A wild turkey has wandered into a Bosville long-term care home

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The arrival of a wild turkey at a long-term care home south of Quebec City over the weekend is a sign that the birds' range and population are expanding in Quebec, bringing them closer to humans.

A wild turkey broke a third-floor window at a Bosville nursing home early Saturday morning, the local health department said in an email. The office it entered was empty at the time, and the fast-working staff at the care home closed the office door to prevent the bird from leaving.

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“The bird regained consciousness after a few minutes and left the way it came,” the Chaudière-Appalachian Regional Health Authority said. “Fortunately, residents were not affected.”

Tadeusz Splawinski, a biologist with the Canadian Wild Turkey Federation, a conservation group formed by hunters, said it was amazing that a turkey could fly out of a window that high.

“It could be a fluke, birds sometimes fly into the window,” he said in an interview on Monday. He said male turkeys are known to attack windows, mirrors and other reflective surfaces during the spring mating season because they mistake their reflection for a competitor.

“Males are very hormonal during mating season, they're looking for females, but they're also competing with other males,” Splavinski said.

Ornithologists are divided on whether or not wild turkeys lived in Quebec until the early 20th century, when the animals became extinct in Canada due to overhunting and habitat loss. But in 1976, the first wild turkeys were spotted in Quebec, and their numbers have grown since then.

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Between 2003 and 2013, the Quebec Department of Natural Resources released 600 wild turkeys into the province; their numbers have been further boosted by the migration of turkeys from the United States and Ontario, Splavinski said.

“When I was a kid growing up in Laurentia, we didn't see turkeys, and in 2013, 2012, we started seeing a few of them, and the population has just exploded in the last 10 years,” he said. adds that turkeys are expanding northward with milder winters.

He says they do well in forested environments, but they can also move into agricultural areas — where they can find food from farms — if they have trees to roost on.

Population expansion is driving turkeys to urban areas like Montreal, where they benefit from a lack of predators and hunters, Splavinski said. “They start congregating on golf courses, on train tracks, in city parks.”

Males often tease people in the spring, they can be dangerous to pets and children as they can weigh over 13kg and have sharp pits on the back of their legs and sharp beaks.

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In February, a man armed with a shotgun killed a turkey in Louisville, 100 miles west of Bosville, causing panic.

The turkey boom in Quebec has become a problem for farmers, said Stephanie Levasseur, vice-president of the province's farmers' association, the Union des producteurs agricoles.

In the summer, turkeys eat field crops and garden fruits such as grapes and apples. In the winter, they eat crops such as hay and silage stored on farms – which are animal feed, he said. Because wild turkeys destroy the plastic wrap used to protect those crops from the elements, they do more damage than they eat, Levasseur said.

Farmers are used to animals such as deer threatening their crops, but it's difficult to adapt control measures quickly as turkey populations increase, Levasseur said.

A farming association has asked the Quebec government to extend the turkey hunting season and increase the number of birds each hunter can bring home.

Without hunting, Levasseur said, the abundance of turkeys and their boldness leads to an increase in situations like those in Bosville and Louiseville.

“The more they get, the closer they get, that's for sure,” he said. “They're opportunists, and if they know they can easily feed around humans, they'll come closer to us. If we can't control them by hunting them, there's not much we can do.”

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