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

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.

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.

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.

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.