Habitat is the Key to Wildlife Survival, Words most Sportsmen have heard in the past! More than just key words and tricky phrases, This concept is the crux of Modern Wildlife Management. All species require five basic things in their habitat and Turkey are no exception. These five are Food, Water, Shelter, Space, and Arrangement. They make sense to each of us I'm sure, as we need these ourselves. So let's continue with more detail...
To have plenty of turkeys to hunt, turkey must have a good dispersion of its seasonal habitat needs. In other words, in good turkey range there should be certain habitat for nesting, another type of habitat for the rearing of the young, and different habitats for fall and winter. If you don't have all these kinds of habitat on a particular piece of property, then that property will not be able to maintain as large a number of turkeys as land that does meet these requirements.
To have more turkeys to hunt, you must have good habitat for the hens. During the spring of the year you need quality nesting habitat close to a clover field, for instance, which would be a good food source. And by providing the habitat requirements for the hen, the gobblers will go where the hens are.
If that nesting area and clover region are close to good brood range, then you have an ideal condition for producing plenty of turkeys during the spring. And when you provide good habitat like this for the hens, you're not only participating in good management for future turkey production, but also concentrating the gobblers in a very small area. So if the hunter provides habitat for the hens, he'll have many gobblers to hunt.
Each of the different types of habitat is important. Good nesting habitat may be a broomsedge field with some briar thickets. Nesting habitat needs to be the kind of place where the hen can make her nest on the ground and feel relatively safe and secure. Ideally, nesting areas will feature low, herbaceous vegetation with scattered brush. And a field of clover next to this nesting region will yield excellent food for the turkeys and for the young poults.
Wildlife Managers learned through research that the first two weeks of the poults' lives is when they are most susceptible to predators. Therefore, to ensure future generations of turkeys, there should be a good brood site close to the nesting area and the clover patch. This brood site should contain grasses and shrubs that are about knee high. Then the poults can move through the low grass unprotected, invisible to predators, and the hen can stick her neck up and look over the grass for predators. If the hen has this type of habitat to raise her poults in, she will raise a much higher percentage of them than if she has to expose them in an open pasture or field.
Yet another limiting factor to good turkey range is the presence of predators. By removing a good number of the predators of the wild turkey, you can increase the survival rate of the poults and of the developed birds.
One of the worst predators on the small poults is free ranging dogs, which destroy turkey nests and can greatly impact a turkey population. Through research Wildlife Biologists determined that the free ranging dog in many regions is the number one predator of turkeys. By removing these dogs, we can increase the numbers of turkeys that survive each year. And free ranging dogs in turkey range have another disadvantage, because, as any hunter knows, when dogs start barking toms quit gobbling.
The raccoon is another predator that destroys many turkey nests and kills young poults. Not only will raccoons wreak havoc on the turkey population, but raccoons are also a menace for the hunters who plant chufa (a grass that produces a nutlike root) for turkeys. Raccoons will get in, dig up a chufa patch, and eat the chufa that was intended for turkeys.
Imprinting is a special form of learning which facilitates the rapid social development of the poults into adults. It's a strong social bond between the hen and her offspring which occurs up to 24 hours after hatching. Imprinting describes the rapid process by which the young poults learn to recognize their species, essential for their survival. It happens only at this time and cannot be reversed.
Chufa is important to turkeys, because it can be utilized during the fall and winter for turkey food when other sources of food may be scarce. If the raccoons get into the chufa patches, they can quickly deplete the supply of winter food that the hunter has planted for the turkey. So one of the best methods to increase the number of turkeys on a piece of property is to reduce the number of predators that are depleting the turkey population.
After providing good habitat and food for the hens and young poults and removing predators, hunters can further increase the number of turkeys on their hunting lands by controlled burning. If you control burn during the winter in a pine forest, the burning releases the nutrients in the soil and will create a generous green up in the spring. Gobblers like to hang around a pine woods that has been burned, and feed on those young, green shoots. But just setting the pine woods on fire in the winter time is not an effective way to control burn. Hunters should work with their departments of conservation and forestry commissions to know when, where, and how to burn for the best effect.
To determine just how important good habitat is, Biologists studied turkeys in mountainous areas and along coastal plains to try to determine home range. They learned that in mountainous regions, a turkey home range of 5,000 acres is not uncommon, whereas in the coastal plains where the habitat is better, a turkey's home range may only be 1,000 acres.
