It's spring in Massachusetts. The flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, and the turkeys are ... aggressive. Longtime residents of the commonwealth may have noticed that spring tends to be a particularly dangerous time to encounter these powerful poultry. Last week, the Dedham police issued a warning to residents about aggressive turkeys that have been following and intimidating multiple people, including a mail carrier. Just last month, a mail carrier in Cambridge had to have his hip replaced after he was attacked by a turkey while on the job. To help us make sense of springtime turkey behavior, GBH's All Things Considered host Arun Rath spoke with David Scarpitti, the turkey and upland game project leader at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.
Arun Rath: Before we jump into the turkey behavior, there's one thing I'm curious about. I feel like I've lived in other areas of the country that have turkeys around, but it feels like we have a lot of suburban and urban wild turkey incursion. Is that the case in Boston or is that my imagination?
David Scarpitti: You know, there's something about Eastern Massachusetts that seems awfully attractive to turkeys. I speak with colleagues in other states and they're just starting to see some of these interactions with turkeys in suburban and urban areas, but certainly not for as long and at the scale that we've seen in Massachusetts over the past ten or so years.
Rath: And that perception I mentioned about them being more aggressive in the spring. Is that a real thing?
Scarpitti: For sure. In the spring, it's breeding season for wild turkeys, and that's what's driving most of the behavior that we see every spring. It's anywhere from late February or early March all the way through April, May and sometimes even as long as into June.
There's other times of the year that the biology of turkeys dictate a lot of this behavior. We see different types of behavior in other times of the year that can be undesirable, but probably the lion's share of that does come in the spring associated with the breeding season.
Rath: If people find themselves outside by themselves or maybe with their pets and they encounter a gang of aggressive turkeys that won't back off, what's the best thing to do?
Scarpitti: A lot of it is body language and posturing. These turkeys aren't really trying to cause injury to people; what they're trying to do is to basically assert dominance. Turkeys are social animals, they live within a social hierarchy, and all the posturing and pecking and strutting behavior is all — particularly for the males during breeding season — a function of them trying to become that dominant individual within the flock.
When humans encounter these turkeys engaging in this activity, I think the most important thing is to really try not to feed into what they're trying to accomplish. What they want to do is they want to have you scurry off and seemingly win that confrontation. Really what the best thing to do is try not to turn your back. If you turn your back and scurry away, that's exactly what that bird is trying to get you to do. It gives them an opportunity to become more brazen and emboldened. Just keep them in front of you, they're going to try and circle around, and slowly back away. Again, don't turn around and run — that's exactly what they're trying to accomplish. Maintaining a very confident body posture, trying to make yourself as big as possible, or raising your arms or anything that you can do to counter and to indicate to that turkey that you're not intimidated by their presence.
I understand that can be pretty tricky for certain people, particularly older folks or children. That's kind of a difficult thing to ascertain, but for most adults that are encountering turkeys, just remaining calm, kind of slowly back away and keeping those birds in front of you, that'll defuse most of those situations.
Rath: Are there other ways to discourage them from moving through our backyards? I have to say, I've personally noticed that they do seem to like the same type of food that I put out for [smaller] birds.
Scarpitti: Yeah, that's kind of at the core of all of this. All of these interactions with turkeys are really fundamentally an artifact of where they're feeding, where they're finding food, and habitat that's just most conducive for them living in that area. Food is really the primary driver of that. What we see a lot of is people like to feed birds, and turkeys are very aware of that. They're going to utilize those food sources whenever they're available. We also see people who go through great lengths to intentionally feed turkeys and putting a lot of seed and other food items on the ground for them. That just causes these turkeys to really concentrate in certain areas.
That's kind of the beginning of the breakdown of the human-wildlife barrier. It becomes problematic as turkeys get more and more comfortable being around people because they're associating people with food.
Then we get into breeding season and other times a year where turkeys are — just as part of their regular seasonal ecology — are going through these different types of behavior that gets kind of outwardly deflected towards humans as opposed to just being contained within the flock of birds. Again, that just has to do with them becoming very habituated to being around humans, and that always goes back to food. Preventing those conflictcs has everything to do with controlling food that's available to turkeys on the landscape.
Rath: From a broader perspective, in terms of wildlife management, are there other things to be done in terms of managing this population of turkeys to minimize this kind of thing? Or is it just something that we live with when we live by wild animals?
Scarpitti: I think more and more — and we see this in Eastern Massachusetts, in particular — there's a lot of of wildlife around. There's a lot of turkeys, there's a lot of deer, there's coyotes, bears, fishers, birds, there's all sorts of other stuff out there. I think more and more people are seeing more of these animals and are becoming more and more experienced in encountering them. I think it is something that we have to kind of just get used to experiencing with some of these wildlife.
But I think in certain cases, turkeys are one of those, we could also be doing a bit more to help prevent some of these conflicts. That just goes back to the discussion about controlling food sources and what's available to them and and not helping them any more than what's naturally available. What's naturally available helps self-regulate their populations across the landscape. And if we just keep adding more and more food to that, we're sort of artificially inflating what the land can support in terms of the density of turkeys. There's definitely a lot of wildlife in Eastern Massachusetts, and there's going to continue to be for the foreseeable future. There's no question about that.
Rath: David, great information and very interesting as well.
Scarpitti: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
