Forests warning as wild turkey numbers take flight in Canada

‘NEGATIVE EFFECTS’

TOM SPEARS OTTAWA • Eastern North America’s wild turkey population is growing so fast that two Pennsylvania scientists say they are damaging parts of forests in their state, and Ontario could suffer as well.

Twenty years ago, there were no wild turkeys in Eastern Ontario and West Quebec, but both provinces released them as game for hunters. Today the big, tough, slightly comical birds are common.

At the University of Pittsburgh, Michael Chips and Walter Carson tramped through forests counting places where turkeys have scraped away biologically rich layers of the forest floor as they scratch for food.

Like deer, “they cause pretty massive understory disturbances just by their physical presence and their foraging,” Carson said in an interview.

Specifically, they scrape away the thick, spongy layers of decomposing leaves or “litter” that hold moisture, recycle nutrients from fallen leaves and branches, and give seeds a soft place to take root.

The two forest scientists from Pittsburgh found repeated bare areas of about 30 square metres showing deep claw marks in several forests.

They write in a published article that “turkeys disrupted the litter layer over large areas, and although turkeys are less abundant than deer … their disturbances may be ecologically more important or at least equivalent because the area that they disturb is much larger.”

Forests with too many deer are already known to Twenty years ago, wild turkeys were non-existent in much of eastern Canada. Today, they’re commonplace. lose their “understory” — the seedlings and saplings.

“Turkeys are huge seed predators as well,” and love acorns and beech nuts as well as insects and small plants, Carson said. He said no one has studied whether they eat enough nuts to make it hard for oaks and beeches to regenerate. He suspects, however, that they do.