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Spot a wild turkey? Today’s the first day you can report it to the Iowa DNR
All Iowans are being recruited to help count the state’s population of wild turkeys. Whether you’re driving, riding a bike, or hiking through the woods, if you spot one of the big, black birds, take note.
Jim Coffey, a forest wildlife biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, says the agency could use a hand in getting a handle on our turkey numbers.
“Wild turkeys are a pretty elusive bird and they’re very hard to survey, so we employ the random sightings of Iowa citizens to help us keep track of the annual production, so we can estimate what’s happening with the population overall across the state,” Coffey says. “That allows us to help set regulations so that we can manage the species for all Iowans.”
This survey is done every July and August, as wild turkey sightings are recorded to estimate this year’s nesting rates and nest success. It’ll help if you can tell the sex of a turkey.
“The most obvious thing is, adult males have what we call the beard, which hangs down from the chest. That’s a grouping of feathers that dangles,” Coffey says. “The males tend to be separated from the females this time of the year, but we want people to report all turkeys so we can look at different indexes of what’s happening with production.”
It’ll also be a big help if you see any baby turkeys, known as poults, to count them, too. Coffey is hoping Iowans will only report the turkeys they’re seeing one time.
“We might get several reports on the same birds and we don’t want to overcount them too many times to skew our results,” Coffey says. “All you have to do is go to our Iowa DNR webpage and underneath the Turkey tab, there’ll be a little button that you click and it’ll ask you, the county that you’re in, as well as the number of turkeys that you’ve seen, whether they’re male or female, and the number of poults that you’ve seen.”
In the late 1800s, when Iowa was first being settled, wild turkeys were hunted to near-extinction — and they vanished from the state’s fields and forests for several decades.
“Habitat destruction and unregulated hunting were probably the two main causes of the loss of the wild turkey. The last one was reported in Lucas County around 1910, and then there were no turkeys in Iowa until the reintroduction effort in the late 1960s,” Coffey says. “Since then, our population has grown quite well. We average a harvest of around 12- to 15,000 birds a year and about 50,000 people are out spring turkey hunting.”
Iowa has wild turkeys in all 99 counties though Coffey says they’re most prevalent in the state’s eastern third and southern half.
