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Hi Mary and Ted,

I'm not aware of any winter survival studies from Vermont for Wild Turkeys, but a radio-telemetry study in Massachusetts (Haegen et al. 1988, link here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3801072?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents) estimated that adult turkeys have a 93% survival rate across the whole winter. Basically, predators kill very few adult turkeys with one exception (see below). In short, no, predators have not killed 92% (11/12) of your turkeys. Turkeys are very mobile and gregarious during the winter, and your flock has likely moved on to a better food supply elsewhere. Perhaps the "limper" is unable to follow, but the limper likely would have been the first bird killed by a coyote had that been the cause. Depredation on male turkeys is minimal (see the PA-OH-NY study below), but adult females are most vulnerable to predators when they are incubating eggs. But even so, predators (in that Massachusetts study) only killed about 16% of the adult females during the nesting season. Males do not incubate but females sit very tightly on the nest, and they can be ambushed by predators. That's probably why female turkeys are so quick to abandon nests if you accidentally find one in the woods.

In Pennsylvania, my former graduate lab published a lot of research on turkeys. In a large Pennsylvania-Ohio-New York study with thousands of birds (read more here: http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/wildlife_pdf/turkeysurvivalrpt.pdf), spring hunting is by far the largest cause of adult male mortality, and adult survival for the rest of the year (excluding spring turkey season) is about 70-80%, while juvenile survival for the year is >80%.

However, predators do destroy a lot of turkey nests and eat a lot of turkey poults. Wet and cold weather during the nesting season can also cause high mortality rates of nests/young.

All the best,

Jason

On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 11:01 AM, Mary <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

We have watched "our" turkey flock diminish by one almost daily. What started as twelve is today down to one limping, ragged looking bird. Would it be coyotes?

mary

1400' in bethel vt

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Jason M. Hill, PhD

Conservation Biologist

Vermont Center for Ecostudies

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