The Garden Thyme Podcast

511 Talking Turkeys with Bob Long

• Garden Thyme Podcast • Season 5 • Episode 11

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Hello Listener! 

 This is our last episode of the year, but, it's a Gobble of a good time! 
This month we are joined by Bob Long of Maryland DNR to talk about wild turkeys. 
Turkey habitat? Jake vs Tom? What is a snood? Why turkeys are better then deer?  And More.... 

Resources about Turkeys - 


The turkey noise found in this episode are from the National Wild Turkey Federation. https://www.nwtf.org

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The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Hosts are Mikaela Boley- Principal Agent Associate (Talbot County) for Horticulture; Rachel Rhodes- Senior Agent Associate for Horticulture (Queen Anne's County); and Emily Zobel- Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture (Dorchester County).

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Garden Thyme Podcast Transcript
 S5:E1 Talking Turkeys with Bob Long (November 2024)

Note: The Garden Thyme Podcast is produced for the ear and is designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.  
 
:Up Beat Music:

Mikaela
Hello, listener. Welcome to the University of Maryland extension presents the Garden Thyme podcast, where we talk about getting down and dirty in your garden. We're your hosts. I'm Mikaela

Rachel
I'm Rachel.

Emily
And I'm Emily.

Mikaela
And in this month's episode, we're talking all about turkeys. 

:Up Beat Music with Turkey Calls:  

Mikaela 
We're joined today with Bob Long, who is the Upland Game Bird Project Specialist for turkey, grouse, quail, and pheasant for the Maryland DNR Service. So thank you, Bob, for being with us today.

Bob Long
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mikaela
So usually, we start off our podcast or our interviews with what is your role at DNR? And tell us a little bit more about what you do there.

Bob Long
I work for the Wildlife and Heritage Service, which is a branch within DNR, which is the Department of Natural Resources. I'm the Wild turkey and Upland Game Bird Project Manager. I just handle all things upland game birds in the state. We do research, surveys, and monitoring for those species, do a lot of habitat habitat management projects, so habitat restoration, both on public lands and on private lands, meet with landowners and help them install good wildlife habitat. And deal with hunting regulations because these are hunted species and just help make sure these populations stay strong for the future and remain a fixture on our landscape.

Mikaela
Absolutely. I can't tell you how much joy it brings me whenever I see a little flock, especially... I live in a very wooded area, and there are some years where we won't see them at all, and then they'll just appear out of nowhere. So I know they're out there somewhere. I just hope they're growing.

Bob Long
Yeah. That's what we try to understand as we try to research, understand why they increase or why there's population declines. And the three main species that I deal with all face different challenges. Bob, like quail, currently in the Eastern part of Maryland, and they're really declining. So there's some big challenges with that species. Same with rough grouse in the Western mountains. And then wild turkeys really occur statewide.

Mikaela
So, yeah. Now, you mentioned working with homeowners and properties. How big does a property have to be in order to work with somebody about building that habits at?

Bob Long
We work with large and small properties. I mean, Every little bit matters. We know that most of these birds, they're not living entirely on one piece of property. It's just all how it fits in with that landscape and what's going on with the neighboring properties. Even an acre or two can contribute towards the habitat that species needs.

Mikaela
That's great.

Rachel
All right, Bob, can you tell us a little bit more about turkey biology and their population in Maryland?

Bob Long
Sure. There are five subspecies of wild turkey. There's only one species of turkey in Maryland, but there's five subspecies. In Maryland, in the Eastern US, the predominant subspecies is the Eastern wild turkey. So that's what we have. That's the only one we have in Maryland and throughout most of the Eastern US. But there are other subspecies, Rio grands, miriams, and golds turkeys out West. Yeah, oceola turkeys in Florida. So that's what we have here. Those are our native birds. It's a bird of the forest, primarily, but you see them in fields. And we've learned over time. At one point, we thought that turkeys needed large, unbroken expanses of forest to survive. But what we found over time is that we thought that because that's the only place they were after settlement swept through, and we destroyed a lot of habitat, there was unregulated hunting, and we pretty much took this species to the brink of extinction. The only place they persisted were in these little small pockets of forest where they were inaccessible. But now we know that they really do well in a mix of open and forested habitat, which Maryland's got. So it's pretty ideal habitat now.

Bob Long
And they're doing well, although their population does go up and down, and they're more abundant in certain locations. So, yeah, it's a bird that does well. And in most of the state, they eat a variety of foods. They're classified as omnivores. So they'll eat seeds and nuts and mast, like acorns, hickery nuts, things like that. But they'll eat some animal matter, like small snakes or frogs, insects, a lot of insects in the summer. Leaves. It's all over the board. So they're pretty adaptable species.

Rachel
What is their ideal habitat range? How far can they travel or do they like to travel?

Bob Long
Okay. Yes. So their home range, what we call their home range, the area that they spend most of their time in is maybe 500 acres or so.

Emily
That's pretty big.

Rachel
That is pretty large.

Bob Long
Right. But, yeah, they spend most of their time there. But what we're learning through some of this research that we're doing and other studies is that sometimes they disperse long distances. So these flocks will split up at certain times of the year, especially in the spring. And they're different than some wildlife species, where the males are the ones that go out and find new territory. So this is the time of year when we see a lot of male white-tailed deer hit on the roads because they're going out, they get kicked out of where they were raised, and they're going to find some new habitat. It's actually the female turkeys, the young female turkeys, they get booted out of the flock. And so we have transmitters on these birds. And so we're learning. They'll go up to 20 miles, 25 miles to find a new place to settle down and nest and try to raise young.

Mikaela
So does that mean they're primarily residential here in Maryland? Like, they're not migratory?

Bob Long
Exactly. Yeah. It's a resident game bird. They're here and there's a little bit of movement, but they definitely do not migrate. They don't have seasonal large seasonal changes where they're moving long distances.

Mikaela
Oh, that's great. So that means they're dependent on the habitats that are built for them or that exist out there year round.

Bob Long
Yeah, you got it.

Rachel
So I have one more habitat question. Do they have an ideal flock size? Are they traveling in pairs of 5, 10, 15, or are you seeing them in smaller groups?

Bob Long
Yeah, that's a great question, Rachel. It's going to depend on the season. There's this seasonality, this annual cycle, where these flocks are rather large in the fall in the winter. They do that because more sets of eyes, the better. They can spot danger. There's a lot of predators that eat turkeys. But then when you get in to the spring and the summer, when they're nesting and raising young, they split up, go their own way. At that point, the hens, the females are called hens. They want to be off on their own to try to hide that nest and make it a little less obvious. The goblers are all hormones are raging, so they're fighting with each other. There's some territorial things going on. Really cool social interactions with these birds that changes depending depending on the season. Males get back together in late summer, and they're all buds again. They were mortal enemies a month ago.

Mikaela
They just needed a good fight to get it out of their system.

Bob Long
Yeah.

Rachel
That's pretty awesome. So how long will a hen live for? Or does their age range differ depending on their sex?

Bob Long
So it's a hard question to answer because most wildlife, they don't live that long in the wild. So a domesticated turkey can live a long time. But in the wild, there are just a plethora of predators that are looking to take these birds out. Even in Maryland, where we don't have large predatory animals like wolves and a lot of bobcats or coyotes, although coyotes are becoming more More abundant. But even in our landscape, red foxes will take a lot of turkeys. Great horned owls, it's one thing that we're learning. Great horned owls will actually, I think in our latest research data, it was like 20% of our hens were killed by great horned owls.

Mikaela
That's crazy.

Emily
That's so neat.

Rachel
That's a fun fact I didn't want to know.

Bob Long
Right.

Emily
That surprises me because I always think of turkeys as being really big. Whenever I see them on the side of the road, they're massive. So I couldn't think of an owl grabbing and taking off with them. Maybe a bald eagle, but We haven't had any killed by bald eagles that we know of.

Bob Long
Now, sometimes it's hard to know. You just find a pile of feathers. But we do know that we've had quite a few killed by owls because it was the middle of the night. They were taken out of the tree. Our data is pretty detailed. We can actually see the exact moment. We can tell how that transmitter is moving. You can tell whatever it is, 11:30 PM, that bird was whacked and wrestled down to the And ow are distinctive. They only eat the head of the turkey. They leave the rest of the carcass. It's crazy.

Mikaela
Wild. That's so wasteful.

Rachel
It is so wasteful.

Bob Long
But then something else comes along and scavenges We also had some nesting hens killed by raccoons. So these hens that are nesting, they nest on the ground. So they roost in trees at night, but they nest on the ground, and they have to sit there day and night for 28 days and hope that nothing finds that nest. And they're very protective of it. So they don't want to flush and give away the location of that nest. So they hold really tight. And red foxes are really made for... They send the hens, and then they'll go in there. So that's a long way of saying. Their typical lifespan's just a few years, really. But I think There has been some documented cases where a hen will, or maybe even gobblers, through banding efforts and research efforts, where they'll live 12, 13. I think maybe there was one that was 15 years old, but It's like, exceptional. It's a very rare occurrence.

Mikaela
I mean, I didn't realize how vulnerable... You figure babies are probably vulnerable because they're so little, but I had no idea how vulnerable they were, even as hens or as adults.

Rachel
Yeah, I didn't think that either. And just a side note, I just looked up Eastern wild turkey babies, and they are adorable.

Mikaela
They are adorable.

Rachel
They are so cute.

Mikaela
I saw the The littlest poults I've ever seen, back in August or September, and they must have been barely walking. They were so small. I had no idea. They were so tiny. Oh my God.

Rachel
Even in that awkward teenager phase, they're adorable.

Mikaela
Actually, that reminds me, just backing up real quickly, we're talking about hens and poults and gobblers. What is the difference between them? We haven't talked about the beards at all yet, or what makes a Jake versus a Tom. Can we get Yes.

Bob Long
It's some of the turkey terminology that sometimes I take for granted because I'm just living this stuff all the time. But yeah, so the males are typically called goblers or toms, usually. The females we call hens, like a lot of other game birds. It gets even more complicated when you throw in that mature goblers. Usually, we call those toms, but then the juvenile, The first-year goblers, we term Jakes. So Mikaela mentioned Jakes. And then the young, regardless of the sex, the young are all called poults, P-O-U-L-T-S. A lot of people say Poulets or some version of that.

Mikaela
Where did Jake come from? Why not call him Bob's or Bill's or something? You know what I mean? This just seems like a very odd... And likewise, Tom. How would we those names out.

Bob Long
I have no idea. Just curious.

Mikaela
I love stuff like that. And you just mentioned it briefly, but I think that's a nice segue into the question of, can turkeys fly? You mentioned that they do roost, so they must have to fly, right?

Bob Long
They do. Yeah, they do fly. You don't see them fly that often. But every night they fly into trees to roost, to get off on the ground, provide some safety from predators, except for the owls. But yeah, they do that. And then, of course, during nesting, they don't roost in trees. So they at least fly a couple of times a day. They'll fly occasionally to escape danger or to cross a highway or a river. But their preferred method of escaping danger is to run. They're really fast runners and they're pretty agile for a big, large bird.

Emily
I got a scare once on one of our research farms. I was there early in the morning and it was foggy and I saw something running through the wheat. And I don't typically scare easily because I really love horror movies. I booked it to a research truck very quickly and then it ended up being a bunch of hens. I assumed they were hens because they didn't have the big tail feathers, which I guess is my next question, which is, how do you tell these toms, jakes, and hens apart Yeah.

Bob Long
The males, so the toms and the jakes, they're what you think of when you see a Thanksgiving turkey with their tail feathers spread open. But the reality is they only do that during mating season, during breeding season, typically. Occasionally, they'll just do it year-round. So they're just flying. We call it strutting. They put their tail feathers up, they spread their wings out. They just want to look big and bad, try to impress the hens as well as intimidate other gobblers. So that's what they're doing there. Their feathers just get poofed up, as my wife says. But it's a display tactic. Their heads also become red, white, and blue, and they can really change the color in their heads based on their mood. So if you see a displaying bird, it's definitely a male. The males will also have a beard. It's like these modified feathers that protrude from their chest. It is shorter on jigs and then it gets longer as the bird gets older. Males also have spurs that they use for fighting. So a lot like roosters, the spurs are on their legs, and when they fight, they'll use those to defend their territory.

Bob Long
The hens are more drab-colored, more brown. It'll blend in with the forest floor when they're nesting. Don't have nearly the iridescent color that the males have. Most of them don't have beards, but an interesting fact is that 5 to 10 % of those females actually do have a beard. So we see quite a few hens with beards.

Mikaela
Did you call them a modified feather?

Bob Long
Yeah, it's actually like it's a modified feather that just looks like it looks like a hair, though. It's almost like a paint brush.

Mikaela
Yeah, very coarse. But yeah, I would have... Interesting. Now, this is the only piece of turkey anatomy I know is the snood. Do all turkeys have snoods? And maybe we should define what that is.

Bob Long
Yeah, I'm actually surprised. What a snood is. So It's a fleshy appendage that drapes over their peak, and it comes from in their forehead area. And if you see a close up photo of a gobbler, he'll have this snood, and it grows when he's excited. During breeding season, this snood gets longer and thicker. Interesting research. I actually... I've been in this job for quite a while now. We used to say we had no idea what these snoods were for. We just knew they were called snood, and it always gets a little bit of a chuckle from folks. But they've done some recent research and they found that hens will select goblers with larger snoods.

Emily
She's looking for the biggest snood.

Bob Long
The biggest snood gets the mate. Yeah.

Rachel
Gets them every time.

Mikaela
That's so funny.

Rachel
It is hilarious.

Emily
So along the lines of she likes the biggest snood, can you tell us a little bit about turkey mating habits? Because I know they probably have some neat calls, and we know that he puffs up and does that display.

Bob Long
Yeah. So it all starts in March or April. It's the start of the breeding season, and they start to get in the mood. It's that season. The goblers are always eager to go before the hens. So they start displaying and fighting and doing their thing, pushing each other around. They're going to start to gather with the hens. They don't really interact a lot during a large portion of the year. The goblers are in their bachelor groups. But towards spring, they start to gather, and these gobblers are competing with each other to get breeding rights. So these hens select the one that they think looks the best, and we're starting to learn what that might be. It might be more iridescent feathers. It might be the longer snooze. It might be the longer beard or the bigger spurs or whatever. But there's some process that she goes through to select the mate. Once that happens, those hens... I should have mentioned that they do make a ton of vocalizations. Throughout the year, you'll hear turkeys making sounds. There's pucks, there's purrs, there's yelps, there's putts, a lot of things other than the gobble. Everybody knows the gobble of the turkey, but they're super vocal.

Bob Long
These hens are making calls to attract got gobblers, and gobblers are gobbling. Pretty exciting time to be out there listening to a flock of turkeys in the March, early April time frame. They do their thing. Those hens start to look for a nesting location. It's going to be usually in some thick, brushy, weedy cover, although they will sometimes nest just in some forest. We're trying to understand what makes a good nesting site and what makes a poor nesting site. Based on our research, it looks like a lot of them make poor decisions because most of the nests fail. But yeah, that's what we're trying to understand. So they're going to go nest and start laying eggs. After they breed with the gobbler, they usually wander off to their nest. A lot of homeowners will see a single hen walk through their yard. About the same time every day. And that's usually a hen traveling from the flock where this breeding is taking place, and they're going off to their nesting location. It's tucked away, hidden maybe in a little brushy wood lot or hedgerow or maybe even a wheat field or something. She's laying one egg, and then she'll go back and do that all over again the next day.

Bob Long
They lay about two eggs every three days until they have a full clutch of eggs build up, and they'll cover those eggs in between so that predators can't find those eggs. Then once she gets her full clutch, which is usually around 9-13 eggs or so, then she'll sit on those eggs and incubate for about 27, 28 days, typically, until they start hatching.

Mikaela
But I assume she has to leave for food, but probably not for a very long period of time.

Bob Long
Oh, yeah. That's interesting. We always thought that they only left one time a day, on average, one time a day for about an hour. We're finding some hands with this research that we just started doing in the last two years, that they will actually only leave the nest every two or three days for a very short amount of time, like half an hour.

Emily
That's a devoted mama right there.

Mikaela
That's a hungry mama.

Rachel
Yeah, she's probably very hungry and very tired.

Mikaela
Can't leave the kids. She's hungry.

Rachel
She hasn't had a bath.

Mikaela
Well, and actually, that helps answer one of the questions I was going to have is what habitat do they nest in? And it sounds like we just don't really know. We don't have the exact formula for what they prefer. So it could be in like brushy sites, I assume in an area where they can easily hide their eggs.

Bob Long
Yeah, they typically select those places that are like what you think of as like an old field habitat or meadow habitat, if that's available. If there's not around, though, they will just find some forest with some undergrowth, maybe. Occasionally, just be almost in the wide open, but up against a tree, and they'll just sit on the nest there. But yeah, it's hard. What we're struggling with is understanding what makes a successful nesting location versus unsuccessful, because there almost seems like a random, just a random chance whether a predator will find these nests despite how concealed they are. There's a lot. Even though they're very researched species. There's still a lot that we don't know, but we always want to try to improve our knowledge so we can better provide their habitat that they need.

Mikaela
Well, that's a great segue into another question. This is probably the million dollar question is, how can people who just have regular backyards, front yards, accommodate wildlife into our landscapes, specifically turkeys? How can we build a better environment for them?

Bob Long
Yeah, there's a lot of things you can do, and a lot of it is context-dependent, what you have there, what's adjacent to your property. So oftentimes, I'll ask somebody if they're wanting I ask, what's the predominant habitat type around it? Is this an area that's dominated by crops or is it all forest? If it's all forest, then some openings might be really important. Because unlike nesting habitat that we know what they like and what they use, but we're not quite sure how important that is, you might say. But what we do really know, and the research backs up, is that the Where they take their young after those nest hatch is critically important. They need what we call brood habitat. So congregation of these poults with their mother is a brood, and they always go to places where they can forage and find insects. They need that protein, and they need a lot of it to grow and to get out of that really vulnerable stage. Because we know that we lose about 75% of the pulse in the first couple of weeks of life. They're really cute, but they're really tasty for all the predators.

Rachel
They're like, Oh, man. That's right up there with the Bob White number, isn't it?

Bob Long
Because I feel like the Bob White number is like 80%. Any small defenseless bird that can't fly, They can only fly after they're 10 days old or so. So they're super vulnerable. So they need a place that they can forage and find a lot of insects, but also have that cover to protect them from being seen. You've got these mammalian predators, like foxes, that will easily take these birds. But then you also have hawks, things like that. They really like these old field areas, where you have a lot of ragweed, goldenrod, any grasses that provide cover, like your native grasses, native forbs, their broadleaf plants. Just the diversity is really important that attract insects. That's the key recipe there to provide that type of habitat. We do know that that's critically important. That's something that landowners can provide. It's great. Those are the folks that are calling me up saying, Hey, there's a flock of turkeys in my backyard. It's a bunch of young poults, and they're out there foraging, chasing grasshoppers. You can have that and just a small acreage of that, and it can provide some benefits.

Mikaela
I was just going to say I would kill for a front yard full of turkeys. I'd have a webcam on them. I'd be watching them all at work.

Emily
Now, do they only have one brood a a year?

Bob Long
Yes. Typically, they were going to have one brood a year. We did document a few hens that lost their brood very early, within a day or two after they hatch. If they lose that whole brood, then they'll re-nest. They'll fairly readily re-nest. If they lose their nest before it hatches, they often will go re-nest. And we've had some nest up to four times during one summer. So they're trying. They're trying really hard.

Emily
I mean, turkey eggs also sound yummy. Exactly. If you're a fox or a raccoon or a snake.

Rachel
That's true. Just as much protein, right?

Emily
Well, and I think not just with turkeys, but with lots of other species, we're finding more and more that that Meadow habitat really plays key roles, even if they're not species that we often see in meadows. So it seems like that applies here as well. Yeah.

Bob Long
So one of my other species, if I can go off on a tangent for just a minute, is bobwhite quail, which I think Rachel mentioned.

Rachel
We love tangents, Bob. We love them.

Mikaela
Especially about quail.

Bob Long
Bobwhites have declined 99%. They're the most declining species in Maryland, and it's due to habitat loss. And so if you think about it, and this is what I try to tell landowners, is that turkey poults are basically just like quail. They're doing the same thing. They're the same size. They're feeding on the same insects and vegetation. They're exposed to the same predator risks. If you're providing this really important brood habitat, you're also providing quail habitat and vice versa. What's interesting is some of the properties that I help manage and help private landowners and some of our wildlife management areas are public properties. Some of the ones where we still have thriving bobwhite quail populations are the ones with the most turkeys. You're seeing turkeys everywhere because they go hand in hand. So it all works well together. And that old field, what we call early successional habitat, the young stages of succession is absolutely critical.

Mikaela
I know that they do some cover crops for encouraging deer populations. Are there some cover crops that also are attractive to turkey populations?

Bob Long
Yeah, that's a complicated question. They will use winter wheat, and they'll nest. We've had quite a few birds nest in some of these cover crop fields. It's just a matter of whether they can get that nest off before it's planted or harvested. In case of wheat, a lot of times it's hard. It's actually wheat for harvest. They'll use some agricultural areas like that during that critical spring and summer time frame, but it's always a gamble whether she'll be successful or not. We've had a few nests that were lost due to those operations.

Emily
There's research from some place in the Midwest that someone talks about the use of winter wheat as a cover crop and how farmers can change their harvesting tactics in order to scare birds into the woods. You might still destroy the nest, but you wouldn't necessarily destroy the mom and any hatched babies if you start on one edge and go back and forth instead of the ring harvesting route.

Rachel
That is really cool. I was going to ask more of the CRP question, and are you seeing swaths of CRP being good habitat?

Bob Long
Yeah, without a doubt. Those programs, those federal farm build programs, can provide good turkey habitat, both for nesting and for brood rearing. A lot of it depends on the practice that you enroll in and the actual planting. So some of the cool-season grasses, if you're planting orchard grass, type of grasses that form a thick mat of sod. It's really good for erosion control and nutrient reductions, but it doesn't provide very good wildlife habitat because the bird just can't navigate through it. It becomes too dense, and those young birds just can't deal with it. But some of your native grasses, your native wildflower plantings, they... Crp practice that that provides that. Awesome.

Rachel
Yeah.

Emily
I wonder if they'd be another one that would like Mascantis then because of how it's clumped for nation is.

Bob Long
Yeah, we've got a bunch of it in one of our study areas down here in Dorchester county, and they haven't used it at all. Not at all. Yeah.

Rachel
So they want our native warm season grass.

Emily
They want broom sedge.

Rachel
A broom sedge, an Indian grass.

Mikaela
I was just going to say, Emily, native grasses, they're far superior, okay? They are.

Bob Long
Broom sedge, little blue stem meadow With scattered forbs and ragweed, it doesn't get any better than that. It's perfect. Any monoculture, like the miscanthus, just isn't what they're going for.

Mikaela
We're big on fun facts. And so is there a favorite fun fact you have about turkeys that you'd want to share with people?

Bob Long
My fun fact was actually going to be about snoods.

Rachel
We ruined it.

Mikaela
Oh, man, I've ruined it. I'm sorry.

Bob Long
I had no idea that that was coming so early.

Mikaela
I'm so sorry. I was just excited because it's the only thing I know about turkeys.

Rachel
That's a fun fact.

Mikaela
That's okay. We can reedit it as the interesting- We could talk about their senses.

Bob Long
It's hard to research, but the general idea is that Anybody that turkey hunts understands how wary these birds are. They don't seem that way when they're walking around a yard or across the street, they seem like a big dumb bird. But when they're away from people people and their senses are at their highest level, they are really alert. You can think of them as just ultra paranoid. There's a famous saying, I'll probably get it wrong, from a researcher a long time ago, he said that a deer thinks that every person is a tree, but a turkey thinks that every tree is a person. They scrutinize every little part of their surroundings. It's true. They have exceptionally good vision. I've seen numbers turned out they can see five times better than humans. Now, there's been some other research that shows maybe they can't really see that well, but they can see movement really, really well. And they can hear a long ways. They're really good at pinpointing where sounds come from. And so, again, some of this is hard to really get at, but they can probably pinpoint where a hen is yelping from from a mile away or so.

Bob Long
So if they hear it, they can just walk right to that spot. So they're keen senses and really aware of their surroundings.

Mikaela
So is that part of the challenge in the allure of turkey hunting is that you have to outsmart these really sensitive birds.

Bob Long
Exactly. Yeah. It is not easy. They are on high alert, and just the slightest movement will We'll send them running, it seems like, to the next county.

Mikaela
Man, they're in tune with their little lizard brain. They just... What's interesting, and I don't know if it's just a disparity between the population of turkeys and other things. But you very rarely see turkeys hit along the side of the road. Maybe it's just because they're very canny to their surroundings and they're wary of cars. I don't know what it is.

Rachel
Well, Sun In fact, turkeys can run up to 25 miles per hour.

Emily
That's nuts. I definitely can't run that fast. Mikaela might. I can't.

Mikaela
No, not 25 miles an hour.

Bob Long
They typically don't, but we do have some road kills every year. We had three or four of our research birds get killed by vehicle strikes. But generally, they can avoid traffic. They're smarter than me.

Rachel
That doesn't take much.

Mikaela
Yeah, for sure.

Rachel
Bob, can you tell us about the Wild turkey Project?

Bob Long
Yeah. So I've hit it at some of the information we're getting from that project. A little bit earlier. But yeah, this is an exciting time because we're learning a lot about Maryland wild turkeys and a lot of things that we haven't known in the past. So we do a lot of annual monitoring of population. We do various surveys. We know population trends. We know if it's a good hatch or not, so if it was a good year for reproduction. But we don't know a lot about how many survive, what their nest success is like, what predators are impacting turkeys. We don't know harvest rates, so exactly what percentage of our population is getting harvested. There's a lot data that we could use to better manage this species. We really didn't have a great handle. It was working, turkey populations were doing well. But in the last 5 or 10 years, we've seen some declines in certain areas, in certain parts of the state. We're just not as many turkeys. We're trying to figure out why that is. He started a project in 2023 where we were putting radio transmitters on about 100 female turkeys, so about 100 hens.

Bob Long
In Western Maryland and Eastern Maryland, we have two study regions. We're looking at that, just a lot of information about the hen ecology and what's going on. And that's where we're getting a lot of these cool interesting data to tell us what's going on there and how many survive, how many get eaten by predators, things like that. And then we're also banding males. So all the goblers that we capture, we're putting aluminum leg bands on them so that we can get those reported by hunters if they're harvested or if we recapture those birds, so we get data on that. So, yeah, it's been fun and got a lot of people working on it across the state and learning a lot. A lot of researchers will be looking at this data for probably years to come. So this is a multi-state project. We've got five states involved currently. So we've got New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Maryland, all following similar procedures, methodology, and sending all of our data to a couple of universities, Penn State, West Virginia University, Ohio State University. And they'll be trying to understand what's going on and looking at some of these habitat relationships, what makes good nesting habitat, what makes good breed habitat, survival rates, things like that.

Mikaela
And I see you also have a turkey sighting report. Do you have public report back on sightings of turkeys that they see?

Bob Long
We do. Yeah. So we've been doing an annual summer wild turkey observation survey since, I believe it was 1993. And so this is a long data set, and it's really primarily to track reproductive success. It's a really good survey, and it's citizen science type of survey. We get the public involved, and anybody can send us observations of turkey flocks that they see in July and August. Every year, we do a little advertisement about the survey, and we get a lot of participation, particularly since 2021. We used to send out forms, and they would mail them back in, and things have evolved. Now it's an online data entry. You can just get the link, you click on the link, you tell us the location, how many hens, how many poults, and how many goblers you saw that day. For such a simple survey, we get a tremendous amount of data. We can really tell what's going on. I think the last few years, we've I've had about 800 to 900 participants send in data.

Mikaela
I'm really glad to hear that. I just want you to know I am one of those diligent individuals. When I see a turkey, I report it. Thank you.

Rachel
Same.

Mikaela
Do you also have one for the January and March period? Do you still take winter flocks?

Bob Long
We do. So we also do a winter flock survey. And that's really more to identify locations that we can do some of this research on. And it's been good. We get a lot of contacts, and we'll follow up with those individuals and see if it's possible that we can maybe capture those birds to do some of our research with.

Mikaela
One of our favorite questions to ask, especially people we're interviewing, is how did you get started with your job at DNR? In what interest What interested you about turkeys enough to be doing this job for as long as you have?

Bob Long
Well, I've always been an outdoors person, right? So we were just an outdoors family. I a lot of fishing and camping and hunting. I was just generally just an outdoor kid. That sparked that interest and went to school at Virginia Tech for my undergrad degree, majoring in wildlife biology. After that, I went to West Virginia University, got my master's, and my research was focused on rough grouse ecology. I had studied grouse for three years in central Pennsylvania. So was angling towards the bird side of wildlife management. And I picked up a few jobs here and there doing water fowel, so duck and Sews research, and then Woodcock, American Woodcock research, which is another pretty fascinating bird. And so, yeah. And then I landed this job, I guess, 23 years ago. And as an up on game bird specialist, and I've been working on it ever since, and love it. And it's always something new, and we're always learning more about these birds, and it's been good.

Mikaela
I don't blame you. I grew up in Wisconsin, and We used to hunting roughnut grouse, but I quickly found I was not cut out for hunting those because they would scare the ever-living out of me, and I could never get the gun up past it. But they are really neat, and I Are there any woodcock out here on the Eastern shore?

Bob Long
Yeah.

Mikaela
I'm surprised when you mentioned it because I never see them.

Bob Long
Oh, I've seen a bunch in the last week. There's some moving through right now. It goes back to habitat Woodcock populations are declining. There are species that need young forests, and they also need wet soils. So a lot of small trees and shrubs that also is near wet soils. If you have that habitat, you're going to have woodcock. They are migratory, so they could be here for a week or two as they move through on their way down south. But yeah, a lot of it's habitat dependent. They are small and pretty elusive.

Mikaela
Man, I guess I'm going to have to start paying attention the next couple of weeks. I got a mission. I got a job to do. I got to go find a way back.

Rachel
Well, let's go on a walk, Mikaela.

Mikaela
They're so cute.

Rachel
They are. I love their little dances.

Mikaela
Our last question is, are there any resources that you'd like to share with people to learn more about turkeys and other wild game birds in Maryland?

Bob Long
Yeah, there's some resources on our website, so you can go to their DNR web page. We've got some fact sheets about turkeys and some of these other birds. We have some habitat management information on there. And you can always give us a call here and we can help you out. If you've got specific questions or want some advice on property management, we're always happy to help. So, yeah, we've got some things there.

Mikaela
Yeah, I think all of our state websites are just the amount of information on them is almost overwhelming. So if you have the chance to go check out the DNR website, it's just full of information.

Bob Long
And I know that the extension, I mean, you all have put out some really good information. I know about Bob White Quail. I worked with Luke on publication that came out not too long ago, and that's great. Very good, recent, relevant information on managing quail habitat, which like we said is, you're doing stuff for quail, you're going to help turkeys as well. That's great.

Mikaela
Yeah. Thank you for making the time. We appreciate it.

Bob Long
No, it's been great. I appreciate the opportunity to come on here and talk with you. Yeah.

:Upbeat Music:

Rachel
Well, that's all we have for this episode, listener. We hope you enjoy it, and we'll tune in next month for more gardening tips. If you have any garden-related questions, please email us at umegardenpodcast@gmail. Com, or look us up on Facebook at Garden Time Podcast. That's Garden, T-H-Y-M-E. For more information about the University of Maryland extension and these topics, please check out the University of Maryland Extension Home and Garden Information Center website at go.umd.edu/hgic. Thanks for listening, and have fun getting down and dirty in your garden.


Everyone
Eoodbye.


Rachel
The Garden Thyme Podcast is a monthly podcast brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Mikaela Boley, senior agent associate for Talbot County. Rachel Rhodes, senior agent associate for Queen Anne County, and Emily Zobel, senior agent associate for Dorchester County.

  Emily
Programs, activities and facilities are available to all without regards to race, color, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, age, national origin, political affiliation, physical or mental disability, religion protected, veteran status, genetic information, personal appearance, or any other legally protected classroom.

:up beat music: 


Mikaela
Man, I love turkeys. I would kill to have them at my front. I want to contact him and be like, I only have this many acres, but I really want turkeys.


Rachel
Yeah. Stop mowing. Plant some broom sedge, and some- 

Mikaela 
My neighbor is going to get angry at me.
It's not even turf. It's just weeds.