By Susan Neul
There are so many turkeys congregating at road corners this month that it looks like they are waiting for the tour bus to the Tanglewood Fall Fowl Festival. Or are they headed to Canada since Canadian Thanksgiving has already come and gone? Why, indeed, are we seeing gaggles of gobblers right now?
Take a hard look at the posse that is wandering across the street in front of your car, and you will see that it is most likely comprised of just females or just males but rarely a mixed group, except for an occasional momma’s boy who wants to hang with his mom just a little while longer. Several hens and their female poults (turkeys under four weeks) will form flocks and will travel together from their summer feeding grounds of open fields full of insects and fallen grain into more dense vegetation, replete with fruits and seeds, and eventually, as fall comes to a close, into the woods, in hopes of finding acorns, beechnuts, and other hard nuts. The males also form flocks; but rather than dads and kids, the gobblers gather in a mixed age group, and there’s a fair amount of in-fighting as a pecking order is arrived at. The males also choose different habitats than the hens for their fall foraging. Their larger size and strength enable them to have success in areas where the females might fail, so the sexes split up and only come together in the spring for breeding.
So, the many turkeys that we are seeing along the roads right now have just left the open fields where the cooling weather means that insects are less plentiful. They are now harvesting the fruits and seeds available in the roadside scrub plants that grow in abundance on the edges of roads. As fall progresses you will see fewer and fewer as the turkeys move deeper into the woods until spring brings them out, and the male gobblers put on shows for the females with plumage and singing, and it all starts over again.
