Turkey poults (young turkeys) stay with the hen turkey feeding on insects (protein
source) during late spring and summer. (Connecticut Wildlife, Summer 2003).
This is no joke. Turkeys do cause damage. It isn't a lot of damage. My first
turkey damage call happened on 11/11/99 or there abouts. I couldn't believe
my ears. The caller said that the turkeys were pecking on cars in the parking
lot. The pecking caused paint to chip. The caller's boss wanted to find a way
to get the wild turkeys to stop.
I put out a call to find out solutions to this turkey car damage and here are
what others suggested.
The car sustained scratches in the paint requiring the bumper to be completely
stripped and repainted, and the trunk to be buffed out, to a tune of approximately
$1,100. The insurance adjuster probably had an interesting time writing this
one up.
Like songbirds that seasonally attack their reflection in exterior rear-view
mirrors of vehicles, the root cause is the bird seeing its reflection, which
stimulates territorial defense / mating competition behaviors. I've seen some
folks place small paper sacks over the mirrors of their vehicles when parked.
Similarly, using a protective car cover for one's vehicle would solve the problem.
Robert M. Timm, Superintendent & Extension Wildlife Specialist UC Hopland
Research & Extension Center, 4070 University Road, Hopland CA 95449
Up here in far northern California, we have a similar problem with ravens.
They will attack shiny stove pipes. We are rural and many homes are heated with
wood stoves. Having the ravens up on the roof banging around the stove pipe
for hours on end can get old real fast. Some folks paint the stovepipes black
so there is no reflection. That, of course, is not an option with the cars and
turkeys. If they don't want to do lethal control, how about not washing their
cars? Perhaps less shiny cars would solve their problem.
Around here, cars get so covered with mud, it's hard to tell what color the
paint is! Kim.
Dispersing Turkey Roosts
Turkeys reside in trees at night. Sometimes these roosts become an annoyance
to local property owners. One way to disperse the roost is to shoot at the tree
they are roosting in. Be careful, one animal professional correctly noted that
your shooting may be misconstrued as hunting out of season (a violation of the
law). Of course, you wouldn't want to harm any of the birds unless you could
legally do so.
