Manage your land with tomorrow's wild turkeys in mind

Sep. 15—Follow these five tips to keep your property friendly to turkeys. These will help make sure wild turkeys in your area do well in the winters to come, something especially important for the younger birds of the feather. Poults hatched this year are large enough now to follow the same feeding and foraging habits as the adults, so they no longer need to be addressed as a special subset of the population. Still, steady production of new turkey generations year over year is an important trend to mind.

According to Dr. Craig Harper, a biologist with the University of Tennessee who specializes in the study of wild turkeys, the top five things to do to help wild turkeys this fall include:

1.Implement prescribed fire.

2.Kill non-beneficial trees to make way for those that help turkeys.

3.Finish the year's spot-spraying application to kill non-beneficial plants before they lose their leaves and go dormant for the winter.

4.Plant cool season food plots that will afford turkeys winter foraging opportunities.

5.Create openings in strategic areas that can become strut zones come spring.

Step by step

1. Implement prescribed fire. "September and October are outstanding times to burn," Harper said, "especially in your woodlands that have been thinned to allow 30 percent to 70 percent of sunlight to reach the forest floor. By using fire frequently, you can establish an understory dominated by herbaceous plants. Burning now will expose seeds and reduce a lot of the litter layer. It's especially good for promoting seed and hard mast production."

Harper says the most critical part of burning in the fall is keeping the scale of each burn small, the better to keep groceries and habitat on the table for turkeys at all times.

"By doing more, patchy, small burns than fewer large burns, you're better distributing the variety of conditions you're able to provide throughout the year," Harper said.

2. Kill non-beneficial trees to make way for those that help turkeys. In any random patch of woods, there'll be trees like sweet gums that don't produce anything beneficial for turkeys. Killing these trees and helping beneficial plants thrive can make a big difference. The oaks and various soft-mast producers like cherry, black gum, mulberry and dogwood are ideal trees to help.

"These are great to have because they provide important sources of food at different times of the year, because they come in at different times of the year," Harper said.

3. Finish spot spray applications where you're killing undesirable, non-beneficial plants before they lose their leaves. Once plants have dropped their leaves, it's much more difficult to kill them with poison because the leaves are one place poison enters their system. Further, once they've dropped their leaves and gone dormant, they're done taking up nutrients and water for the year, making them all but impossible to kill with spray then anyway.

4. Plant cool season food plots that will afford turkeys winter foraging opportunities. No matter what the target species might be, turkeys will benefit. Flowering plants that produce portions turkeys can eat, that provide a spot for insects in cool weather, are ideal for browsing by turkeys of all ages.

"Annual and perennial clovers are good to get established now," Harper said. "Winter wheat and oats are especially beneficial. Turkeys eat the seed heads in a big way. Birds will be in there thick as thieves in March and April, picking clover leaves and eating them. Not to mention all the invertebrates associated with the plants in these plots."

5.Create openings in strategic areas that can become strut zones in the spring.

"If your property has any variety in topography, it's great to find elevated areas the birds will use to gobble and be heard over greater distances," Harper said. "If you have a ridge top in a wooded area, you can open that up simply by using a backpack blower and by killing a few trees to let sunlight in to a strip say, 5 to 15 yards wide and 100 yards long, or whatever dimensions are available. Gobblers are drawn to those places like magnets."

For more information on what you can do to help wild turkeys, visit turkeysfortomorrow.org.

Kevin is the weekend edition editor for the Daily Journal. Contact him at kevin.tate@journalinc.com.