Nov. 24 – Visitors to Maine Audubon’s Gilsland Farm in Falmouth are often welcomed near their cars – not by staff or volunteers – but by small dinosaur-like greeters. The two-legged, brown-feathered creatures with long necks and bright red wattles forage for food along the paths and raise their young in the meadows.
Without the threat of hunting in this protected sanctuary, wild turkeys seem undisturbed by the people they encounter in their turkey trade.
As Thanksgiving approaches, these may be the safest turkeys in Maine. And they know it, says Andrew Kapinos, a Maine Audubon naturalist who leads educational bird walks at Gilsland Farm.
“They know very clearly that this is not a place where they will be hunted,” he said. “I think turkeys come from all over the area here.”
These days, it’s not uncommon to see flocks of turkeys parading through suburban neighborhoods, stopping traffic as they cross roads or hanging out in the fields. In southern Maine it often feels like they are everywhere.
But it wasn’t always this way.
Hundreds of years ago, turkeys were found in large numbers in York and Cumberland counties – and there may have been some as far east as Hancock County. Native artifacts indicate they lived in coastal areas and possibly as far away as the Bangor area, said Kelsey Sullivan, a state bird biologist who monitors Maine’s turkey population.
A combination of unregulated hunting and clearing of their forest habitat for farmland was devastating to the turkey population. By the end of the 19th century, they were extirpated or locally extinct, Sullivan said.
Although the population has recovered exponentially, they still face threats – from passing cars on the highway to ‘forever chemicals’ that have polluted their environment.
WHERE did all these turkeys come from?
The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Game – now the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife – attempted to reintroduce turkeys to Maine starting in 1942, but none of its attempts were successful until the late 1970s.
In 1977 and 1978, the department rounded up 41 wild turkeys in Vermont and released them in the towns of York and Eliot. In the spring of 1982, 33 turkeys from York County’s growing population were trapped and brought to Waldo County. Five years later, another 70 turkeys were brought in from Connecticut, according to the department.
By then, many of the region’s farms had been long abandoned, allowing thousands of acres of farmland to return to the wooded habitat that turkeys need to survive and thrive.
And they flourished – spreading far beyond their historical reach.
The estimated spring population is now between 70,000 and 80,000 and will grow two to three times in the fall, Sullivan said.
Wild turkeys can now be found in all 16 provinces and as far away as New Brunswick and Quebec, although the highest densities are still in the coastal areas of southern Maine. Turkeys traveled into Maine’s deep woods along power and gas line corridors, Sullivan said, although there is still no abundance of them in the boreal woods, where snow depth is a challenge.
Kapinos said the abundance of these birds is a good example of how meaningful action can be taken to reintroduce a species to a place where humans were the cause of their demise.
“It’s a conservation success story that’s in everyone’s backyard,” he said.
WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT ALL THESE TURKEYS?
Some may say turkeys aren’t the prettiest of birds, but those who study them say the highly adaptable creatures are quite fascinating.
“They have really cool social structures. They are very social birds,” says Kapinos, who enjoys seeing them at Gilsland Farm when he leads bird walks.
Early in their lives, turkeys follow their mothers through the pastures, learning what to eat and where it is safe to go. On the farm, “you’ll hear the mother cackling to the young to keep them in the same room and maybe warn them if a predator is nearby,” Kapinos said.
As adults, turkeys tend to group by sex for most of the year. In February or March they begin to reform into mating groups, consisting of a pair of dominant males, who are usually siblings, and a pair of females and non-breeding males. Shortly afterwards, the males begin their elaborate displays of strutting and gobbling to attract as many chickens as possible. They spread their tail feathers and parade around, similar to the more colorful and majestic mating dance of peacocks.
“It’s one of those signs that we’re getting closer to spring,” Kapinos said.
After breeding, chickens limit themselves to nesting in shallow depressions on the ground at the base of a tree, under a tangle of brush or in dense herbaceous cover. Eggs are incubated for 26 to 28 days before hatching. Young turkeys, called chicks, usually leave the nest on the day they hatch. Chickens and their brood often go into fields and forests to forage for insects and other food.
“It’s so much fun watching them forage,” Kapinos said. “They will eat acorns and grubs under an oak tree for 30 minutes, then go to the feeders and into the fields. They are super, super smart and can pick these little, unnoticeable bits of food out of the leaf litter.”
Sullivan said some people may think turkeys are stupid, but biologists measure their intelligence based on how they survive and how in touch they are with their environment.
“Turkeys are very well adapted to their environment. They have acute vision and hearing,” he said. “They are truly wild animals that are well adapted to respond to predation and danger. They are quite intelligent.”
THREATS FROM FOREIGN COUNTRIES
The days of overhunting turkeys in Maine are long gone, and current harvest limits are set every year to keep the population in check.
The first modern turkey hunt took place in the spring of 1986 in York County. The hunting area was expanded to include Cumberland County in 1992 and expanded statewide four years later. The first fall season was in 2002. The turkey permit lottery was abolished in 2005 and opened to all hunters.
Hunters must report their harvest to the state, which uses these numbers to track trends and help estimate population. That’s also how officials decide whether to increase or decrease harvest opportunities in different areas, Sullivan said.
Right now, the goal in southern Maine is to keep the turkey population from increasing, so there are more hunting opportunities in that region, Sullivan said.
This year, IDFIW and the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued an advisory on wildlife consumption in the Unity/Thorndike area after 54 deer and 55 turkeys were tested for the presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). or ‘forever chemicals’.
As the turkey population increases, so do the car accidents involving them. The number of reported crashes has increased from 30 in 2014 to a high of 66 in 2022. There were 48 reported crashes last year and 45 so far this year, according to public crash data available through the Maine Department of Transportation.
Conservationists also monitor the turkey population for diseases such as turkey pox, but these have not affected the overall population. Sullivan said turkeys are not susceptible to and do not carry bird flu.
The state currently has four management goals for wild turkeys: maintaining a healthy and sustainable population, ensuring public satisfaction with that population, promoting participation in wild turkey hunting, and increasing public knowledge of the birds and how the population is managed.
Like Kapinos, Sullivan sees the bountiful turkey population as a great wildlife recovery story.
“They are another piece of the puzzle that makes Maine special,” he said.
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