The Top 5 Wild Turkey Foods – Daily Family Farms (2024)

FAQs

The Top 5 Wild Turkey Foods – Daily Family Farms? ›

Grasshoppers, spiders, snails, crickets and slugs are all delicious snacks for our wild friends—even small snakes and frogs. Providing a simple, natural ecosystem for insects and reptiles allows them to prosper. A good guide to the amount of feed to put out is about two large handfuls of feed per turkey.

Wild turkeys are opportunistic foragers and can eat a wide variety of leaves, grass, seeds, berries, insects, worms, snails, frogs, and small reptiles. This allows them to thrive in a variety of natural habitats.

Turkeys, being omnivores, eat just about anything, with favorites including bugs, tender greens, acorns, berries, corn, soybeans, sorghum, milo, sunflowers, chufa, and other seeds and grains.

The most significant group of predators effecting turkey populations are the nest predators. This group is broad, and is composed of everything from crows to armadillos. Perhaps the most notable of this suite are the raccoon, skunk, and opossum.

They're simply following a pattern of daily rituals: feeding, calling, breeding, preening and loafing through the day. Use a turkey's daily rituals to plan a hunt strategy, especially when gobblers are henned up. It can be a long, tough hunt, but those are typically the most memorable.

They are fed a balanced diet of corn and soybean meal mixed with a supplement of vitamins and minerals. Genetic improvements, better feed formulation and modern management practices are responsible for the size of turkeys produced today. On average, it takes 75-80 pounds of feed to raise a 38-pound tom turkey.

Food plots planted with cool season seed mixtures, or cornfields planted to attract deer during fall and winter are excellent food sources for turkeys. These mixes include some annual clovers, brassicas, oats and wheat. Throughout late spring into summer, mow strips to scatter the matured grains.

Sunflower, milo, and millet are all enjoyable types of seeds to put out for wild turkeys. Nuts- Acorns are a chosen favorite for wild turkeys. But in the wintertime, acorns can become scarce. Beech and hickory nuts are a great alternative.

Crops like clover, corn, rye, fescue, oats, millet, sorghum and chufa are great places to begin, but turkeys will also require “bugging habitat” and native foods like mast (acorns, beechnuts, hickory nuts, pinyon pine nuts and soft mast like wild cherry, grapes and berries), buds from deciduous trees and shrubs, along ...

Processed Human Food: Processed foods, especially those that are greasy, salty, or sweet, should be avoided. These foods are not healthy for turkeys. Our junk food is also junk food for them. Too much salt, sugar, or fat can cause health problems.

What is the lifespan of a wild turkey? ›

Turkeys generally have a lifespan of three to four years in the wild. Eastern wild turkeys change their diets based on the season. In spring and summer, they feed on a wide variety of plants and insects. In the fall, they eat acorns, corn, oats, and other seasonal plants and nuts.

eagles, Hawks, and owls – Hawks and eagles are some of the few daytime predators of turkeys; owls hunt at night. These three birds of prey leave behind a lot of feathers at the feed site, as they do not like to eat feathers – plucking most of them while they feed.

Life History

Turkeys are considered polygamous breeders, as toms will mate with many hens and hens may breed with more than one tom. Males establish a pecking order of dominance, and the most dominant male may breed with most of the hens in an area.

Turkeys may use traditional roost sites night after night but they generally use different sites and move from tree to tree. Turkeys usually select the largest trees available and roost as high in them as they can comfortably perch.

Once it is legal to hunt (½ hour before sunrise) you are in a perfect position to try to call in a gobbler when they are most active. Turkeys usually fly up to their roost trees at or just after sunset. Once they are in the trees, toms and jakes will often gobble on their own but can also be prompted to gobble.

Adult turkeys will get as much as 50% of their intake from pasture or range grass. Range grass is grass that is four to six inches long. Turkeys like to eat the growing tips of the grass. They will also enjoy any kitchen or garden scraps: lettuce, tomatoes, sweet corn, summer squash, and so on.

Whole corn works best; cracked corn is not good because of mold. Soybeans are also a good high-energy supplementary food source. After food plots and crop fields are gone, feeding along those edges is a very effective way to feed not just turkeys, but all wildlife.

“Winter wheat and Triple Threat Clover make an excellent combination for a green strip,” said Buckland. “They are beneficial to deer in the fall because of their nutritional value and they also rejuvenate in the spring which is good for turkeys because of the insects they attract.