Wild turkeys thrive in the suburbs, make a comeback on Long Island

As the days get shorter and temperatures start to drop, Long Islanders are observing another sign of fall: flocks of turkeys traveling together from woodland to lawn to the edges of fallow fields, scratching for morsels to eat, chortling to one another to let the others know where they are.

"I have a flock that visits me every day around sunset and we kind of look forward to it," said Sally Newbert, who lives in East Moriches and is on the board of the Eastern Long Island Audubon Society. "They are very wary: The minute you come out the door, they pretty much take off. But they have become part of the neighborhood."

While the Department of Environmental Conservation doesn't have a specific estimate for their numbers, Chip Hamilton, a DEC field biologist, said wild turkeys on Long Island are "stable to increasing in population." And many observers note that they have been seeing many more of them strutting about in recent years.

"There has been a robust recovery," said Robert DeLuca, president of the Group for the East End, a conservation organization. "They have proven to be very adaptable to the suburbs."

Not everyone on Long Island loves these large birds. Hamilton said the DEC field office gets occasional calls from people who don’t want turkeys scratching (and leaving their droppings) in their yards, or from businesses who report a flock loitering in a road. Once he got a complaint about a turkey roosting on a hot tub cover.

Rebounding from near extinction

Millions of wild turkeys once roamed North America, from Maine to Florida and as far west as Colorado, thriving in varied habitats, including pine-oak forests, cypress swamps and grasslands. By the mid-19th century, they were disappearing across much of their range, including on Long Island, nearly wiped out by unregulated hunting and the clearing of woodlands for timber and agriculture, according to the New York Audubon Society. As some farms reverted to woodland in the early 20th century, wild turkey populations rebounded; by the 1940s, a few migrants from Pennsylvania had established an outpost in western New York.

In the 1990s, the DEC relocated about 75 wild turkeys from upstate to Suffolk County, and after a slow start, the birds have prospered.

The population has grown so sufficiently in the past decade or so that the DEC added a spring turkey hunting season in 2023, after a fall hunt was legalized in 2009. This year's fall hunt begins on Saturday. 

The hunt is not popular with many birders, who are shut out from some nature areas during the hunting season. "It’s just the worst time," Newbert said, "because it’s migration season, when all the warblers are coming through."

Wild turkeys have been spotted as far west as Muttontown, and all the way east to Montauk and Orient Point, according to Hamilton. And they have settled in many state parks, including Wildwood, Hither Hills, Sunken Meadow, Orient Beach, Connetquot River and Nissequogue River, according to George Gorman, Long Island regional director of the state parks department.

"We have seen a boom of wild turkeys within Long Island state parks over the last several years," Gorman said.

But they don’t keep to the backwoods. "They are an adaptable species," Hamilton said. They would be quite happy to take up residence near "a North Shore gold coast house, with lots of big oak trees." Acorns are a favorite food.

Birds navigating 'burbs

Turkeys are social creatures, banding together in different configurations through the year. In the spring, hens with their young will gather with other hens and poults for safety. Male turkeys, called "toms," or "jakes," when they are young, may form large flocks in winter, and then split up during mating season, but male siblings retain their fraternal bonds their whole lives, according to the naturalist Joe Hutto, whose experience raising a brood of wild turkeys in northern Florida’s wetlands is the subject of the documentary "My Life as a Turkey."

Only males make the distinctive gobbling sound, either to attract hens or to communicate with other males.

Hamilton said wild turkeys have quickly learned "how to navigate the landscape" in their newly adopted suburban Long Island neighborhoods. They will avoid a lawn where a homeowner has chased them away, carefully skirting the edge of that property but making themselves at home in the neighboring garden.

The birds are still unfamiliar enough in some areas that residents who spot them will call animal welfare groups in alarm. "We tell people this is a good thing — they should be here," said John Di Leonardo, the director of Humane Long Island.

Di Leonardo advises against feeding them. Turkey chicks, called poults, especially need to learn how to fend for themselves. "They are perfectly capable of foraging on their own," he said. "Feeding wildlife habituates them to humans, which can lead to conflict. Let wild animals be wild."

Turkeys that have no fear of humans may be undeterred when people who don't want them on their property try to chase them away, and they make easy prey for hunters. 

But like them or not, wild turkeys have reclaimed their niche in Long Island’s ecosystem.

"If you get the opportunity to be out in the woods in the springtime when turkeys are gobbling and calling," Hamilton said, "to hear one just before or just after the sun rises — it’s something special."