Invasion of the Turks
Wild turkeys are everywhere these days–and not everyone is giving thanks.

BY MICHAEL MCCARTHY

They sound like a gaggle of mad scientists running amok through the woods. It’s breeding season for wild turkeys in California, and the forests are full of gobblers strutting their stuff and cackling their crazy calls. Trouble is, backyards, gardens, playgrounds and rooftops all over Marin County are also resonating with these cackles. Reports are emerging of wild turkeys attacking people in suburban areas. According to scientists studying the problem, the wild turkey population in Marin has flown right out of control, and its time some of the birds flew the coop.

“Wild turkeys were first brought to California in the late 1800s, but the turkey population has increased exponentially since the 1970s, when the Department of Fish and Game introduced a new subspecies to California,” says scientist Daniel Gluesenkamp, a researcher for Audubon Canyon Ranch (not officially associated with the national Audubon Society). “They are having profound effects on the native environment. Lately they have been appearing in what I call ‘unsuitable’ habitats like sand dunes along the coast, far from their preferred oak woodland environment.”

Gluesenkamp suspects that the birds have been driven there by hunger, “because the flocks in the woodlands are eating everything.”

“We aren’t sure yet where this will lead, but our mission at ACR is to preserve and protect the environment, so we think a lot more research needs to be done,” Gluesenkamp says. “Especially finding out what the current population really is.”

While the mission of environmentalists like Gluesenkamp may be to “preserve and protect,” the direction of their work runs head on into the efforts of the California Department of Fish and Game—known to some as the “Department of Hunting.” While officials at Fish and Game agree that the turkey population has exploded all over the state—especially in Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino counties—they don’t think there is anything to worry about. Turkeys invading residential areas aren’t topping their list of priorities.

“Basically, this is a seasonal issue,” says Fish and Game information officer Patrick Foy. “What happens is that during breeding season, which can run from March until May, the tom turkeys become much more visible. You see them emerge from the woods, parading around with their tails fluffed up, attracting the hens. Suddenly we get complaints and reports about turkeys roosting in residential developments. Just the size of these birds scares some people, because they can be pretty big, especially to people who haven’t seen them before. They also get into people’s gardens, or scratch cars, and roost on people’s roofs. But while they can be a nuisance, we don’t see them as dangerous.”

The birds may not be dangerous, but tell that to someone who has been attacked by wild turkeys. According to Fish and Game’s own report, “Strategic Plan for Wild Turkey Management,” problems can occur when wild turkeys lose their fear of people. “Turkeys that live in residential areas learn to have no reason to fear people and over time will often closely interact with people,” says the report. “These problems are often exacerbated by people feeding turkeys. Turkeys may associate people with food. Turkeys that are acting aggressively may be destroyed at the discretion of the department or any law enforcement agency.”

• • • •

FOY ADMITS THAT most law enforcement agencies have more pressing concerns than turkey troubles; and that goes for Fish and Game also.

“It’s unlikely that an officer will drop [what he’d doing] and come to your house because a turkey is scratching your car,” says Foy. His own department’s management strategy plan states that “turkeys will only be removed where they are a chronic or significant problem.” The problem is, no one seems to know what the exact turkey population is, and Fish and Game does not admit that there is any serious or chronic problem. Anyway, according to Foy, there are lots of easy ways to get rid of wild turkeys.

“If you have a dog, that will certainly scare them off. A motion detector sprinkler works very well, and you should definitely remove your bird feeders,” he says. “If they are scratching in your garden, you’ll have to fence it off.”

Probably the biggest problem with turkeys, says Foy, is that “about 5 percent of people hate them and complain to authorities, and about 5 percent love them and so they feed them.” Contrary to legend, wild turkeys aren’t that stupid. They learn quickly where they can get free food handouts or easy pickings, and they can be very hard to catch.

“They run very fast, and they can fly very fast for short distances,” says Foy. “And they are very hard to see in the wild.”

All this makes wild turkeys a great favorite of hunters everywhere. In fact, Fish and Game is directly responsible for bringing wild turkeys to California expressly for the purpose of hunting.

Turkeys were first introduced in 1877, and Fish and Game has been releasing turkeys off and on into the wild for hunting purposes since 1910. From 1959 to 1999, Fish and Game released nearly 4,000 turkeys throughout the state, a rate of about a hundred per year, but it wasn’t until recently that the population really took off.

The turkeys found in Marin today can be traced back to a Fish and Game release in Loma Alta in 1988, a move intended for hunting purposes on private land. While wild turkeys may be clever in some ways, they can’t read signs and they sure didn’t stay on private lands for very long. Off they went, and now they are everywhere in Marin—in private backyards and municipal and state parks and open space lands and in the Marin Municipal Water District watershed.

“We don’t know what the population of wild turkeys is on watershed land,” says MMWD Natural Resource Manager Mike Swezy, “but I’d say we have at least several hundred here. We have just given a three-year contract to Point Reyes Bird Observatory Conservation Science to try to get an estimate of the numbers. While they can be a nuisance and sometimes irritate people with aggressive behavior, we see them more as a nonnative pest. We have a mission to protect our watershed ecosystem, and these birds could be having a major impact. They eat a lot, and because there is no free lunch somebody in the ecosystem is losing out, but the damages are very difficult to document.”

Swezy says he gets calls and complaints about wild turkeys from the public, but anything MMWD might do to control the birds falls under the control of Fish and Game. MMWD just started a project in partnership with Fish and Game, the state parks and ACR to test what techniques might work best to remove turkeys from MMWD land. Currently, trapping the birds and releasing them elsewhere is the only method that Fish and Game allows.

“We wanted to start the trapping project this spring, but all the rains have prevented that. We’ll start next year,” says Swezy. “Invasive plants and animals are a fairly significant problem to us, and we see wild turkeys as an invasive species that needs to be controlled. These are big birds and they vacuum the forest floor. They eat an awful lot of acorns. About 50 percent of our mature live oak trees and 80 percent of tan oaks in the watershed have died from sudden oak death thanks to a fungus, so we are concerned about the oaks regenerating if much of the acorns are eaten by turkeys.”

Sudden oak death is a statewide problem. So are the turkeys, which prefer oak woodlands like Marin County to all other habitat. The latest Fish and Game research estimates there are 242,000 wild turkeys roaming the state, up significantly from 100,000 at their last count a decade ago. Nationwide, the population has grown from 30,000 back in the 1930s, when the birds had nearly been hunted to extinction, to approximately 7 million in 2006.

Wild turkeys are native to North America and there are five subspecies. All five range throughout different parts of the continent. After the female turkey mates, she prepares a nest under a bush in the woods and lays her tan and speckled brown eggs. It takes about a month for the chicks to hatch. Eggs and nests are protected by state law, so residents cannot remove and destroy a bird’s nesting habitat.

When the babies (known as “poults”) hatch, they flock with their mother all year, even through the winter. As they grow, the poults eat seeds, small insects, acorns and wild berries, and the adults also eat small reptiles like salamanders (and endangered red-legged frogs). They’ll also eat the eggs of other birds, such as quail. Turkeys usually feed in early morning and in the afternoon. Hens are capable of producing two clutches a year with as many as 18 eggs each, and can quickly overrun other bird species in their vicinity.

The males are called toms, or gobblers, and can stand 4 feet high and weigh as much as 25 pounds. The females are called hens, stand up to 36 inches with an average weight of 8 pounds. The birds can run up to 25 miles per hour for short bursts, and can fly 50 feet in a flight. Wild turkeys have excellent vision during the day but don’t see well at night. They perch high in trees at night to roost, and to avoid predators like coyotes.

A case of mistaken identity resulted in the American Turkey being named after the country of the same name. When the Spanish first found the birds, they brought them back to Europe. The English mistakenly thought it was a bird they already called a “turkey” so they gave it the same name. This other bird was actually from Africa, but came to England by way of Turkey, so the name stuck.

Because they run fast when they see a predator like humans, many American Indian tribes felt that the wild turkey exhibited cowardice and refused to eat them for fear that the trait would be transferred to them. Today, the phrase “turkey” still refers to cowardice. These days, however, the gobblers don’t always run. Habituated to people in suburbs, especially in areas where they are fed, the gobblers may attack people during breeding season, mistaking humans for other male turkeys. That’s when they get their “snood” up.

The snood is the flap of skin that hangs over the turkey’s beak. It turns bright red when the turkey is upset. The “wattle” is the flap of skin under the turkey’s chin, and it also turns bright red when the turkey is distressed. The male turkey’s snood grows from 1 to 5 inches when the wattle fills up with blood. The turkey fluffs his feathers up and spreads his tail out wide, trying to look even bigger. That’s when curious humans should turn turkey and run.

• • • •

HOWEVER, WHEN IT comes to who should be afraid of whom, the turkeys certainly come out on the losing end. Hunting wild turkeys has become a huge national pastime. Witness the growth of the National Wild Turkey Federation. Founded by a couple of hunters back in 1973 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the NWTF now boasts more than 500,000 members in 50 states, Canada and 15 other countries. It supports “wildlife management” (which is viewed by some environmentalists as “increasing the number of turkeys available to shoot by as much as possible”) as well as wild turkey hunting.

Back in 1973 there were an estimated 1.3 million wild turkeys and 1.5 million turkey hunters in the country. There are now close to 7 million wild turkeys and nearly 3 million turkey hunters. Turkey hunting has become the fastest growing form of hunting in the country with the second-highest number of participants of any type of hunting. Since 1985, the federation has raised and spent more than $224 million to support hunting of wild turkeys.

Biologist James Kennamer, a senior vice president of the NWTF who has studied wild turkeys for 40 years, claims turkeys habituated to humans think that people are just other turkeys, and the gobblers will fight to show who is dominant in the flock. Jim Cardoza, a turkey expert at the Massachusetts Wildlife Agency, claims turkeys simply get used to people and incorporate them into the pecking order. People putting out food and then backing away just make the gobblers feel superior.

In California, the push to increase the number of wild turkeys really took off in the 1970s when Fish and Game imported turkeys with a good chance of survival. Earlier efforts had relied on the importation of farm-raised birds that were poorly equipped to survive in the wild.

“The department began importing and releasing birds of the Rio Grande subspecies into the wild—caught in Texas in habitats comparable to those where they were released in California,” says ACR’s Gluesenkamp. “Populations have increased very rapidly, and ranges have expanded dramatically. Even in states where turkeys have been managed for a century, the nature and severity of turkey effects on the environment are largely unknown. Most research to date has focused on management for hunting.”

Indeed, their population has exploded here in the North Bay, where the oak woodlands of Marin and grapevines of Sonoma County provide ready supplies of tasty food. Turkeys are omnivores, and a 20-pound mature male will devour a wide range of food daily. According to Gluesenkamp, their omnivorous behavior has wide implications for all other forest creatures competing with turkeys for food.

In November 2002, Gluesenkamp initiated ACR’s “Turkey Invasion Project,” the first experimental assessment of turkey impacts in California, conducting scientific experiments to evaluate the ecological impact of introduced turkeys, mapping their distribution and abundance, and trying to get a handle on their population. He set up nine different locations in ACR’s Bouverie Preserve in Sonoma; each location had two plots, one with cages and one without. Half were located in oak woodland and half in oak forest. In the first year he found a tenfold increase in soil disturbance due to turkey activity. Ecological impacts were immediate. Insect prevalence in the studied plots, for instance, greatly declined.

“The bigger the bug, the bigger their population decline. Camel crickets, bristletails and springtails got hit hard,” says Gluesenkamp. “Other herbivores and omnivores that eat these insects will also get hit hard. Species diversity declines quickly in turkey plots, but actually increased where turkeys were excluded. Turkeys are changing the ecosystem. They are altering the insect trophic structure and impacting the food web. Nobody knows how this will affect the whole system, but it’s clear that turkeys are having a profound effect on the environment.”

One thing for sure, their numbers are increasing dramatically while other bird species like quail are declining. Even Fish and Game officials admit the wild turkey population is increasing “exponentially,” especially in the last few years. Fish and Game’s Foy thinks that climate might play a role in that growth.

“I think that weather has a great deal to do with creating optimal conditions for population growth. For instance, we haven’t had a drought for over a decade. The conditions have been perfect for turkey habitat, but we have also seen a rapid increase in deer and bear populations too during the same period.”

In fact, Fish and Game sees deer as far greater nuisances or threats than wild turkeys, and has the facts to back up the argument. Last September there were three serious deer attacks on people in the state. Each followed the same pattern. Humans fed deer that then became aggressive and attacked when humans came too close. In San Diego County a man died after being gored by a buck he surprised while working in his backyard. Other incidents included a buck attacking a couple in their garden in Mendocino County, and a buck in Orinda attacking two dogs, killing one of them.

“Whenever deer begin to associate people with food, problems are guaranteed to occur,” said Craig Stowers, coordinator of Fish and Game’s deer program. “Deer, even the small ones, can be quite aggressive and they are much stronger than people imagine.”

Some municipalities have chosen to pass an ordinance making it illegal to feed wild animals within their properties. Some homeowners associations have created similar measures. Wild turkeys have been recently included in the list of game species that can be taken by using a depredation permit. This permit has often been used for other wild animals that cause damage to crops such as elk, bears, beavers, wild pigs or gray squirrels.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love wild turkeys,” says Gluesenkamp. “I think they are very cool. They are beautiful birds with complex social systems. In some ways, I think they are very smart. Hunters love them because they are hard to hunt. Maybe a better way of putting it is that they are ‘good at being turkeys.’ But I also love lizards and crickets and mariposa lilies, and if we have to choose between turkeys and diverse biological systems, maybe the turkeys need to go.”

For more on turkey research, log on to ACR at www.egret.org. Turkeys causing nuisances can be reported to the Department of Fish and Game. The nearest office is in Yountville. Call 707/944-5500.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK POUTENIS

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