How to Improve Habitat to Support Wild Turkeys

This is due to an amalgam of reasons, but the cold truth is that we have mostly taken our largest game bird for granted. The generations of hunters who remember when turkeys were nearly eliminated have mostly aged out, and the current cohort has only known booming populations and plentiful opportunities for their entire turkey hunting careers.

Unfortunately, it’s now abundantly clear that our turkey populations aren’t as invulnerable as we assumed them to be and that they need some direct attention if we want future generations to enjoy them as we have. While individual landowners and land managers aren’t likely to reverse the turkey decline on a broad scale, they can certainly help improve one of the biggest factors of population growth at the local level: poult recruitment.

To do this, it’s essential to understand the unique requirements of a freshly hatched wild turkey.

Bugs or Bust

Many turkey hunters are avid deer hunters and often see turkeys feeding alongside whitetails in the fall and winter. That perspective makes it easy to view turkeys as primarily herbivores–happily picking away at hard mast and crops with their hooved comrades. In reality, adult turkeys are aggressively omnivorous throughout most of the year. And poults are even more so.

If you’ve ever encountered a poult in late spring versus one in late summer, the size difference is astonishing. They pack on pounds like an Olympic weightlifter, and they do it the same way—protein. It’s no coincidence that turkey poults emerge when the most abundant sources of protein are crawling, hopping, and buzzing around. The invertebrate army that every turkey hunter inevitably complains about is exactly the food source that a hatchling needs to have any chance at becoming a limb-hanger.

Whether you manage 20 acres or 2,000, providing high-quality bugging habitat is a great way to give your feathery friends the best possible start to life. And it just so happens that the best habitat for hunting invertebrates is also the perfect cover for a foraging poult.

The Right Cover

Consider the worst place to be in early summer as a human with an aversion to bugs, and you’re probably picturing dense understory vegetation that is nearly impossible to walk through. That same habitat is the perfect feeding ground for an insectivorous and flightless young bird that’s on every predator’s menu.

I’m addicted to fur trapping, and there’s no denying that taking a few predators off the landscape doesn’t hurt turkey populations. But, predator management cannot compete with habitat management in its ability to deliver results with small-scale applications.

Between meat-eating mammals, raptors, and even the occasional snake, it’s nearly impossible to make enough of a dent in your local predator population to significantly lower poult predation. You can, however, provide the right cover to keep hens and their broods concealed while they feed. This is the best way to successfully leverage the natural system to achieve your turkey management goals.

What should that dense understory look like to be an optimal poult buffet? A healthy mixture of native forbs, shrubs, and grasses that are tall and leafy enough to conceal a small forager from above, but open enough below to allow for easy travel and evasive maneuvers. From whitetail fawns to game bird broods, heterogeneous, low-level cover is the ticket for both food and safety.

But, the placement of this habitat is also critical.

The Right Location

As a turkey hunter, you probably already know where the local birds roost during the breeding season. That means you also know approximately where they’ll nest and where mom will return to roost with her poults in tow once they’re able to get themselves somewhat off the ground.

There’s little point in providing a perfectly protected poult feeding area if a hen has to lead her brood over a grazed-to-the-dirt pasture or barren-understory pine forest to get there. Keeping cover close and connected with buffer strips will further improve your poults’ chances of surviving one more day, gaining one more pound, and eventually contributing to the next generation.