Wild Turkeys of California

As my wife and I were driving out of Berkeley a few days ago, we saw a group of five Wild Turkeys walking down the side walk of one of the  major streets.  When we turned a corner at the next intersection we saw another group of five crossing the street in front of us.   Many people were stopping their cars or coming out onto their front porches to watch and photograph the birds as they sauntered by.  The turkeys were completely unfazed by the attention as they calmly walked through the neighborhood.  With the Thanksgiving holiday just past, and this encounter fresh in my mind, I thought it would be appropriate to post on the Wild Turkey population of California.

Wild Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) are native to North America, and there are six recognized subspecies.  In the late 1800s they were nearly driven to extinction by a combination of heavy hunting and habitat loss which reduced the continent wide population to around 30,000 individuals restricted to remote locations.  In the 1970s reintroduction programs began to successfully bring the Wild Turkey back to large portions of its historical range.  But, Wild Turkeys are not native to the west coast.  The first recorded introduction of Wild Turkeys to California was in 1877 on a ranch on Santa Cruz Island where they were released for the express purpose of hunting.  More introductions followed, especially from the 1950s to the 1970s, and now there is an estimated population of 240,000 birds in California alone and they are found across 54 of 58 counties.  The birds we have here are largely of the Rio Grande subspecies (M. g. intermedia).  This subspecies is particularly long legged, generally weighs between 20 and 25 pounds, have body feathers that have a coppery-green sheen, and tail feathers and upper tail coverts that are tipped with tan.

As the population of Wild Turkeys in California has grown, they have increasingly moved into suburban areas.  Like deer, turkeys can adapt to human dominated landscapes and learn to thrive there.  This has led to an increase in human-turkey interactions.  Some of these interactions come in the form of turkeys doing damage to gardens and landscaped areas.  Agriculturally, turkeys eat wine grapes and have become a nuisance in many vineyards. And while males can become aggressive during the breeding season, the vast majority of the interactions between Wild Turkeys and humans are completely benign; just don’t feed them.

As an interesting aside, the reason they are called Turkeys has always puzzled me since these birds are not found in the country of Turkey at all.  I recently learned that the when these birds were first being imported to Europe from the new world they all came through trade routes that stopped in Turkey before being distributed to the rest of the continent.  The name of the bird became entwined with the shipping location, and the name has stuck ever since.

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Salmon Return to the San Joaquin River!

A long fought legal battle.  A long sought agreement between many diverse parties.  A massive restoration effort.  And now an amazing success.  Chinook Salmon have returned to the San Joaquin River for the first time in almost 70 years!  Hopefully, they will spawn and so reestablish a breeding ground in what used to be their native range.  Read a more complete account at:

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/mschmitt/a_historic_day_salmon_return_t.html

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A Morning on the Sutter Refuge

A friend invited me to join him duck hunting this past weekend on the Sutter National Wildlife Refuge.  I have never hunted the Sutter Refuge, and was excited to explore some new ground.  Leaving West Sacramento at 2:30 am , I drove up to meet him.  In the darkness of early morning, long before dawn, we walked out into the marshes to find a place that would hopefully be very attractive to ducks.  We found a small island, scattered our duck decoys in the water around us, and nestled in to wait for dawn.  As the sky lightened, the birds started moving.  We had a few groups of ducks fly by, but the really impressive flocks were the White-faced Ibis!  Thousands of them flew over is that morning.  Big flock after bigger flock swept over us all heading to the south.  It was a very impressive show.  We also saw Ring-necked Duck, Northern Shoveler, Greater White-fronted Goose, Mallard, Bufflehead, Double-crested Cormorant, Belted Kingfisher, Black Phoebe, White-crowned Sparrow, Turkey Vulture, Savannah Sparrow, Lark Sparrow (my first of the fall), American Coot, Snow Goose, American Wigeon, Red-tailed Hawk, Sharp-shinned Hawk,  Northern Harrier, White-tailed Kite, Red-winged Blackbird, Marsh Wren, Great Horned Owl, Great Blue Heron, Snowy Egret, Great Egret, Tundra Swan, and Yellow-rumped Warbler.  By the end of the morning, my friend had shot a male Mallard, but that was the only bird of the day.  As I sat there, not shooting any birds, I was struck again by how many species benefit for these refuges.  While a large portion of their funding comes from the sale of hunting licenses and permits, hundreds of non-game species use the habitats that are preserved withing their boundaries.

The Sharp-shinned Hawk was an especially exciting encounter.  She (it was an adult female) was hunting the marshes as we were.  She was flying low to the ground or across the surface of the water, moving from stand of tule to brush covered island in the hope of startling some prey out of cover.  It was really amazing to watch how she used tall stands of plants as cover.  She would fly low towards one such stand and then, at the last possible moment, fly up and over it and drop down onto the other side.  One of the islands she decided to explore was the one we were sitting on.  She flew directly at me, and just saw me at the last second when she was only a few feet away.  She was rather surprised to see someone crouching in the plant cover, and flared up and over me to hunt elsewhere.  What great look!

On the walk out, I found a large growth of Oyster Mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) growing on a dead and fallen cottonwood tree.  I gathered some of them and brought them home, so at least I did not return completely empty handed.  These were the first mushrooms that I have collected this fall, and I am hoping that they signal that it is now wet enough to bring out many more.  The mushrooms ended up being part of dinner stir-fried with a little garlic, and also lunch the next day added to polenta (which was awesome).  Finding these mushrooms really drove home the point for me that it is not even just game bird species and non-game bird species that benefit from the National Wildlife Refuge system, but whole ecosystems filled with plant, animal, fungi, Bacteria and Archean species.  Thousands and thousands of them living their intricate lives so close to our own.

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Seeking Evening Grosbeak Info

One facet of my research on the Evening Grosbeak (Coccothraustes vespertinus) that I am hoping to put together is a much better survey of where the different flight call types occur, what they are doing, and what they are eating.  To give a bit of background, five different variants of Evening Grosbeak flight call have been observed.  These different variants have been labeled Type 1 through Type 5, and while the differences are subtle to the human ear, they are distinct enough that with practice they can be identified in the field.  They are also different enough that the grosbeaks themselves can almost certainly tell them apart as well, and so may play an important role in group membership identification.

The geographic ranges of birds that make these different flight call types has been generally worked out.  Type 1 is found mostly in the Pacific northwest and central Rocky Mountains, Type 2 is mostly found in the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade Mountains of California and Oregon, Type 3 is mostly found around Great Lakes and in New England and southeast Canada, Type 4 is mostly found in the southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, and Type 5 is mostly found in the mountains of central Mexico and southern Arizona.  I say mostly a lot in that description because there is a lot that we don’t know.  It is known that there is a fair bit of overlap in where the different flight call types have been observed.  In the Sierra, while most of the birds give Type 2 flight calls there are birds that give Type 1 flight call as well.  In Wyoming, where Type 1 would be expected, Type 1 birds are the most commonly observed, but Type 4 birds occur there in smaller numbers as well.  There are also parts of the continent where it is not well understood what type might be the most common.  The area in central Canada that is between Type 1 and Type 3 is filled with question marks.  Nevada and Utah are between the Type 1, Type 2 and Type 4 regions.  This area does not have a lot of Evening Grosbeak habitat, but it seems likely that these birds do occur on high mountain ridges.  They may or may not breed there, but even knowing what birds pass through the area would be interesting.  Another huge area of unknowns surrounds Type 5.  Very little research has been done on where these birds occur, exactly.  Even the portion of the range that is in the USA in Arizona and possibly New Mexico is not well established.

An even less understood aspect of Evening Grosbeak life is that of diet.  Most bird books give the very general “eats seeds and insects” with little or no explanation of what seeds and what insects.  Do birds that make different flight call types eat different foods in their respective different ranges?  No one knows.  When individuals that produce different flight call types find themselves in the same place, do they then retain any differences in diet, or do they all simply eat whatever is around?  Again, no one knows.

So here is my call for aid.  I want to collect information on the calls and diet of Evening Grosbeaks across North America.  This will take a very long time if I do it all myself, but I am hoping that you might be willing to help.  If you are willing to help there are two ways you can.  One is if you see Evening Grosbeaks any where, take a moment to observe what they are eating.  What I am looking for is information on what these birds are eating in the wild, so bird seed out of a feeder may not give the most interesting information, although you never know.  The second way to contribute is if you hear an Evening Grosbeak vocalizing.  If you do, and have any recording device (this does not have to be fancy, I have gotten useful recordings off the recorders in digital cameras), then make a recording.  These recordings will be best if they have the vocalizations of only one bird calling for as long as possible, but any recording will be useful and this includes birds at feeders.  After you have made an observation or recording make a note of the date, time of day, location (be as exact as possible.  GPS locations would be great), and any notes on behavior or habitat that seems interesting to you.  Then send them along to me at anhaiman@ucdavis.edu

This is going to be a long and slow accumulation of knowledge which is why I am starting now.  I will be collecting this information for years.  As you find birds and can pass the information along to me, don’t worry about being too late.  Thanks in advance!

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