempts to restore them during the twentieth century, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources successfully reintroduced a population from Missouri in the 1970s. Today, turkeys occupy all their former range and beyond.
Written by Gary Shackelford, Fair Meadows Sanctuary resident manager
Cover image by Gary Shackelford. A strutting gobbler in full display.
