Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare Some Turkey Chow?
- On November 17, 2019
- By Meleah
- In Critters, Natural Wonders, Uncategorized
- 0
Winter is coming, so we’re busy cleaning birdhouses, putting up more feeders and plugging in a few heated water bowls for birds and other wildlife. We know it’s ill-advised to bring every shivering creature into our house when it gets cold. So we do what we can to make the freezing months a little less harrowing by providing some food, shelter and water.
Bitter cold makes me worry about all living things that must survive outside. But I probably worry most about wild turkeys. Those strange-looking animals, which are ubiquitous in the city these days, will eat all sorts of things. But they can’t forage for food in deep snow because their little pokey turkey legs just can’t propel them through it, especially when the snow is powdery. So the turkeys hunker down under evergreen trees and shrubs, trying to wait it out. But if the snow doesn’t melt, they will starve to death in just a few weeks.
Last winter was the first time I’d ever heard about this sad turkey situation, so my husband, Mike, and I only spent a couple of months trying to feed hungry wild turkeys before the snow melted. This year, we’re prepared to do more. Of course, I know that for a lot of reasons, people aren’t supposed to go around feeding animals in winter. But while some of those reasons are well-founded, there’s plenty of dumb, cruel rationalizing going on out there too. So I looked up why we shouldn’t feed turkeys, and one of the most-made arguments falls into the latter category, I’d say.
I’m paraphrasing here, but the basic rationale is that since a 15-pound turkey usually eats about 5 pounds of food per week, you would have to put out thousands of pounds of food routinely if you wanted to save more than a few turkeys from starvation. What? How do you ever get anything done with that sort of attitude? I may not be able to feed a whole bunch of turkeys, but I’m sure the ones I can find and feed will be glad to have lived through the winter.
How did Mike and I get so hung up on turkeys? We see them all the time when we visit his mom’s grave at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. That place is crawling with turkeys and they almost always seem to be little families, everyone walking around together, necks bobbing as they search the ground for acorns, seeds, berries, worms, spiders, snails, beetles, slugs—even frogs and snakes. I know turkeys can be a nuisance, and even aggressive in some situations. But, in my experience, they mostly just run off when they see people coming toward them. I mean, who’s really more likely to turn the other into a sandwich?
While researching this whole turkey-feeding thing, I did find one good reason not to feed them, and that was because it might make them too tame. No one really wants turkeys coming to the door for a snack. And being too comfortable with people might also get the turkeys into trouble if they approach the wrong person and wind up hurt. When circumstances are dire, though, New Hampshire’s Fish and Game website says that exceptions can be made if “there is 15 or more inches of soft powder snow on the ground for a period of 10 or more days.” In that case, they say, feel free to feed wild turkeys “cracked or whole kernel corn, sunflower seeds, oats, wheat, or non-medicated commercial poultry or turkey rations.”
Once the snow starts falling, we plan to keep plastic buckets of “turkey chow,” as we call it, in the car. Like last year, when we spot wild turkeys, or go to specific places we know they are likely to be, we’ll stop and put out some food. If you’re interested in feeding wild turkeys when times get tough too, another approach is to feed them where you see them roosting this winter, often under evergreen trees. That same Fish and Game site advises spreading the food around, about ½ cup per turkey daily, so everyone gets something to eat. Try to do this away from busy roads and buildings. Stop when the snow has melted away enough for them to forage again.
Know that your kindness just might help a bunch of weird-looking turkeys live to enjoy another spring.
Snapping Turtles Soon Will Start Laying Eggs
- On May 27, 2019
- By Meleah
- In Critters, Natural Wonders, Uncategorized
- 1
In June, snapping turtles will once again start coming up onto the sand on Lake Harriet’s north beach to lay their eggs. If you’ve never had the good fortune to see this happening, walk over there this year and see this wondrous event for yourself. My husband, Mike, and I were lucky enough to see the turtles last summer. I wrote a column about what it was like to watch all those mama turtles, laying there eggs in the middle of the public beach, covering them with a little sand and then returning to the water
I wanted to share the experience, but I was also hoping to get some people together to help me do something to protect those delicate eggs. Mama snapping turtles don’t watch over their eggs once they’re deposited in the sand, and the lifeguards on the beach told us that every year many of those carefully laid eggs get eaten by hungry critters and/or crushed by people on the beach who don’t know they are there. I was hoping there could be a way to rope off at least some of those eggs, and I got several emails from people offering to help.
Knowing the beach is managed by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB), I called to ask for their thoughts, or maybe assistance. I talked with Debra Pilger, MPRB’s director of environmental management. She told me that people contact them every year wanting to know whether something can be done to protect turtle eggs that have been laid someplace perilous. In fact, people call them a lot, trying to help all sorts of creatures. There are times when the park board does intervene, like when the rope off areas to protect nesting owls from thoughtless humans who climb up trees to take pictures of them.
But in the case of snapping turtle eggs, they aren’t going to take any action and they don’t want the public to either. “We feel the best protection is to leave the eggs alone,” Pilger says, explaining that putting up fencing or ropes might attract people and critters who might otherwise have left the eggs alone. It’s a fair point. But putting up some kind of barrier to protect even a portion of the eggs could also be a great way to positively engage the public with nature. Call me Pollyanna, but I believe most people would be thrilled to get the chance to be citizen scientists, keeping watch over baby turtle eggs until they hatched, and the little guys made their way to the water. Sign me up!
That said, Pilger made some good points. Snapping turtles are not endangered, so letting nature take its course in this case will not lead to the end of these animals. Also, snapping turtles lay between 25 and 80 eggs at one time. Moving eggs once they’ve been buried is ill-advised. But leaving them on the beach is also problematic because, depending on the weather, they can take two to three months, or even longer, to hatch. That’s a lot of eggs to try to enclose in some way on a small public beach at a very busy lake.
So what now? Do we accept that nature needs to take its course in this instance? Or might there be more we could do if we thought about this differently? I don’t have the answer, but I would love to hear what others think and you can email me at livinthing.com. Perhaps there is some way to work with the park board on this in the future. How about a citizen science project? For now, I plan to go down to the beach as often as I can this summer to see the mama turtles laying eggs, and to try to see what happens to them over time. Maybe I’ll even get to watch some of those babies hatch and make it to the water. Maybe I’ll see you there too.
How Critters Survive Minnesota Winters
I knew it had been a while since my last blog post. But I was surprised to see that it has been more than two months. I imagine that’s at least partly due to my aversion to spending any more time than necessary at my computer where I might be tempted to check the headlines—AGAIN and AGAIN, as if somehow some good news will suddenly appear. We will make it through these incomprehensibly stupid and dark times but, for now, it’s better for me to do stuff that’s totally unrelated to current events.
One thing I have been up to lately is marveling at how critters somehow manage to stay alive in our cruel climate. After doing a bit of research, I still don’t really get how, in the absence of witchcraft or magic, the majority of living creatures out there don’t just DIE during our long, inhospitable winters. But they usually don’t, and here’s how.
Birds—Sure, a lot of birds head south for the winter. But here in Minnesota, many birds stay put, including house sparrow, woodpeckers, blue jays, American goldfinches, Northern cardinals and black-capped chickadees, to name a few. How do they survive? Well, not all of them do. When we go through long periods of terribly harsh cold, only the strongest birds make it. And they do it, by doing some of the same things we might, like shiver, especially through the night when it’s really cold so they can maintain their body heat. Some birds also squat down to cover their legs and feet as best they can. (Oh, those tiny little bare legs.)
Because all that shivering burns off fat, birds are really hungry in the morning. So if you’d like to help out with a meal, fill a tray or platform feeder with a nice mix of black oiler sunflower seed, peanut pieces, safflower seeds and cracked corn. To offer a little something for everyone, consider having a tube-style feeder with a similar mixture in it for birds who prefer to eat that way. While you’re at it, maybe throw in a suet feeder or two and a finch feeder packed with tiny bits of thistle and sunflower pieces (they love sunflower pieces). Want to provide some water too? Plug in a heated dog dish or birdbath. Birds bathe all year long to keep their feathers clean, which helps them hold in warmth.
Ground Squirrels and Chipmunks—While chipmunks hibernate in the winter, sleeping in their burrows where they wake up every now and then to have a snack and poop and pee, Eastern Gray squirrels must survive the cold on food they’ve either hoarded or can forage somehow. They often stay in their nests for several days when it’s bitterly cold, but otherwise they’re out and about hunting for all of those nuts they carefully buried. How successful are they at finding all of those? According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, “a gray squirrel can hide 25 nuts in a half an hour and can later find roughly 80 percent of the those it buried.” I’m impressed.
Frogs—Hibernation means different things for different creatures. In the case of frogs, many aquatic frogs hibernate in the water. But rather than burrowing deep into the mud like turtles, they hang around near the bottom of a pond or stream where they breathe oxygen from the water through their skin. (Fun fact: extremely cold water holds more oxygen than warm water.) Other frogs, like tree frogs and wood frogs, endure a more sci-fi experience in that they pretty much freeze solid for the winter months. Hibernating under logs or in leaf litter, they wait out the winter as little frog popsicles that reanimate once the weather warms up.
Wild Turkeys—It’s hard to take a nature walk in the city these days without running into at least a few wild turkeys. Huge and strangely prehistoric looking, those turkeys are as tough as they look and can usually survive our brutally cold weather as long as they can find food, particularly fruit-bearing shrubs and trees as well as grasses and seeds. The biggest hardship they face is deep powdery snow that can make it too difficult for them to forage. If those conditions persist for more than a couple of weeks, many turkeys can starve to death, which totally makes me want to set up a Little Free Wild Turkey Emergency Feeding Station in my front yard. I know. You’re super glad you’re not my neighbor.