Male Wild Turkey Fertility and Disease Prevalence in Alabama

Abstract

Wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) are the second most pursued game species in the United States, and the spring hunting season attracts tens of thousands of hunters afield annually in Alabama. Despite their popularity as a game species and their importance among some communities, concern for their population has increased over the past 10–20 years. During this time, multiple datasets have grown to suggest declining or stabilizing trends in hunter-harvest and annual population recruitment. Some managers and stakeholders have speculated about the role of hunter-harvest in annual reproduction and have questioned if early and intense male removal may have a role. Secondly, changes in the prevalence of known diseases or the introduction of new ones have remained unknown in Alabama for many years. Thus, to address these knowledge gaps, we worked with spring wild turkey hunters to collect samples and paired observational surveys. We found that adult male wild turkeys are more fertile than subadults and that decoy use by hunters selects for more fertile adult males. However, the low decoy-aided harvest rate (3%) we observed does not likely negatively lead to genetic drift or affect population recruitment. Related to disease, we detected Histomonas meleagridis, the protozoan that causes histomonosis, in 0.7% (3/434) of our sample. We detected lymphoproliferative disease virus in 72.7% (609/838) of tested males, and a negative relationship between a county’s prevalence and proportion of mixed forest. These results contradict some earlier studies and emphasize how many questions about diseases’ impacts on wild turkey populations remain unanswered.