Egg hunt proposed to control wild turkeys

Residents of Spokane’s South Hill are being invited to help solve the problem of too many turkeys traipsing through their neighborhoods.

One idea floated Monday evening: forming volunteer search-and-destroy squads to find and reduce the number of turkey eggs producing poults this spring.

The goal, said Candace Bennett, a state wildlife conflict specialist, is to find a way to stem the booming population of wild turkeys across the city. Bennett explained the option to about 20 people who attended Monday night’s meeting hosted by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Turkeys, which are not native to Washington, have expanded their range across the eastern half of the state in the past 20 years. In the city, state wildlife officials estimate the South Hill now has more than 120 turkeys. The number has grown since 2008, when Fish and Wildlife first began focusing on turkey removal, Bennett said.

The egg hunt will focus on the Cliff-Cannon and the Rockwood neighborhoods where most of the concerns have been from, she said. She hopes to get as many as 50 residents taking part.

“Since December 2014, I’ve received more than 60 complaints” from Spokane residents unhappy about the volume of bird feces in their yards and the level of noise the flocks produce some mornings, she said.

Some parents of young children also fear the droppings can carry salmonella bacteria and might be a pathway to infection, the department has said.

The egg hunt strategy includes two options to see which is more successful.

One will involve wildlife department staff removing eggs from nests and destroying them. In the second approach, property owners will coat the eggs with corn oil to prevent the egg from continued growth.

Using the two methods might help the department find which is more successful in containing the turkey population, Bennett said.

Turkey hens will be looking for nesting areas within the next four to five weeks. That leaves the department only a short time to set up teams to find the eggs, she said.

“We have tried trapping turkeys. But the traps we use require snow on the ground, so we weren’t able to try that this winter,” she said. In 2008, the department trapped about a dozen turkeys on the South Hill. They were not released in rural areas because they had already been urbanized and likely wouldn’t have survived, Bennett said.

In that case, the turkeys were donated as food to Spokane charity Union Gospel Mission.

In general, however, turkeys are not easy to trap inside the kind of neighborhoods found on the South Hill, said Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Madonna Luers.

Nearly all the residents with turkey complaints tell the department they don’t want all the birds killed. “They just say they want to keep the population controlled,” Bennett said.

The volunteer training will describe the likely locations for nests, primarily in ground cover or in shrubs.

Hens usually lay eight to 12 eggs in the spring. Incubation takes about 30 days. The plan is to not destroy or interfere with mature eggs that have less than two weeks left before hatching, Bennett said.

Addling the eggs – covering them with oil – is intended to address the likely scenario of a hen producing another clutch of eggs if the original eggs are removed, Bennett explained.

Attending the meeting was South Hill resident Phyllis Silver, who said she’s been dealing with more than a dozen turkeys that have roosted in the tall pines on her property. She’s tried using reflective Mylar tape, which can discourage the flocks because of the reflective motion of the tape.

“I like the idea of egg removal,” Silver said, adding she will sign up to help identify nests. “I feel that if I’m concerned enough to complain, I need to also take some steps to try to solve the problem.”

Also agreeing with the idea of stemming the population of turkeys was retired South Hill resident Stan Miller.

“I am not so sure the problem is solved by using nonlethal methods, like scaring the turkeys or using noise-makers,” he said. “All that would do is move the problem to someone else’s area.”

Bennett said the hope is to continue the egg hunt experiment for several years, deciding in about three years if it’s helping.