If You Build it They Will Come

Make a roost site for wild turkeys

If you want to see more wild turkeys in your woods, give them a reason to be there.  Give them a secure roost site.

To roost, turkeys need mature trees, hardwood or evergreen, with stout horizontal limb, twenty feet or more in the air.  The limbs have to be thick enough to support a twenty pound bird,  level enough to sleep on all night and high enough to be safe from ground bound predators.  If you have that in your woods,  the rest is easy.

The other thing they need is a clear understory below the roost.  They want a clear take off and landing strip and also they need to see that there are no predators hiding nearby.

Take a chainsaw to the saplings and scrub brush below your chosen grove of trees to make it more secure for turkeys.  If you do it in winter, hungry whitetail deer will benefit from it too  by eating the tops of the branches. This trail cam video shows a fawn chowing down on branch tips.

Do the work in the winter to benefit the deer and to give yourself a break from cabin fever. Then you may hear a tom gobbling from the roost you enhanced this spring.

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