UND and North Dakota Game and Fish join forces to track relocated wild turkeys across the state

Mar. 22—When Cailey Isaacson started working on a collaborative research project with the North Dakota Game and Fish Department to trap and translocate problem wild turkeys fitted with tracking devices, the UND doctoral student admits she didn't know a lot about the birds.

Now, wild turkeys are pretty much a daily part of her life. And will be for at least the next two years, as Isaacson researches how North Dakota nuisance wild turkeys fare after being moved to new areas.

"I did not know almost anything about turkeys before I started this and now I feel fully immersed," she said.

Isaacson is overseeing the fieldwork and monitoring portion of a study that involved capturing nuisance wild turkeys from sites across North Dakota and moving some of those birds to state wildlife management areas, where they hopefully cause fewer problems and provide public land hunting opportunities. By attaching tracking devices to the birds, the project, now in its second year, is beginning to shed light on wild turkey movement, survival and reproduction rates after the birds have been moved.

The study also includes a subset of "control" birds that weren't moved to determine if there are differences in survival rates and nesting success.

"In 2023, we had capture sites along the Missouri River and west, but in 2024, we did actually expand to include birds here in the eastern part of the state," Isaacson said Monday, March 18, in a Zoom update.

This year's capture effort included sites from the Missouri River east to the Red River Valley.

"We have 155 active birds on the landscape," Isaacson said. "Over the next year, we'll be chasing those birds and doing the same data monitoring with all 155 birds."

Joining Isaacson on the Zoom call were Susan Felege, UND professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management and the project's faculty adviser; RJ Gross, upland game biologist for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department; and Dr. Charlie Bahnson, the department's wildlife veterinarian.

While Game and Fish historically have moved as many as 200 nuisance turkeys to WMA lands and other sites every year, little was known about how they fared after being relocated.

That's where the UND-Game and Fish collaboration comes into play. The project is funded by a $466,000 federal Wildlife Restoration Program (Pittman-Robertson) grant and $98,000 from the National Wild Turkey Federation, along with an additional $10,000 from the NWTF in North Dakota. The tracking devices, powered by a tiny solar panel, cost about $1,500 each and will last about two years.

Isaacson and Gross gave a presentation on the project in February during the National Wild Turkey Federation convention in Nashville. Eventually, findings from the research will become the subject of Isaacson's doctoral thesis, which has a working title of "Estimating Survival, Productivity and Movement of Translocated Turkeys in North Dakota."

Much of the information to date is more along the lines of "interesting observations" than formal conclusions, Isaacson says, just because the research is ongoing.

"We're still collecting a lot of this data, so I haven't spent as much time at the computer analyzing all of this," Isaacson said.

Since launching the study in the winter of 2023, project partners have trapped more than 200 problem turkeys — 100 during the winter of 2023 and 111 in 2024 — and fitted them with the tracking devices. The goal was to capture birds at a ratio of four females to one male.

Game and Fish personnel, with help from Isaacson and Felege, attached the tracking devices in department facilities near the capture sites, where the birds also were sampled for various diseases, before being released.

Results to date haven't raised any health concerns, said Bahnson, the Game and Fish veterinarian; all of the birds also have tested negative for avian influenza.

"I don't know that we've seen anything groundbreaking," Bahnson said. "But with the turkey comes all the other organisms that live on and with the turkey, so that's what we're somewhat interested in," as well.

One of the most significant developments to come from the study to date is the technique for trapping the birds, Gross said. Instead of using conventional drop nets or rocket nets to catch the birds, a Game and Fish technician developed a walk-in trap that resembles a dog kennel that contains bait to attract the birds and can be monitored with a cellular trail camera.

When enough turkeys have entered the trap, it can be closed remotely with a text message. Gross then could coordinate with Isaacson to travel to the capture site.

That alleviated the time and expense of waiting at a site, sometimes for hours, until enough birds were gathered to fire the rocket net, Gross says. Game and Fish also uses the remote traps to catch and move problem turkeys in urban areas.

The technique has attracted attention from wildlife agencies in other states, he said.

"I told our technician who came up with our trap that he needs to patent his design because other states all around the country really want to use it," Gross said. "It's been fantastic. ... It's just so much more efficient."

With the capture part of the study now complete, the project focus shifts exclusively to monitoring the birds. Some of the tracking devices can be monitored over the cellular network, while others require Isaacson to travel across the state and locate birds with traditional telemetry gear.

Among the findings to date:

* Of the 100 turkeys trapped in 2023, 47 survived into 2024. Some of the birds that didn't survive were shot by hunters, while a couple of others were hit by vehicles. The survival rate, Gross says, was "a lot better than I thought it was going to be."

* Isaacson counted five nests from the 74 females tagged in 2023. The number may not be surprising, she says, considering the number of juvenile birds and the stress of relocation that occurred shortly before breeding season.

* Two of the five nests were successful in producing chicks. One was a control bird that wasn't moved and the other was a translocated bird.

* Every turkey captured in 2023 moved at least 5 kilometers, and one control bird fitted with a tracking device traveled about 18 kilometers.

* All of the birds translocated to one particular WMA in the winter of 2023 moved to adjacent private land by September, likely in response to increased human activity after archery and grouse seasons opened.

According to Felege, the project's faculty adviser, the study "is super unique" because it's providing information not only about the trap and relocation program, but also about turkeys in North Dakota and the northern Great Plains as a whole that previously wasn't available. Unlike many parts of the country, turkeys in North Dakota are generally doing well.

"This is a real nice demonstration of what teamwork and partnerships look like," Felege said. "We've brought together the university, we've got the disease side of things with Game and Fish. We have the game bird side of it. We also have the partnership with the Turkey Federation, and that's pretty cool.

"You add the landowners in there, and then the Game and Fish, just as a whole, has really come together to help us, whether it's trapping or picking up a tagged bird or whatever. This is an all-hands-on-deck teamwork kind of thing, and I've been so impressed at how well that has worked."