MANTUA, Utah (AP) - It’s gotten a little quiet out there. Too quiet.
The influx of wild turkeys in this town seems to have dissipated in recent days from the flock that numbered as many as 50 thronging bird feeders and hay stacks this winter. Warmer temperatures have apparently eased their need. Plus people have stopped filling their bird feeders here because of the intruders.
But Police Chief Mike Johnson worries they may be already nesting.
“Oh, good Lord,” he said of the wild turkey eggs’ 25-day gestation, with clutches of ten or more eggs.
“At first when they were a novelty people were feeding them, chumming them in,” said Johnson, also mayor of this town of about 800. “But I think we’ve gotten over that desire.”
The previous winter they only numbered a dozen or so.
Carol Nelson Norman is an amateur photographer and is enjoying adding the invaders to her portfolio. She’s counted as many as 100 in one group this year.
“They’re all just everywhere together,” she said. “It’s been thick.”
They’ve done no serious damage, Norman said. “They roost in my trees. They’ve eaten the berries off my bushes. They’ve just been fun to watch.” Like Johnson, she wonders if they’ll be coming back in numbers after spring nesting.
“They used to just kind of hang out at the cemetery, but now they’ve been just everywhere at the south end of town,” said Janice Johnston. “They’re wild, so who knows where they came from. Maybe they forgot to migrate.”
“We’ve had ’em the last couple years,” said Johnston, a city clerk. “But they have just triple-multiplied from what they were before … the problem is they leave a mess, they leave a little something extra behind when they go.”
Mantuans now also wonder about their spring plantings from the visiting gang, one of several collective nouns for turkeys, along with rafter, gobble, and brood.
“I’m worried about people’s gardens,” said the mayor/chief. “If thirty of them show up, you’re going to have your garden gone.”
The state Division of Wildlife Resources says Mantua’s problem may be tied to a larger wild turkey infestation in neighboring Cache County.
A significant flocking of the birds has rafters gobbling as high as several hundred the past two winters in the Paradise-Avon area. It’s just over the hill mere miles from Mantua, said Corrie Wallace, landowner assistance specialist for the DWR’s Northern Region.
The Cache numbers are so high, the division has been trapping the birds there and moving them downstate, using eight turkey traps.
“They’re everywhere,” Wallace said. “Mendon, Wellsville, Richmond, Clarkston, Nibley,” she said, referring to the rural towns that stretch to the north and south of county seat Logan, each drawing flocks of 60 to as many as 200 of the turkeys.
“It’s a simple trap for a simple bird,” Wallace said of the Cache trapping.
The three- to six-foot square metal mesh traps have a slanted single opening that requires the birds to lower their head to enter to get at the cracked corn inside.
Which somehow is befuddling, she said, since even though the trap’s door stays open, they don’t immediately figure out how to exit.
She’s seen them hold as many 20 of the birds. “They do learn, so we’ll have to move the trap,” Wallace said. “But then they’ll go in again.”
“There’s a lot of private land up here, so the hunters don’t get to them,” she said of the bird’s surge in growth.
“People were feeding them. So we weren’t getting the natural mortality. So they are going into spring healthier.”
“I don’t know that they have a whole lot of natural predators around here,” Johnson said. “Apparently nothing that big to hassle them lately. Maybe a raccoon or a skunk will steal their eggs, but that’s about it.”
The division has been dealing with damage claims in Cache County, Wallace said, with the birds getting into cattle feed, defecating as they do. The cattle won’t eat the tainted feed.
No claims have come from Mantua yet, she said, or from the Thatcher area, experiencing a similar influx.
But she warns the males, 20 pounds or more in size, get aggressive during the spring mating season, when they are known to chase children and pets.
“They’ve been known to swarm on a person’s lawn,” added Johnson. “And they’ve been on mine.”
He’s had inquiries on shooting the birds. “Mainly to put ’em on their dinner table. But I can’t authorize that. They are protected wildlife.”
Johnson said the likely solution would be to issue more permits during the coming spring turkey hunt.
“I wish they’d eat the Box Elder bugs,” he said. “We’ve got something of an infestation of them too.”
Janice Johnston noted, “I’m from Salt Lake. I didn’t know they could fly. Not for very far, or very long, but I had one fly over my car.”
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Information from: Standard-Examiner, https://www.standard.net
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