Turkeys Eat Ticks
 If you have Turkeys in your yard it's a good thing. Turkeys eat ticks. Their sharp eyesight and acute hearing make them talented tick gobblers. Both domesticated turkeys and all five subspecies of wild turkeys in the U.S. eat ticks.A single, full-grown turkey can consume 200 or more ticks per day, under the right conditions. A female turkey can raise a clutch of 4 to 17 poults every year, which means after one year of reproduction, her turkey family (two generations, including her and her mate) could eat up to 3,800 ticks per day, altogether. That’s way more ticks than most other birds consume. All of this gobbling up of ticks helps keep the population from getting too out of control, which can help reduce the spread of tick-borne diseases. Wild turkeys can be beneficial because they eat ticks that are on the ground, in the grass, in low vegetation and even ones on their own bodies during self-grooming. Even though these birds are also tick hosts (i.e., ticks latch onto them), they tend to eliminate more ticks than they spread. |