2018 Home for the Holidays

2018 Home for the Holidays LINCOLN DAILY NEWS November 21, 2018 Page 9 be found in Florida sweet gum swamps and cliftonia (a heath) and oak in north-central Florida. Be aware turkey hunters--wild turkeys are agile flyers of open woodland or wooded grasslands. They have very good eyesight but not at night. Wild turkeys don’t migrate to distant states that are warmer. Instead, at twilight, most turkeys will head for the trees and roost off the ground for protection from predators such as skunk and opossums and ground hogs. Avian predators of their poults (baby turkeys) are red and white-tailed hawks, bald eagles and the barred owl. Go and watch the turkeys down on the farm. Healthy turkeys like to strut their stuff and get attention of the females by spreading out their feathers and dragging their wings across the ground! They also attract their mates by emitting a low-pitched “drumming” sound, produced by the movement of air in the air sack in the chest. A gobble, spit or a kee-kee can carry up to a mile. Hens “yelp” to let gobblers know their location, but they rarely do so. They are a bit more humble. If it is your preference to eat a wild turkey on Thanksgiving, how do you catch one? Turkeys in the wild eat a range of vegetation. You can put out acorns, nuts and a hard mast of hazel and chestnut and hickory trees. Wild turkeys also eat pinyon pine as well as various berries and juniper bearberry, and small reptiles. They sometimes can be caught feeding in cow pastures, or caught scavenging seed after a harvested crop and they are known to eat some grasses. Because of cutting down trees, game managers estimate that the entire population of wild turkeys in the United States was as low as 30,000 by the late 1930’s. By the 1940’s they were almost extinct! Game officials later made efforts to protect and encourage the breeding of the surviving wild population. They would do what is called, “trap and transfer” and wait for numbers to grow, catch the surplus birds with a projectile net and move it to another unoccupied territory, and repeat the cycle. This included some of the western states where turkey was not native. Evidence shows the bird does well near farmland. In 1973, wild turkey numbers were estimated to be 1.3 million, and current estimates place the entire U.S. wild turkey population at 7 M. Attempts to introduce the wild turkey to Britain and Ireland as a game bird in the 18th century were not successful due to local poachers and the lack of winter feed. What is the right turkey for you? Choices include: the Rio Grande turkey from Texas and Oklahoma, Merriam’s turkey from the Rocky Mountains and the prairies Continued u