 Okay, well I have 19 or 701 so why don't we go ahead and get started for those of you who don't know me I'm Sandy Duchain and on behalf of the Penobscot Valley chapter I'd like to welcome you to our free monthly program. Unfortunately, still on zoom we'd like to be back in person but on a cold and snowy February night it's probably not so bad to have people be able to join us here. We're very excited to have Kelsey Sullivan from inland fisheries and wildlife here with us. And before we get started I just want to go over a couple of housekeeping items, and then also mentioned some upcoming programs that we have on tap. So thank you all for housekeeping. Because this is a webinar, only the panelists show and have talking access. So, we'd like you to use the chat for any comments you have or communicating with each other, or than any of the panelists, but use the q amp a which is two buttons over from the chat at the bottom of your screen for any questions that you'd like to ask Kelsey simply. And he is requested, rather than store them up for the end of the program like we usually do he'd actually like to receive your comments and questions as they come in. So I won't be monitoring the chat as closely as I do the q amp a. So if you want your question to be answered by Kelsey please put it in the q amp a. And having said that, I'll go ahead and talk about some programs, exactly one month from tonight on May 4 will have done Hitchcock's for main Audubon talking about the ethics of birding in the modern age. And we're looking forward to that program. So on the fields pond over the next month on Saturday, February 12, there'll be an outdoor tracking walk guided walk on probably a snowshoe given what we've got out there for conditions right now. Then on February 18, there'll be a midnight snowshoe hike I think that's the full moon. There'll be a moonlight snowshoe hike with the staff from fields on Audubon Center. That's your opportunity February 18. And finally from February 22 to 25. I don't know if there are any seats available. It's limited to 12 students from grades one to five but they are having a February school vacation camp at fields pond. So from that you can contact fields pond either on the phone is 9892591 or it's on the web. So having said that I'm going to introduce Bob, my Bob Duchain, who's also on the board of Valley chapter, and he'll introduce Kelsey. Take it away. Thank you. Thanks. I am Bob Duchain for those of you who don't know me. Why not. Many people realize that Maine has officially for big game species moose, deer, bear, and wild turkey. And Kelsey Sullivan of course is the wildlife biologist and game bird specialist who's in charge of all this. So he oversees all of our game birds, but one of them is in fact considered a big game management species of Maine. And so it gets additional attention and bringing the turkey back to Maine, and then how to manage simply overrun the area and other places it's colonizing where you'd never would have thought it was there before. It must be an interesting challenge and I would like to hear all about it from a game bird specialist Kelsey Sullivan Kelsey. Thanks Bob and Sandy appreciate folks tuning in tonight. I do it mentioned that Sandy noted that you're welcome to ask questions as we go through the presentation and also, you know, if you want to save questions for the end though should be some time for the end so with that. So what I'd like to present today is the wild a wild turkey story, or the wild turkey story for Maine. And I'll go over a bit of history of where turkeys were or weren't in the past, and then get into some research that we've done more recently related to some publicly derived from management. A new management plan for big game species as Bob noted turkeys are big game species, and then sort of the next steps which is kind of the next. We'll move after our research that we've just completed most recently. Last year. So, I guess with that I'll get into it as Bob noted. I'm a wildlife biologist for I made in the fisheries and wildlife I cover waterfowl woodcock turkeys and grouse. I'm in the bird group. I work in partnership with several other biologists within the department as well as other agencies so even though I'm the lead for the program I work with quite a few other people to for the success and the management of turkeys. So we'll get right into it hopefully I can move my internet along here. By saying that you already have your first question from Christie wants to know, how can we best support our local turkey flock, we have one group and also alone Tom, we provide cracked corn and water, anything else we can be doing. Thanks great program. I think, you know, putting out a little putting out some food is, it's okay. Actually, that's probably why we have a robust population is a little bit of assistance from people. I would just say to be cautious if there are some diseases that run through birds so that if you saw a bird that was lethargic and kind of separated from another other bird or another species that you might consider. Feeding if you want to reduce the risk of other species so there's always a risk with feeding wildlife and that's, you know, I don't discourage it but I say just do it cautiously. And for some reason my screen isn't advancing. There we go. Okay. So we'll start up we'll start the story out two to three million years ago. So this is the earliest fossil record of the ancestral form of wild turkey found in Texas and Kansas. That was the ancestor of what we have today. Of course, people have been interacting with wildlife and turkeys, since people in turkeys and wildlife have been on the landscape together. In indigenous cultures, while Turkey were used quite a bit. As you'd know, know and see that headdresses and ceremony feathers were used. I also use bones for alls and needles I also put down here in the bottom right corner more of a modern use of wild turkey bone this is a turkey call used during the turkey hunt for you can simulate a sound of a hen. But I'm guessing that indigenous cultures also probably use that for for pursuit of turkeys for food. And more background research I came across this reference to IPM so we think of that as you know integrated pest management, which can be complicated with different insects species and other wildlife but the indigenous cultures did use turkeys as what we would call the IPM or integrated pest management to reduce, you know, for interactions and negative effects of different invertebrates bugs and things they, they didn't tame turkeys but they encourage the use in their landscapes. I put food as a very small word because really, from what I understand from literature and research is that turkeys were opportunistically taken by indigenous cultures. They occurred as robust as what we see it on the landscape today so, you know, if they encountered a turkey they would take might take it for food but it wasn't like a staple or mainstay food resource for for those folks. When European settlement occurred and folks came across the ocean and colonized the United States, there was no turkeys where they came from so they really didn't have a name for it which was kind of interesting so they came up with the name. Their Latin name is Maligus Galapavo Silvestrus which means basically they said this looks like a guinea-pea fowl like forest kind of bird so that's the origin of the name because they did not have wild turkey like as we know in the old world like we do in the new world. So picture yourself back with European settlement. This is probably what most of New England and the country look like. There weren't a lot of clearings it was mostly forested and we did have turkeys back then, probably in smaller numbers than what we do have today but I'm setting the stage for turkeys in the past leading into the future but European settlement occurred and this is what the landscape looked like in late 17th century or 1700s, 1800s basically a near clearing of most of New England and that resulted in the loss of part of what turkeys were required for habitat which is some forest cover. This with over hunting led to basically in the late 1800s turkeys didn't exist in Maine. I mean they did exist in pockets in a few states south of us but for the most part most states who had turkeys before European settlement lost them because of clearing and over hunting and unregulated hunting. To what we term extirpation which is something that used to be here that doesn't exist anymore so early 1900s, mid 1900s turkeys didn't exist in Maine. So there was a few things that led to turkeys being restored successfully and I guess it's a good example of how people and interests influence the success, the conservation of things that we care about but Industrial revolution occurred in the early 1900s. So folks left the farm and things started to grow back again. So that integral part of the turkey habitat that forest cover started to regenerate. In 1937 a pretty key act of federal acts for providing federal aid and wildlife restoration by Pittman and Robertson. Basically the excise tax equaled about 11% off of the sale of firearms ammunition and sporting equipment that was dedicated to be disseminated to states for the use of wildlife conservation management. And basically species conservation. Following World War two there was a workforce that was ripe and ready to get on the ground and put some energy into things that were important to them. There was an interest in restoring species like wild turkey that once existed that didn't exist anymore. So you had this funding to put towards conservation and management of species like turkey, which basically led to resources for what efforts to figure out a way to bring turkeys back to the to the states that didn't have them anymore. I note that from the 1940s to the 1970s there was a long period of time when things like Game Farm birds were being experimented with released onto the landscape but basically what what happened was these birds didn't have a wild these wild traits that were required to survive out in the wilderness or out in the natural world. So there was a thing that really allowed for the success of wild turkey restoration. These are birds that were captured in other states and brought to Maine. This I have a video I hope it plays but this the invention or the the use of cannon that rocket that's to trap birds from other states and then box them up and bring them to Maine and release them is how it all worked the real success of the program. So basically you're baiting in front of a group of birds you shoot a net over them and run out box them up and then load them into a truck and drive them up to to Maine. So I just have some statistics on number of birds and when we received turkeys 1977 78 so the winter of 77 78. 41 turkeys came from Vermont and they were released in the towns of York and Elliot so southern Maine. 1982 through 84. The successful reproduction of these birds that were released in southern Maine allowed for enough of a population to start moving them. There was a leapfrog effort so you'd move them out 20 miles and then establish another breeding population then capture birds at that site and then move them further out so that's how the department aided in the movement and expansion of turkeys in 1987 and 88 so the winter of 87 88 70 birds were obtained from Connecticut and then released again into Maine. So this was this continued in those about anywhere from 50 to 100 birds a year up through 2011 that were moved throughout the state with that leapfrog program of moving 20 miles out and then establishing and moving 20 miles out again so that was the real success of reestablishing turkeys was through that the aid of kept trapping transfer. So now today, if you go to any county and not in every corner of every county but in in in each county there's at least some turkeys. You'll find you'd find there was a report of a recent turkey. I think he's 20 miles northeast of Jackman out in the North Maine Woods last week so they're, they're they're dispersing. But this is really what would be considered their core range, which is where the strongest of the greatest number and highest density of turkeys are which actually mimics what the historic range was considered prior to extra patient. I'm going to just, I'm not going to read all this I just wanted to throw I have two slides that these are basically trying to illustrate that introducing a wild turkey hunt program was a slow and steady conservative approach you can see from 1986 from the first hunting season. Annually some things were changed and different parts of the state were added for turkey hunting but it wasn't just a carte blanche open the open the state to Turkey hunting it took several decades so this next slide is just illustrating that so you know continuing with slow and steady making sure that there wasn't over harvest and that populations were establishing over time, which led us to most recently that 2016 17 those highlighted references was when we started to shift from a restored population to an abundant population as many folks out there in Maine. See there's lots of pockets of large groups of birds. And so we've transitioned from restoration to man active management. Excuse me. And how we're how we approach that is through this big big game management plan, which was informed by a public survey led by a responsive management in 2016, which is going to be kind of the rest of my talk is to talk about the approach and moving forward with this big game management plan for turkeys. As Bob mentioned, Maine does have four big game species and turkeys are included in that. So they are afforded a significant amount of attention by the department but also in the legislature you'd be surprised at how much the Fish and Wildlife Committee talks about turkeys and and managing turkeys and what we should do for turkeys but they they save quite a bit of attention. So that responsive management survey as I mentioned was something that we wanted to start as a baseline as to see the perspective and opinions about turkeys in Maine turkey management population sizes and sort of direct us towards what we should try and be trying to achieve in terms of managing at what level of turkeys are accepted or desired by manors basically. One of the questions was to kind of help us understand folks perspectives on how they thought Maine or the department was managing turkeys and we had a 70% rating of excellent or good which was pretty good when you look across other turkeys at their turkey programs. That was actually pretty high rating. Another question that sort of helped us kind of derive some objectives and goals was what folks wanted to see in terms of what a population size was compared to what it is now and what what it should be in the future. 60% of folks that were asked would like would like to see turkeys stay the same at the time in 2016. They wanted to see an increase in the turkey population and 30% wanted to see a decrease and there are a number of reasons for that. Several different reasons in terms of crop depredation and perceived negative interactions of turkeys on other species, like gross and deer. I say perceived because there's not a raw real support for that kind of negative interactions turkeys might have on other species. Another question was whether folks were supportive of legal turkey hunting for population management and it was pretty high 92 to 99% and those variations are related to landowners hunters and the general public there was three categories that were asked the same question. 92% of turkey hunters were satisfied with their turkey hunting that they've experienced up until 2016. So, part of the big game management plan was we assembled a committee, a steering committee and subcommittees for each, each species moose, bear, deer and turkey, and then derive these goals based that were informed by the responsive management survey. And one of the goals was to sustain the population through research and management. Another goal was social caring capacity, recognizing that landowner and public support was important. And that was based on perspectives of acceptance of what level of turkeys are would be on the landscape. And I recognize that turkey hunting for it to be successful in in achieving management goals was there needed to be some effort to promote while turkey hunting and its value. There's about 12,000 active or dedicated while turkey hunters and the population itself. Now that it's abundant could afford more harvest so that was where that goal came from. And then general outreach and education on turkey general turkey biology ecology and management would help help the citizens of Maine understand while turkeys and which would further support our efforts for turkey management. So, the rest of the talk I'm going to talk about these other goals are ongoing. We have an outreach and education department and recruitment program for for hunting not just turkey but other other species. But my role is really to focus on research and management. And so I'm going to the rest of the talk is going to cover what we what we've done to approach that or address that goal. So, within that goal there's a few different objectives of detective one to stabilize while turkey populations and portions of southern and central Maine. So that was out came out of the questions from the responsive management survey where, if you remember there was responses of decreasing the population that desire to decrease the population and that came from where you'd expect the most. The highest density of turkeys occurred where there's more negative interactions in terms of property damage and and perspectives where there's more turkeys so to try to stabilize that section of the population. And then recognizing that there's a lot of other parts of the state where the densities aren't as high, and that that we could afford or we could. We could try to achieve a higher higher level of turkey populations in northern eastern and western Maine. We wanted to develop and improve techniques to monitor wild turkey population trends as I noted before, prior to 2015 we're really approaching wild turkey management as a conservative restoration effort. And now that we're into this abundant population we want to have scientifically sound methods to monitor and and make recommendations for wild turkey hunting and conservation. Beyond just reactive to perspectives. And then improve the quality and availability of wild turkey harvest data so having a more precise and reliable system or accurate or evaluate the current system we have I guess is really what we're trying to do. And to see if there was a need for more effort to improve the availability of wild turkey harvest data. The looking at the wild turkey hunt itself it's always been a priority of the department based on perspectives of wild turkey hunters that spring the spring wild turkey hunt is an important hunt that want that folks want to maintain that we want to maintain and continue to maintain a spring hunt for whatever we do in terms of management and trying to increase or stabilize populations that we've the core goal is to really maintain the quality of the spring wild turkey hunt. We have another question. An anonymous attendee wants to know if avian pox is causing a decrease in the main turkey population. Yeah, that's a good. That's a good question. So what we found in it. It kind of rings true for a lot of a lot of abundant wildlife species is. We have a pulse of avian pox in 2012 and 2013. And that was when our densities were highest across the state, significantly higher than it had been before. And what I think happened, which makes sense is that mother nature kind of corrected things a little bit and kept the population in check. Avian pox itself can affect individuals negatively cause mortality but for the turkey population that we've seen in Maine. There wasn't, it wasn't it didn't decimate the turkey population there's enough resistance and ability of most of the population to to withstand and survive pox so I guess the long went winded answer could be summarized in short that our population strong enough that pox isn't going to really negatively influence the overall population trend over time. Thank you and we do have a second question related to your last slide which is why is the spring hunt popular. That's a spring hot, it's popular because it's an interactive hunt where you're basically trying to emulate while turkey female during the breeding season so that it's a, it's a pretty intense I guess I could speak as per personal experience of being a spring turkey hunters that it's a very interactive, you know, I guess, what's the term, not primal but almost primal experience where you're, you're in, in the system of wild turkey breeding and you're basically the intensity and the, the challenge of trying to bring turkeys to your decoys and things like that is pretty. That's, that's why I think it's pretty popular. Okay, well Diane has a follow up question to that which is wouldn't the taste of meat reflect the winter diet of the turkeys in the spring hunt. Yeah, actually that's another good question I don't think they're eating much in the spring. I don't think they're focused on breeding more than anything so. But I would think that by the time the spring hunt is on the winter diets probably shifted already, but that but that like I said they're not eating a lot during the during the spring hunt either. Okay, I'll move on. Thanks for the questions. Getting back to the, that goal of deriving sound science we're moving forward with a more active management program. We really wanted to get an idea of main specific wild turkey biology and ecology. And there's a lot of data and literature out there for other states but we wanted to start with a baseline for our system. Through research so we're interested in looking at topics like nesting timing of nesting success of nesting habitat use across this different gradients of landscapes from open, open landscapes to forested landscapes. And how that would relate to annual survival and how that would relate to harvest rates and if our annual survival that we measure is sustainable for the harvest rates that we have. And also, to the, in some of the person that asked about pox was that there is a disease component that's important to consider, and how that affects all of the above nesting and survival and harvest, and then ultimately to come up with a population estimate that we were comfortable with that we were that we felt was reliable to move forward with any type of increased opportunity for hunting or or curbing hunting to protect some some pockets of the population. All all with the goal to inform this new conservation management regime that we're we're in with turkeys now. So, in 2018 we worked with a few different groups to. We came up with this research project titled population estimation harvest management landscape spatial ecology of wild turkeys in Maine, which is a big long title for basically trying to understand. How many turkeys we have the harvest levels that we're experiencing are they sustainable, and how they use the landscape that they're they're in throughout their annual life cycle. So, we worked with the University of Maine, Dr. Eric Longberg and Dr. Pauline came with with. They brought on a graduate student each. Matt Matthew Vonerman was the population dynamics student and Stephanie Shay was the disease ecology student so they both have completed their PhD programs and moved on but we also had support from the National Wild Turkey Federation for the purchase of some of the equipment that we used. And then of course, as I mentioned back in my one of my earlier slides the success of the restoration of wild turkeys occurred through the Pittman Robertson act which is basically this wildlife wildlife and sport fish restoration is the Pittman while Robertson act. So we were able to use a significant number amount of funding from that, those monies that we continually use for all of our programs to support this research. So, the exciting stuff started to happen. We started catching birds like I showed in that video of trap and transfer we use the same methods where we would catch birds with rocket nets. We got these GPS transmitters from the National Wild Turkey Federation. And this is a hen turkey with GPS transmitter attached basically like a backpack so she's she's got a harness that goes over or under her both both of her wings. There is that throughout her annual life cycle. This, once you put this unit on to a turkey, the beauty of the GPS units because we use different types of units for other things too but the beauty of the GPS unit is once you put it on the on her. You don't have to pursue her or try to track her down. Again, you can go and remotely download data that's set to satellites and collected. That's the value of the GPS unit they. Of course, the one thing with GPS units is they're pretty expensive so we also use radio telemetry units which were units that you'd have to go out and actively track birds and, but they were more, they were less expensive. So, what we did was we set up these three study areas, two study areas and one of them was a head subset of study areas but trying to get at the question of how they use the landscape throughout the year. The northern study area consisted of on the left the orange Exeter Corinth, which was considered Northwest and mostly agriculture, the light blue section or subsection of that northern study area was the Orno Bangor area so we're interested in how these interacted with the urban landscape and backyard feeders and how they traversed across into these other landscapes the Stud Mill Road which is Milford and East was considered the forested area so you know all of these areas have a subset of agriculture urban forest but predominantly they were agriculture urban forested and then we wanted to you know like any good study you focus on another part of the state that that it does have a little bit of a different climate and to see if that had an influence on the things that were interested in survival and nesting over time so that's the study area. This is just a little animation of one of the GPS units we use so on the left you see all those blue circles with the bullseye that's where this female was marked in the wintertime and so she had a winter range of a mile and a half or so and then over the course of the spring she started to move and disperse so she's moving six miles away from where her wintering site was and then this is where she set up shop for nesting so this was good information for us for managing at a wildlife management district level because this six miles was about average of how far a female would travel from wintering site to nesting area but we had some birds that were moving 20 miles and some birds that were moving two miles so there was quite a range but I guess the take-home was is that they're moving quite a bit so the turkeys you see in the wintertime maybe six to 20 miles away from where you see them during the nesting season so they're using quite a bit of landscape between winter and nesting I just wanted to throw this one in because it was pretty interesting so this female was marked in Munson in 2020 March 2020 and so on the bottom of the screen is where she was captured and then in May she turned up and nested in Cacadillo 28 miles away so this gets at sort of the answer of why we're seeing birds in Jackman and other places is that you know they're dispersing quite a bit for nesting and then she returned back to Munson for her wintering area so some things about nesting that we were interested in we monitored 120 nests with radio transmitters average dates of initiation is important for how our season is set so that was a really important question we wanted answered is you know we have a spring season that potentially if it's placed in the wrong part of the breeding season could significantly influence negatively the success of reproduction for turkeys and then compromise the spring hunt and compromise the population overall so our season generally runs and starts May 1st and so you see first nest attempt was April 30th they did they did we did have some re re nesting if they failed so they they only raise one clutch a year so they're they're not if they fail the first time they do try again and we've had a we had one try a third time but but the take home really here was that our season is timed for when most females have have bred are fertilized and are already nesting so that we felt we feel confident that that May 1st start date is is sustainable overall nest success was 31% which falls within the realm of several other studies that have been done so our our nesting successes is on par with a lot of other states if this one to throw in some this was kind of one of the highlights of being a research biologist is getting out and following these birds and finding out where they're nesting and habitats they're using and I don't have a blow up but if you walked to the left of the this patch of cat tails you'd be on root 26 and gray 20 feet away so they're they nest all over from deep in the woods to along along road sides and then you know they're pretty cryptic coloration camouflage nesting so you wouldn't necessarily know they're there unless you're following with a radio transmitter antenna this is Bob Bob would like to know if you could define nest success yeah that's a good question nest success is the proportion of eggs that female incubates to hatch so that's what we were calling nest success so 31% of the nest we tracked at least made it to hatching and the 24 hour period that they stay in the nest and and then nest success so would that be like if one chick makes it then that's nest success no that's a good question so yeah nesting success was the ability to to pull off a successful hatch it could have been one it could have been nine so there's more specifics than that you could get into but we're saying at least you know at least one but in general it was four to five eggs would hatch successfully to mobility thank you so that's where she is so this this is a bird that I walked up on and and and and and I didn't even know she was there until I was three feet away this is just another shot just to show that clutch size is variable and but in general they average about 12 eggs per nest interesting little fact too is that the second attempts generally are seven eggs so they you know they've expended energy to to lay their first nest and they don't have the sources to lay more so the more I guess one thing to consider is the more disturbance and failure you may see less of a reproductive abundance that year one thing that we did was to get a burden background here one thing that we did to understand the age of the nest and try to get at when when nests were initiated I'm going to move here as you can float eggs and like any chicken egg if you put it in water it's going to sink but if it's fertilized and there's more oxygen in the egg it'll eventually become buoyant and float you can estimate when the turkeys I got a friend here let's see if he quiet down apologies another thing that we did was we put vans on birds and this was related to estimating harvest so you get number of vans reported in a harvest and you know the number of birds that you banded so you can estimate proportion of harvested that are versus not and you can get a harvest rate from that we're getting hung up here yep having technical apologies just to show you that this is just a diagram or a figure to show the amount of banding that we did and the distribution to try to get at harvest rate across the state the blue circles are where we banded birds and the purple triangles where we put transmitters on birds so those are the study areas that I showed before just to try to get a wider representation of harvest is why we expanded the banding beyond the telemetry study area we did put two we put GPS units on two males that we had there were older units that we didn't know we're going to continue to be working so we wanted and we were interested in male movement between winter and nesting and you can see that this is actually the Bangor area down on the left where the one one male was marked and then another one was marked on the winter farm in orinal but this just shows that there's quite a bit of movement for males across the landscape to so just helped us or helped us understand that the flocks that we see in the wintertime are really moving quite a bit and you can think of birds that were north of there interacting with birds that were south of there east and west so there's quite a bit of movement across the landscape I like to throw this one in just because it was an interesting one we captured this bird on the stud mill road and 10 months later somebody reported it in their backyard at their feet or so another good example of that they're using different landscapes over the course of the year I think I kind of describe this the use of banding and informing harvest rate so we use total reported spring harvest with band reporting and that helps us to estimate the spring population size the harvest rates for toms versus jakes differ there's more of a preference for toms they're larger birds and their harvest rates are quite higher than juveniles so we looked at harvest rates between the two and then we looked at the specific harvest rates at wildlife management districts and then banding can also help us understand how far birds are moving between or crossing WMD lines from winter to spring and we saw quite a bit of that this is an age old tool in statistics that's used in waterfowl harvest and other game species harvest where you take harvest registration data which we have your total harvest you put in the band numbers, the age, sex, year and you basically come up with the harvest rate and this is what we generated and from that you can take a harvest rate and if you know your registration number which we do we have an accurate measure of the number of birds that are harvested in the spring you can take your harvest rate and through that Lincoln estimator generate a population estimate and so for 2019 the reported harvest was 6,612 birds the band recovery was about 20% or the harvest rate was 20% averaged out between adult males and juvenile males and so in 2019 we estimated that our spring male turkey population was 32,000 and if you assume a 50-50 sex ratio our spring wild turkey population was 65,000 in 2019 now it's important to think about what time of year you're estimating a population and how that influences your harvest modeling because if you looked at the population in the fall you'd probably multiply that by four because you're looking at reproduction too and I just like to clarify this because a lot of people ask me what the population is for turkeys in Maine and I use the spring measure because that's how we have confidence in our data but you know in the fall it's quite a bit different quite a bit larger so I just have to clarify that when people ask me about population that submits for turkeys in Maine I mentioned that disease was one component of the study that we're interested in looking at and how that might affect survival of turkeys and reproduction and going back to the question about avian pox these pictures are from 2012 and 2013 where we had a high rate of avian this is 90% of these birds that had these lesions on the head were pox there's another disease called LPDV which doesn't present itself outwardly most of the time but we did find that if there's a high prevalence of LPDV limpro proliferative disease virus in Maine during the study 57% and we did look at how that might how that influenced the vital rates of wild turkeys and so we found that LPDV did in fact birds that were infected with LPDV the clutch sizes were smaller only by 1.5 eggs so averaged out over the population it wasn't a significant negative effect or influence on the total population of turkeys in a given year this other disease REV there's a 17% prevalence and birds did have lower survival but the prevalence is much smaller so both both the diseases although they do affect turkeys it's not at a population detrimental level another thing we looked at too was salmonella that's been a big concern of dairy farms is the amount of salmonella that turkeys might be bringing into feed piles when they're coming into feed and we found like New Hampshire did in the early 2000s and we also did in 2012 and 2014 that salmonella is still pretty low in Maine turkey so there's really no not a big concern of salmonella and how that might influence dairy production in the state of Maine or New Hampshire for that matter okay so I know I just threw a bunch of stuff at you and I just threw this into kind of recap that you know turkeys were native to Maine prior to European settlement and the loss of habitat and over over hunting they were gone by the late 1800s and then through series of funding and interest they were restored to Maine and other states they're very abundant in their core area which is that lower lower half of the state of Maine and we are trying to incorporate publicly derived goals and objectives to inform and our future while turkey management and so we just collected a bunch of data and we're still actually putting it all together and there's some the next steps are to to take that into a more proactive management program I do want to thank there's like I said before there's several other folks that participate while turkey management and the research program the University of Maine was a big player several students assisted with captures and fieldwork we had a big field crew and regional biologists across the state and lots of volunteers so that's a shout out to to basically the army of people that helped to collect data and I'm going to finish this last slide which is the what's next so I just gave you a bunch of information about information we collected and questions we answered but that really is just the beginning of what we're going to do in terms of moving forward to try to have a more scientifically sound system to try to manage turkeys into the future and so we have to incorporate you know assessments over time learn refine it's basically another way of saying adaptive management but trying to balance wise use with perspectives on how many turkey should be on the landscape and that concludes my presentation. Thank you so much that was wonderful Kelsey we have two more questions that have come in and I'll invite anyone else with questions please put them in the Q&A and we'll keep answering them until it's time to go. We have some time here. Bob wants to know have you gotten commissioned or commuso turkey hunting yet? I haven't. We have a fisheries biologist that took her out. I think she took her out a couple years ago. An anonymous attendee wants to know are humans the turkeys only major predator? No that's a really good question. And it depends on what time of the year. So you have egg robbers during nesting season, skunks, porcupines, different small mammals. And then you have owls that will take the young bobcat, fox, they'll take the adults. So there's a there's a long list of predatory species that capitalize on turkeys. Thank you. Diane wants to know any plans to look at toxic contaminants or PFAS? Yes. We're sampling next week actually. And that that for those of you that aren't familiar with well PFAS itself is a toxin that's in a lot of our environment but more recently this past season, deer season there was deer sample then around hot spots of PFAS and there were significantly elevated levels of in a PFAS and eight deer that were sampled. So next week in the week after we're sampling wild turkey in the same area. Okay, thank you. Karen wants to know. So are the turkeys I see in my neighborhood in the spring different than the ones I see in the fall? Yes. Yes I know. There's probably some. I mean you have in the spring you haven't had reproduction yet. So the you there's young of the year from the previous year in the fall you have this year's reproduction. So you have new individuals on the land. So you have new individuals on the land. But at the same time, the ones that you see in the spring, there's a very good chance that they are completely different adult individuals in the fall that you're seeing because of there's quite a bit of movement. a good chance that they are completely different adult individuals in the fall that you're seeing because of there's quite a bit of movement. Okay, and George I think referring to this last slide of yours wants to know what's that acronym WMD. Yeah, good question I should have, I should have thrown up a WMD map. The data main in terms of wildlife management is divided into 30 wildlife management districts. So if you think back of that slide I showed in the core area, there's those wildlife management districts WMD's have different bag limits because of their density. So WMD is important in terms of regulating harvest based on population size. In specific locations. Yeah. Any other questions. Coming in. Going once. Going twice. Seeing none. Thank you so much, Kelsey. We've really enjoyed this conversation and learning more about our wild turkey population. And this program has been recorded. So if you have any friends that wanted to be here tonight and missed it, we'll probably be posting it on our website and on the Facebook page. So thanks very much and have a good evening, everybody. Stay warm, stay safe. And thanks again. Bye bye now. Bye.