The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting

by Edward Avery McIlhenny; Charles L. Jordan

The chief of all his enemies is the "Genus homo"

In the early morning, all things being favorable, their first move after leaving the roost is in search of food, which search they undertake with characteristic vigor and energy, scratching and turning over the dry leaves and decaying vegetation. Two kinds of food are thus gained: various seed or mast, fallen from the trees and bushes, and all manner of insects, of both of which they are very fond, and which constitute a large part of their food supply. There is no bird of the gallinaceous order that requires and destroys more insects than wild turkeys. They will scratch with great earnestness over a given space, then, all at once, start off, moving rapidly, sometimes raising their broad wings and flapping them against their sides, as if to stretch, while others leap and skip and waltz about. Then they will go in one direction for some distance. Suddenly, one finds a morsel of some kind to eat, and begins to scratch among the leaves, the whole flock doing likewise, and they will keep this up until a large space, perhaps half an acre of land, is so gone over. What induces them to scratch up one place so thoroughly and leave others untouched would seem a mystery to the inexperienced; but close observation will show that such scratching indicates the presence of some kind of food under the leaves. It may be the nuts of the beech, oak, chestnut, chinquapin, black or sweet gum tree, pecan nut, grape, or muscadine seed. If one will observe the scratchings, it will be seen that they occur under one or another of such trees or vines. Thus they travel on, stopping to scratch at intervals until their crops are filled.

Under certain conditions, wild turkeys are compelled to seek numerous sources to obtain a supply of food, as when there is a failure of the mast crop, which affords the principal supply of their food, or when there is an overflow of the great swamps or river bottoms, which turkeys so often inhabit. When such overflows occur, the turkeys are either forced to take up their abode in the trees, or to leave their feeding ground and retreat to the high lands that are not overflowed. In the latter case there is little trouble in procuring food by scratching in the dry leaves or gleaning in the grain fields. But turkeys are hard to drive from their haunts, even by high waters, and more often than not they will stubbornly remain in the immediate locality of their favorite swamps and river bottoms by taking to the trees until the waters have subsided; they will persistently remain in the trees even for two or three months, with the water five to twenty-five feet in depth beneath them. At such times they subsist upon the green buds of the trees upon which they perch, and the few grapes and berry seeds that may remain attached to the vines which they can reach from the limbs. It is truly remarkable how long these birds can subsist and keep in fair flesh under such conditions. There is a critical time during these overflows, when turkeys are hard pressed in that they may obtain sufficient food to sustain life; this is when the rivers overflow in December, January, or February, before the buds have appeared or have become large enough to be of any value as food. Under these conditions they must fly from tree to tree until they reach dry ground, or starve to death.

Although I have never known of a gobbler being thus starved to death, I have seen them so emaciated they could hardly stand. One incident of this sort I will relate: I found four very large old gobblers in an overflowed swamp on the Tombigbee River in Alabama, and as it was in February, it was too early in the year for herbage to begin the spring growth. The river had overflowed the bottoms suddenly, and it was a long way to dry land, perhaps three miles, so the turkeys could get little or nothing to sustain life. I shot one of these gobblers, not thinking of their probable condition, and found I had bagged a skeleton.

If the bottoms are not over three miles wide, turkeys will usually, on approach of rising water, start for the dry ridges farther back from the river, and there remain until the waters steal upon them, when they will fly into the trees. Sometimes a ridge is an island at sundown when they go to roost, but is covered during the night, and when the morning comes there is no dry land in sight for the poor birds to alight upon. This is bewildering to them and presents a new state of affairs. If there be an old mother hen in the flock, she will at once take in the situation, and by certain significant clucks and a peculiar cackle, which is a part of their elaborate language, she will take wing and fly two or three hundred yards in the direction of dry land, alighting in the trees, when, after a rest, with another cluck or two, the party will continue in the same direction. This is kept up until the dry land is reached, when, with wild acclaim and a general cackle of exultation, they all alight on the ground and proceed at once, at a fearful rate, to scratch up the leaves in search of food.

The hunter, aware of these habits after the swamps begin to overflow, will lose no opportunity for an early visit to the hummock at the margin of the backwaters. The turkeys do not remain near the edge of the overflow for any length of time, but very soon extend their range farther into the high forests and fields. They seem to know instinctively that it is unsafe to linger near the edge of the water.

In case the overflow occurs in March or April, when the trees are full of fresh buds and blossoms, the turkeys have an easy time, living in the treetops, fluttering from branch to branch, gathering the tender buds and young leaves of such trees as the ash, hackberry, pin oak, and the yellow bloom of the birch, all of which are favorite foods, while of the beech and some other trees it is the fringe-like bloom they eat. They will remain in the trees out of sight of land for months if they have plenty of buds and young leaves to eat, and keep in fair flesh; but the flesh is not so palatable as when feeding on mast or grain.

I once knew a flock of fifteen turkeys to remain in trees above an overflow for two months. I could see them daily from my cabin on the bank of a lake in Alabama, and could sit at my table and watch them fluttering as they fed on the hackberry buds. They were in sight of a dry, piney wood, and a flight of three hundred yards across a lake would have taken them to the dry land, but not once did they seem inclined to go to it. They remained in the trees until the water went down, and the next I saw of them was in an open plantation, with the lake on one side and the river on the other. The water had barely left the surface in places, and it was muddy and sloppy. They never once went to dry land, but returned to their swamp haunts as the water abated.