Wild turkey nest survival and nest-site selection in the presence of growing-season prescribed fire

Abstract

Concerns about destruction of wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) nests traditionally restricted the application of prescribed-fire to the dormant season in the southeastern United States. Periodic dormant-season burns were used to open forest understories and increase forage and nesting cover for wild turkeys. However, much of the Southeast historically burned during late spring and early summer (i.e., growing season), which tended to decrease understory woody vegetation and promote grasses and forbs, an important spring and summer food for wild turkeys. Despite the potential benefits of growing-season burns, landscape-scale application coincident with turkey nesting may destroy nests and reduce or redistribute woody nesting cover. We determined turkey nest-site selection and nest survival in a landscape managed with frequent growing-season burns. We monitored radio-tagged female wild turkeys to locate nests and determine nest survival. We compared vegetation composition and structure at nest sites to random sites within dominant cover types and calculated the probability of nest destruction as the product of the proportion of wild turkey nests active and the proportion of the landscape burned. Females selected shrub-dominated lowland ecotones (a transitional vegetation community between upland pine and bottomland hardwoods) for nesting and avoided upland pine. Ecotones had greater cover than upland pine and estimated nest survival in lowlands (60%) was greater than in uplands (10%). Although approximately 20% of the study area was burned concurrent with nesting activity, only 3.3% of monitored nests were destroyed by fire, and we calculated that no more than 6% of all turkey nests were exposed to fire annually on our study site. We suggest that growing-season burns have a minimal direct effect on turkey nest survival but may reduce nesting cover and structural and compositional heterogeneity in uplands, especially on poor quality soils. A combination of dormant and growing-season burns may increase nesting cover in uplands, while maintaining open stand conditions. © 2014 The Wildlife Society.