Sharing my backyard: The wild turkey comeback
March 31, 2009
I had a dream last night: My 4-year-old coonhound Barley scratched at the backdoor to go out. She was clearly excited about something so I went to see what was outside. It was late and the porch light was out (been meaning to change that for days) so I couldn’t see much. I decided I’d let her explore. I started to open the backdoor when a wolf or a wild dog or something – something big and mean and slightly mythical that could only exist in the depths of my unconsciousness – leapt into my house, running wild and terrorizing poor Barley, who clearly had just wanted to say ‘Hi.’ I woke up in a panic and breathed a sigh of relief to see Barley dozing obliviously beside me.
A little shook up, I went to the bathroom, splashed some water on my face, and succeeded in calming myself down. After all, it was just a dream. But as I was starting to fall back asleep, I started to wonder…what is out there? Surely no monstrous wolf-like creatures, but I know I’ve heard stories of coyotes meandering into people’s back yards and rumors of bears and cougars wandering the Hoosier National Forest back in the mid-19th century. But who lives there now? And who lives in the habitats that we call our homes during the summer months when we boldly venture outside of the Hoosier state?
It’s a worthy question, I decided. What animals exist in and around the places that Barley and I have lived over the past few years and what’s going on in their lives? So I’m starting a series to investigate just that. I call it ‘Sharing my backyard,’ as that’s how I imagine Barley views these animals. I start this series with a story about wild turkeys I researched earlier this semester for the school newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student.
I see wild turkeys every so often as Barley and I are heading out to the lake for a hike or a swim. But we had one particular experience that captured my interest in the bird and motivated me to learn more. I was house-sitting for a professor who is fortunate enough to own over 40 acres of undeveloped land. So naturally, Barley came with me to stay at his house for the week. She was outside, wandering the woods as usual, when she started barking…repeatedly. When I went out to investigate, I was surprised to see three wild turkeys standing at the far corner of the yard. Barley was at the near corner, right next the deck. Talk about all bark and no bite.
Finally, she worked up the courage to start walking towards the birds. Cautiously, she inched her way across the yard. At first the birds were unphased, but as Barley got close, they started to take notice. They didn’t panic, however. They simply turned and starting walking back towards the woods. As they reached the end of the grass, they synchronously lifted off the ground and flew off into the distance, at which point Barley of course ran barking up to the wood’s edge, confident she had showed them who was boss. I was fascinated by the whole experience. I learned two things that afternoon: 1) my dog could never make it as the hunting dog she was bred to be, and 2) wild turkeys can fly!
Curious, I started doing a bit of research. Turns out, wild turkeys were once completely eradicated from most of the Midwest, but thanks to a massively successful conservation effort, they are back in full force. In Indiana, their numbers have grown exponentially over the last thirty years and have finally started to level out, indicating that the populations are starting to stabilize. This is great news for the turkeys, of course, but also for the hunters of Indiana, as wild turkey hunting is as popular as ever. Here is an unedited version of the article I wrote for the school paper just a few months ago:
Once completely wiped out from most of the Midwest, wild turkeys have fought their way back into to Indiana’s backyard and now draw over 50,000 hunters annually. Maybe Benjamin Franklin had the right idea when he suggested the wild turkey over the bald eagle as the U.S. national bird because of its courageous demeanor.
The historic bird was extricated from Indiana and many other Midwest states in the late 19th century when European pioneers cleared much of the forest that wild turkeys call home. In addition to the habitat destruction that took place, subsistence hunting likely contributed to the eradication of the wild turkeys.
“Times were tight, and if you needed some meat for the pot, you didn’t go to the grocery story, you went out and pursued it,” said Steve Backs, Wildlife Research Biologist with the Division of Fish and Wildlife.
Amazingly, after half a century of restoration efforts, the wild turkeys are back, with an estimated 125,000 birds in Indiana today.
The turkeys are a great success story in Indiana, said avid turkey hunter Steve Siscoe, property manager of Green Sullivan State Forest. Between 1956 and 2004, 2,795 turkeys were released in a total of 185 different sites. Initially, the birds were transplanted from other states to the most habitable parts of southern Indiana. Once those populations started to thrive, they were used to seed new populations all over the state.
“It’s been a special ride for those that have been involved,” said Randy Showalter, Regional Wildlife Biologist for The National Wild Turkey Federation.
By 1970, three counties had enough wild turkeys to host Indiana’s premier spring hunting season. An estimated 62 hunters killed six birds over the course of the four day season. Today, 91 counties host over 50,000 hunters that bring in a 10,000 plus harvest each spring.
Wild turkey hunting has become so popular and successful that in 2005 the state of Indiana decided to hold its first ever fall season, boasting a harvest of 716 birds.
“Fall turkey hunting is vastly different from spring turkey hunting,” said Siscoe.
Among other differences, the fall season is restricted to archery and crossbow hunting until the last five days. Furthermore, the birds behavior differently in the fall than they do during the spring breeding season, Backs said.
“It takes a lot of work to find those small flocks of turkeys,” he said. “And they’re not as receptive to answering to calls as they are in the springtime.”
Nevertheless, the first fall hunting season has remained a success, with this past season bringing in another 610 birds. While the harvest numbers have dipped slightly since the initial catch in 2005, this is likely due to dwindling interest, not decreases in turkey numbers, Backs said.
Still, wild turkey hunting remains a primarily spring sport. The Division of Fish and Wildlife is going to continue to emphasize the spring turkey hunting opportunities, Backs said. The fall season is really just a byproduct of having good turkey populations.
“These are the good old days when you look at some wildlife species,” Showalter said, referring to the successful restoration of not only wild turkeys, but whitetail deer, Canada geese, elk and others. “It’s kind of nice to be here at this time.”
Notes:
Source of data for graphic: 2008 Spring Wild Turkey Harvest Check, Wildlife Management and Resource Notes No. 958, by Steven E. Backs, Wildlife Research Biologist (7/7/08), Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Fish and Wildlife Station Results
Worlds of perspective
March 24, 2009
Today I have nothing more than to share with you a surprisingly inspiring quote from a rather unusual source, Mites of Moths and Butterflies by Asher E. Treat:
The magic of the microscope is not that it makes little creatures larger, but that it makes a large one smaller. We are too big for our world. The microscope takes us down from our proud and lonely immensity and makes us, for a time, fellow citizens with the great majority of living things. It lets us share with them the strange and beautiful world where a meter amounts to a mile and yesterday was years ago.
I have always been fascinated by perspective – the way it shapes our beliefs and our behaviors and the way it can be so wickedly warped to reconcile our sometimes wayward motivations. But most of all, I am intrigued by the differences in physical perspective that sets us apart from the tiny creatures of the world that vastly outnumber us giants. I remember writing stories as a child from the viewpoint of an ant in the kitchen looking for its next meal (I’m pretty sure I stole this idea more or less directly from a published children’s book) or even a shruken man trying to communicate his predicament to his friends (also wildly unoriginal). I found myself imagining the possibility that there were even bigger giants out there in the world, looking down on us like we were little ants, and the ants of our world were like atoms to them. (I swear I had these thoughts before Will Smith opened the locker to discover just that in Men in Black.) But in all of my fantasies, I never once looked at a microscope with the brilliant reverse perspective that Treat does here. Nicely put, Treat.
Notes
Thanks to Olivia Judson for bringing this quote to my attention.
Robot muscles – stronger than steel?
March 20, 2009
Will robots take over the world? For the last several decades, the rapidly accelerating technological advances have evoked this concern. From Isaac Asimov’s 1950 collection of short stories to the 2004 Will Smith movie i, Robot that was based on it, the topic of robot intelligence has captured the interests of science fiction lovers to scientists.
But while a robot’s mental capabilities to take over the world has been hotly debated, its physical capacity has often been overlooked. How exactly does one construct the muscular system that would give robots the physical power to dominate and control? Superelastic carbon nanotube aerogel sheets might be the answer. Click here to see a video demonstration.
This new material is stronger than steel, stiffer than diamond, and nearly as light as air. Most importantly, it can stretch up to 220% of its length when a voltage is applied, and it returns to its original shape when the voltage is removed. In sum, this new material is the making for an electrically-powered artificial muscle tough enough to build a Superman robot.
Well, not quite. The extremely low density of the material, about 1000 times less dense than human muscle, means that a whole lot of it would be needed to match the strength of an average person.
But it’s definitely a start. Its strength and flexibility holds a lot of promise for generating an impressive amount of force. Furthermore, the material appears to be functional across a wide range of temperatures, from nearly 200°C below zero to over 1500°C. With such resistance to extremity, robots built from this material could travel to some environments that humans couldn’t dream of approaching.
So far, the researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have created ribbons of the material that are 16 cm wide and several meters long. They are hoping to construct larger sheets soon.
Notes:
Lazy Mommas
March 8, 2009
Every get so frustrated with your kids you wish you could just drop them off at your neighbor’s and be done with it? No, no, of course not. They’re your kids, your responsibility. Who would do such a thing?
Cowbirds, that’s who. These birds take no shame in dumping their eggs in someone else’s basket…literally. Known as brood parasites, they lay their eggs in nests of other species, who then raise the chicks on their own. And what’s worse, the brood parasites often remove or kill the hosts’ eggs so their own chicks have less competition!
In a recent study published in this month’s Animal Behaviour, researcher in Argentina found that shiny cowbirds (Molothrus bonariensis) adjust their brood parasitism behavior depending on which species they are victimizing. In particular, the researchers focused on two aspects of brood parasitism: laying synchronization and egg puncturing.
Laying synchronization refers to the tendency of parasites to lay their eggs around the same time as the hosts. This ensures that the parasite eggs will be incubated long enough for hatching to be successful. The importance of synchronization may depend on host body size. In general, the larger the bird, the longer the eggs need to incubate. Cowbirds and other parasites, however, tend to have shorter incubation periods than hosts of similar size. Thus, laying synchronization usually results in the parasites hatching before the hosts, giving them a competitive advantage over the host chicks. On the other hand, if the hosts are the smaller than the parasite, laying synchronization may be less important, as the larger size of the parasite can compensate for any differences in age.
Punctures in host eggs made by shiny cowbirds results in a small hole, through which the contents of the egg leak out or dry up and results in the death of that chick. The punctured eggs are usually removed later by the host parents during “nest sanitation,” thus reducing the number of host eggs present in the nest and the number of host chicks the cowbird chicks will have to compete with for food. However, punctured eggs also increase the risk that the host parents will abandon the next altogether, resulting in the death of all the eggs, both host and parasite. Thus, if the parasite is significantly larger than their host, the risk may not be worth it, as their size advantage will give them the competitive edge they need to outcompete the host chicks for food.
In this experiment, the behavior of shiny cowbirds was compared depended on which of two host species they were parasitizing: either the large, chalk-browed mockingbirds (Mimus saturninus), or the smaller house wrens (Troglodytes aedon).
Indeed, the researchers found that cowbird chicks had lower survival rates when they hatched after mockingbirds, while relative hatching time had no effect on cowbird chick survival in house wren nests. Similarly, cowbird chick survival in mockingbird nests was lower when no host eggs were removed, but this made no difference in house wren nests. Thus, it seems that the cowbirds size advantage over the house wrens may compensate for any disadvantage of late hatching or host competition.
As might be predicted from these findings, cowbirds tended to synchronize their laying with that of their host more often when parasitizing mockingbirds, the larger host species, than when parasitizing house wrens. In addition, the number of host eggs punctured each time a nest was parasitized was greater in mockingbird nests. These results suggest that cowbirds do indeed put more emphasis on laying synchronization and egg puncturing when parasitizing a larger host species, which may aid the success of their chicks.
The lesson to be learned: if you’re gonna dump your kids, at least be aware of who you’re leaving them with.
Notes:
Photo credit 1 – A Common Cuckoo being raised by the much smaller Reed Warbler.
Animal birth control
March 5, 2009
Scientists are supposed to save the animals, right? But what about those populations that become so abundant, they actually become a nuisance? When is it time to take action to limit their grow, say, through the use of birth control?
Take Canada geese for example. Once nearly extricated from parts of North America, human restoration efforts have led to population explosions, totaling 3.5 million in 2002. In addition to the unruly amount of droppings they leave wherever they go (which can pose serious health risks, especially in areas of leisure swimming), territorial nest defense behavior, detrimental effects on certain agricultural fields, and other problems stemming from their overabundance have become more than a mere annoyance. Just this past January, the FAA reported that a flock of geese was responsible for the crash of US Airways flight 1549 into the Hudson river. While all passengers and crew survived this terrible disaster, next time we might not be so lucky.
Whitetail deer are another example of a species that has become extremely populous, with current estimates reaching 17 million deer in the United States alone. Deer certainly pose threats to our gardens, but the more serious danger is automobile accidents that result from a deer suddenly dashing across the road. From the first recorded deer-vehicle collision in 1969, the numbers rose to a staggering 300 incidents each year in the mid 1980s. While those statistics have since dwindled thanks to the hunting efforts in the more affected areas, these animals still regularly raise concern about driving those country roads after dark.
Given the extent of the problems these animals have caused, wildlife researchers have decided to do something to do something about it: stunt their population growth. A one-time shot for deer has just been submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a once-a-day pill is already available for geese and pigeons. Read more about these proposed population control methods…
Notes
To read more about the US Airways plane crash…
Congrats to the Wade lab!
March 2, 2009
Congratulations to my advisor, Mike Wade, the students in our lab working on this project, and their collaborators at the University of Texas Arlington for their recent NIH grant! Over $2 million will be put to use studying specations of flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum), with implications for the study of human disease. For more information on this work and the other research that goes on in our lab, visit our lab website.
