Thriving turkey populations on and around your property rarely occurs on accident. Active management and considerations to their overall habitat are key to maintaining and growing a strong turkey population. Often, people first think about providing for wildlife by planting food plots. While these plantings are an important supplement for many species, they are only icing on the cake. A baker needs to consider the cake first and so do wildlife managers. The cake that drives wild turkey numbers is primarily cover for nesting and brooding.

The annual and perennial clover, wheat, and oat food plots that are commonly planted in the fall do provide nutritional benefit for adult turkeys. This is particularly true in times of nutritional stress in late winter and early spring. However, in Alabama and throughout the Southeast, turkeys are most limited by the lack of nesting and brooding cover. The native vegetation that comprises these cover types creates areas necessary for turkeys to elude predation, reproduce and raise young, survive the elements, and feed.

Fall and winter in Alabama is a great time to plan toward creating and/or maintaining nesting and brooding cover availability in spring. As a bonus, these areas can also provide fawning cover and nutritious native browse that also greatly benefits deer.

Characteristics of Nesting and Brooding Cover

Nesting cover provides protection for nesting hens and their eggs from predation and weather. This cover must be available during the nest initiation and incubation period from April to June.  Although turkey’s nest in many different vegetation types, nesting hens are most successful and often select cover that is 18 to 36 inches tall and is adjacent to a structure that provides horizontal and overhead protection, such as the base of a tree or shrub.

Nesting cover is often associated with native perennial vegetation at 2 to 4 years of regrowth. This buffers against both hen and nest predation by providing the thicker, overhead cover and undergrowth required for concealment.

Brooding cover consists of early grasses and forbs (broadleaf, flowering plants) that range from 12 to 28 inches tall. It must be low enough for hens to see approaching danger, high and dense enough to provide escape from predation (especially avian predators like hawks and owls), and yet open at the ground level for poults to freely move to capture insects.

These characteristics provide protection for hens and poults from predation and weather, along with the insect protein that poults require within their first 4 weeks of life. Forbs should dominate these sites, as they produce and attract the insects that make up 80 percent of a poult’s diet to provide fast growth. The quicker poults can grow and roost off the ground (usually within 2 weeks), the better their chance are of survival. Good brooding cover is often associated with just 1 to 3 years of regrowth.

Active management strategies—such as thinning timber to a greater than 30 percent canopy opening, daylighting roads, clearing openings, applying herbicide, prescribed burning, and timely disking—are used to create and maintain these early stages of plant growth, also known as early succession. Vegetation that is advanced beyond the above parameters should be set back with prescribed burns or disking.

Managing Covers

Rotational management will provide close-proximity spring nesting cover (right) and brooding cover (left).

Plan to keep nesting and brooding cover in close proximity to each other and available on the landscape. Once hatched, poults immediately leave the nest and follow the hen to brooding areas. Here, they are susceptible to predation, particularly if that walk extends through poor, open cover. To minimize this, map and create a timeline to manage the landscape on a rotation that keeps nesting and brooding together. Essentially, burning 5- to 25-acre blocks of land—that are ideally no more than 50 yards from each other—in 1-to-3-year and 2-to-5-year rotations will achieve this. For the big picture, it is generally recommended that 25 percent of the landscape be managed as natural openings, with about 1 to 5 percent maintained as food plots. However, this can vary by property and surrounding land use.

Also, consider that Alabama is a geographically diverse state. Climate, soils, topography, and plant species can vary greatly throughout the state, so property location and weather patterns will dictate cover quality. For example, highly productive sites can quickly outgrow the parameters of nesting and brooding cover. Conversely, areas of lower productivity may be maintained for longer periods, simply because the vegetation may grow more slowly and be maintained longer.  Wet weather and drought years also dictate the height and density of plant growth. So, do not get stuck on a timeline. Instead, let the site response dictate management regimes, such as when and how often to apply fire or disking.

Mowing is Not Effective Management

This old fescue field was sprayed with glyphosate in November, burned in April to remove thatch, and responded with valuable natives that provided great brooding cover, fawning cover, and deer browse.

Mowing is not an effective way to maintain wildlife habitats. It creates a thatch layer that hampers poult mobility and fosters invasive plants and woody resprouting that greatly reduces value for turkeys. Additionally, recent studies from the University of Tennessee have documented that an unacceptable amount of turkey hens and their nests (approximately 12 percent) were destroyed by mowing from the same landowners wishing to improve turkey numbers. Spring and early-summer mowing also destroys the cover that nesting hens and young poults rely on. If haying must occur at this time, consider harvesting the interior of the field, leaving a border at the edge or wood line where nests often occur, and hay production is less anyway.

Utilizing Herbicide Applications

In areas that are dominated by invasive plants and nonnative pasture grasses, herbicide applications are necessary to kill undesirable plants and allow the native seed bank to respond.

It is important to note that pastures and hayfields are not as suitable for nesting or brooding cover. Often, nests in these areas fail from a lack of overhead protection and mowing. Also, the sod-forming grasses intended for livestock create a jungle of thatch and ground cover that hampers poult mobility and do not attract insects nor produce soft mast or browse that is valuable for turkeys and other game species.

Grass pastures and hayfields are not friends of wildlife. If you have cool-season forage grasses (fescue, orchardgrass, brome, ryegrass, etc.), spraying them with glyphosate after the first or second frost is ideal for their control, but follow-up spraying will be necessary. For warm-season forage grasses (bermudagrass, dallisgrass, bahiagrass, etc.), chemical control varies based on the species, but winter is a good time to mow these areas to expose the grass for better chemical contact come spring and summer.

Further details on identification and control of undesirable grasses are in the Alabama Cooperative Extension System’s YouTube series, Old Field Renovation & Early Successional Vegetation Management for Wildlife Enhancement, available at www.aces.edu/go/2634.

Working as a Team

In Alabama, approximately 640 acres will support a turkey flock of about 20 to 30 birds, on average. So, objectively look at your property and surrounding properties and consider speaking with like-minded neighbors about management strategies. Together, you can determine what to improve upon and where to fill in the gaps on a larger scale. This will produce more turkeys and healthier flocks, leading to more sightings and better experiences in the field. Together, you can bake and ice a better wildlife-management cake. For more information or help with turkey-habitat management along the way, reach out to your local Extension office or a wildlife biologist for help.