Talking Turkey

Readers in 1997 could be excused for overlooking a brief announcement that 29 wild turkeys from southern Ontario had been released into the forest of Renfrew County.

A couple of dozen birds, deep in the forest, likely to be frozen or eaten by coyotes.

But the turkeys defied all odds.

Today, there are an estimated 80,000 turkeys in woodlots across Ontario, as big as their supermarket cousins, but faster and smarter, and not pre-buttered.

Just 274 American birds were brought to Ontario.

The turkey introduction was blindingly successful at building up the population. So why aren’t all the bird lovers happy?

It all comes down to an argument over whether the turkey belongs here at all.

Some love having the bird. One of these is Randy Jennings, the wild turkey co-ordinator– yes, that’s a job title — for the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH).

The biggest concentration today is in Southwestern Ontario, but 20 to 30 per cent of the provincial total — which would make 16,000 to 24,000 birds — are in our region.

“They were all native,” says Jennings. He says wild turkeys lived in this region until the early 1900s, and were later hunted out in Canada.

“They don’t tend to move around a lot. They get into big groups. And they’re quite intelligent; they know how to stay away from things that want to eat them.”

Turkey season comes twice a year; hunters with tags can shoot up to two males in spring, and either sex (with a limit of one bird) in fall.

Last fall, Ontario hunters killed 654 turkeys.

Turkeys that are fed often can learn to relax near humans, “which is not what we want to raise young. We want them to stay wild, not like the geese down at (the) McDonald’s parking lot.”

Wild turkeys can knock bird feeders to the ground and raid the seeds that spill out. They know where farmers have planted corn. And especially in mating season, they show surprisingly little fear of humans; an aggressive male with more hormones than brain power was chasing people on Sherbourne Avenue in Ottawa a few years back.

Of course, the birds are an attraction to hunters. For $35, the OFAH will run a half-day course in turkey hunting at the Ottawa Sportsmen’s Show on Feb. 26 and 27, with later courses in Arnprior, Kemptville, Perth and Pembroke.

Years ago, there was ample warning that releasing turkeys in this region was a doomed plan.

The Birds of Canada, Canada’s authoritative bird encyclopedia, says the turkey was probably gone from Canada by 1902 because of loss of forest habitat. The 1974 edition looked ahead and predicted that the success of reintroduction “could at best be only extremely local today because of paucity of suitable habitat.” It said the bird needed extensive mature deciduous forest.

This sounds like a classic in bad predictions, but Ottawa naturalist Dan Brunton says author Earl Godfrey was bang-on, and the birds of 2010 are surviving precisely because they are not the birds of the 1800s, and not even close relatives.

“Earl was not addressing these barnyard hybrids that are infesting southern Canada,” Brunton says. “He was talking about the subspecies that naturally occurred in extreme southern Ontario and which indeed requires extensive, mature forest.

“These non-native, introduced hybrids represent subspecies (especially those from the central and western United States) that naturally occupy open scrubby land. They are a good apicultural choice, but represent lousy, inappropriate and destructive conservation and species management. Earl was and remains right.”

Fighting words, indeed. But other prominent naturalists also remain convinced that the wild turkeys we see today are a bad choice.

“Nobody investigated the effects of these birds,” says Michael Runtz, who teaches biology at Carleton University, but is better known as an explorer and photographer of wildlife from here to Algonquin Park. “Turkeys scratch through the leaves (on the ground.) They eat everything that moves under their feet. They’ll eat young birds as well as salamanders and snakes and you name it.