Photography by seb29 / iStock / Getty Images Plus / via Getty Images
It’s 6 a.m. and still dark in Putnam County, not far from the Iowa border. Alisha Mosloff and Reina Tyl have walked a half-mile through calf-deep snow to sit inside a blind and wait. Mosloff, a doctoral student, and Tyl, a scientist for the Missouri Department of Conservation, don’t speak. They bring nothing to eat or drink. It’s just them and a “buddy heater,” a non-negotiable on that 6-degree February morning. The dawn light reveals the soybean field ahead. They watch it with binoculars.
They’re trying to catch wild turkeys. It’s not easy: Meleagris gallopavo are skittish birds with keen eyesight and an ability to instantly burst into flight. They’re important to the state’s ecosystem and its identity. Missouri consistently has one of the biggest turkey harvests in the country. Lately, however, turkey numbers have been dropping. Tyl and her colleagues want to find out why. First, they have to catch some.
A couple of weeks earlier, other researchers had driven along the agricultural fields of Putnam County and scanned for signs of the birds, who’ve wandered this land for millennia. They chose this exact spot because, in their estimation, it offered enough cover for wild turkeys to feel safe but enough openness for the birds to think they could escape. The researchers set up a camera and scattered some corn on the ground. The turkeys took the bait. They returned for more every morning. A few days later, the team returned to set up additional bait and a net-launching device. The turkeys noticed the changed landscape and avoided the area but just for a few days.
On the February morning that Tyl and Mosloff are huddled in the blind, the birds signal their presence as the light comes up. “We hear the hens clucking and talking behind us,” says Mosloff. The birds run past the blind, toward the corn, in waves of 10 or so at a time. They’re too fast to count one by one; once Mosloff sees about 40 birds, she tells Tyl to shoot when she’s ready. Like Wile E. Coyote, Tyl holds the detonator, waiting for birds to settle in, put their heads down, and relax. Then she hits the button.
BLAM! The net, pulled by rockets, flings out over the turkeys and pins them to the ground. “The turkeys start flying and jumping, and it’s like pandemonium,” Mosloff says. She and Tyl bust out of the blind and sprint toward the birds. Out of breath, they secure any birds at the perimeter and make sure the others are safe and unharmed. Now, with help from technicians who had been waiting a few miles away, they begin extracting and tagging the turkeys.
The overall project is being led by Michael Byrne and Mitch Weegman, both assistant professors at Mizzou. An MDC grant of about $1.3 million and additional support from the National Wild Turkey Federation has allowed the team to outfit turkeys with high-tech backpacks fitted with various sensors. The hope is that resulting data will shed light on why the population is shrinking, and therefore, enable a rebound.
The researchers are focusing on poults (or chicks) because they may hold the key to understanding the problem. Fewer and fewer poults are surviving to adulthood. Over the past five years, MDC data shows, the 14-day survival rate has reached near-historic lows. Among the first to notice something amiss were turkey hunters, who number more than 100,000 in Missouri. “I heard it a lot last spring and I’m sure I will again this year,” Tyl says. “People will say, ‘I used to hear five turkeys on my property, now I’m lucky if I hear one.’” Last year’s numbers bore out these observations. In 2020, surveyors found a poult-to-hen ratio that was nearly 30 percent lower than the 20-year average. The animals aren’t facing an immediate existential threat, Weegman says, but the decline is worrisome.
“There is almost no species their size in the Eastern North American ecosystem,” he says. “No ground-dwelling birds occupy this niche.” Wild turkeys eat seeds, which means they’re seed dispersers. They’re predators, too, in that they eat insects. In the eyes of foxes, owls, bobcats, and other creatures, they’re prey—particularly the poults.
Researchers will wait for poults to hatch, then fit them with tiny sensors, tracking their first four weeks of life to see what kills them. In addition to tracking poults, Weegman and colleagues will collect data on variables including prey, habitat, and weather. Weather can affect habitat, which can affect prey, which can affect habitat. Computer modeling will help put the pieces together.
There is a limit to how conservationists can respond to the findings—there isn’t much anyone can do to change the local weather, for example. But land use is different. Says Tyl: “One of the things we’ll look at is how we can manipulate habitat in a way that will give these turkeys the best chance.”
