During the first 3 weeks of life, young turkeys (or poults) … It eats acorns, nuts, seeds, fruits, insects, buds fern fronds and salamanders. (Photo: Matt Poole/USFWS) TURKEY FACT #2: Turkey droppings tell a bird’s sex and age.
As soon as the last turkey has hatched, the hen leads her brood away from the nest. Life Cycle. Breeding usually begins in late February or early March in its southernmost habitats, but not until April in northern states.
Florida (Osceola) Wild Turkey. TURKEY FACT #1: Enough with gobble, gobble. Wild turkeys mate in the early spring. Benjamin Franklin would have preferred to have the Wild Turkey, not the Bald Eagle, chosen as the national symbol of the United States. Humans can hear gobbles from a mile away. Turkeys in northeastern North America use mature oak-hickory forests and humid forests of red oak, beech, cherry, and white ash. Caruncles are bumps of flesh that cover the birds’ necks and heads. The cycle is complete with the hatching of poults by June or as late as mid-summer farther north. The wild turkey can make at least 30 different calls. It roosts in trees at night. In the spring, the adult male makes a call known as a gobble to attract females. Turkeys also cluck and purr. Wild Turkeys live year-round in open forests with interspersed clearings in 49 states (excluding Alaska), parts of Mexico, and parts of southern Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, Canada. It usually forages on the ground in flocks, scratching in the earth to uncover food. Although the barnyard variety is a rather stupid creature (leading to the insulting tone of the term "turkey"), the original wild form is a wary and magnificent bird. The wild turkey is an omnivore. A wild turkey shows its wattle and caruncles at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in Massachusetts. The wattle is a skin flap reaching from the beak to the neck.
Birds that renest may bring off broods as late as August. Male … The wild turkey feeds during the day.