Prospecting during egg laying informs incubation recess movements of eastern wild turkeys.

BACKGROUND: Central place foragers must acquire resources and return to a central location after foraging bouts. During the egg laying (hereafter laying) period, females are constrained to a nest location, thus they must familiarize themselves with resources available within their incubation ranges after nest site selection. Use of prospecting behaviors by individuals to obtain knowledge and identify profitable (e.g., resource rich) locations on the landscape can impact demographic outcomes. As such, prospecting has been used to evaluate nest site quality both before and during the reproductive period for a variety of species. METHODS: Using GPS data collected from female eastern wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) across the southeastern United States, we evaluated if prospecting behaviors were occurring during laying and what landcover factors influenced prospecting. Specifically, we quantified areas prospected during the laying period using a cluster analysis and the return frequency (e.g., recess movements) to clustered laying patches (150-m diameter buffer around a clustered laying period location) during the incubation period. RESULTS: The average proportion of recess movements to prospected locations was 56.9%. Nest fate was positively influenced (µ of posterior distribution with 95% credible 0.19, 0.06-0.37, probability of direction = 99.8%) by the number of patches (90-m diameter buffer around a clustered laying period location) a female visited during incubation recesses. Females selected for areas closer to the nest site, secondary roads, hardwood forest, mixed pine-hardwood forest, water, and shrub/scrub, whereas they avoided pine forest and open-treeless areas. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that having a diverse suite of clustered laying patches to support incubation recesses is impactful to nest fate. As such, local conditions within prospected locations during incubation may be key to successful reproductive output by wild turkeys. We suggest that prospecting could be important to other phenological periods. Furthermore, future research should evaluate how prospecting for brood-rearing locations may occur before or during the incubation period.

Habitat selection of Gould's wild turkeys in southeastern Arizona.

In semi-arid environments, resources necessary for survival may be unevenly distributed across the landscape. Gould's wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo mexicana) are spatially restricted to mountainous semi-arid areas of southwestern United States and Mexico, and information on their distribution and habitat use is limited. We described how landcover type and topographical features influenced space use and habitat selection by Gould's wild turkeys in southeastern Arizona. We used GPS data from 51 Gould's wild turkeys to describe resource selection during 2016-2017 in southeastern Arizona, USA. We estimated home ranges and calculated resource selection functions using distance from landcover types, slope, aspect, and elevation at used locations and random locations within individual home ranges. Gould's wild turkeys selected areas closer to pine forest and water. Likewise, Gould's wild turkeys selected locations with moderate elevations of 1641 ± 235 m (range = 1223-2971 m), and on north and west facing slopes with a 10° ± 8.5 (range = 0.0-67.4°) incline. Our findings suggest that conserving portions of the landscape with appropriate topography and landcover types as described above will promote habitat availability for Gould's wild turkeys.

Reproductive asynchrony within social groups of female eastern wild turkeys.

Coordination in timing of reproduction is driven by multiple ecological and sociobiological processes for a wide array of species. Eastern wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) use a male dominance polygynous mating system, where males communicate with females via elaborate courtship displays and vocalizations at display sites. Most females prefer to mate with dominant males; therefore, asynchronous breeding and nesting may occur which can disproportionately influence individual fitness within breeding groups. For female wild turkeys, there are reproductive advantages associated with earlier nesting. As such, we evaluated reproductive asynchrony within and between groups of GPS-tagged female eastern wild turkeys based on timing of nest initiation. We examined 30 social groups with an average of seven females per group (range 2-15) during 2014-2019 in west central Louisiana. We found that the estimated number of days between first nest initiation across females within groups varied between 3 and 7 days across years, although we expected 1-2 days to occur between successive nesting attempts of females within groups based on observations of captive wild turkeys in the extant literature. The number of days between successive nest attempts across females within groups was lower for successful than failed attempts, and nests with an average of 2.8 days between initiation of another nest were more likely to hatch. Our findings suggest that asynchronous reproduction may influence reproductive success in female wild turkeys.

Seroprevalence of Leptospira Among Selected Mammals on a Wildlife Management Area in Louisiana, USA.

From August to December 2018, we collected blood samples from 98 individuals of 11 mammal species to examine seroprevalence of leptospirosis at the Sherburne Wildlife Management Area in central Louisiana, US. Overall, 21.4% of individuals tested positive for antibodies of at least one Leptospira interrogans serovar and six individuals were reactive for two or more serovars. The most prevalent serovar we detected was serovar Bratislava (19.4%), followed by serovar Grippotyphosa (6.1%), serovar Icterohaemorrhagiae and serovar Pomona (2.0%), and serovar Canicola and serovar Hardjo (1.0%). We detected the highest prevalence in fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), hispid cotton rats (Sigmodon hispidus), and feral swine (Sus scrofa), with serovar Bratislava being the most reactive for these three species. Positive samples returned titer results of 100-400 for all species and serovars, with the exception of one feral swine that returned a titer of 1,600 to serovar Bratislava, indicating an active infection. Although the potential effects of leptospirosis on our study species remains unclear, our data contribute information necessary to understand and manage potential risks of Leptospira exposure to wildlife, domestic animals, and humans.