While rounding a bend driving into her community on Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina, last weekend, Liz Magalis observed a turkey hen in the brush along the side of the roadway. A 2nd look revealed that the hen was combating something: a huge snake. “I was worried I would scare her, but I pulled over,” Magalis says. “And she was so busy with the snake, she didn’t seem to care about me.” For the next couple of minutes, Magalis saw an interesting scene unfold—and recorded it from about twenty feet away. “This hen was actively pursuing what you can tell is a very large snake, in my opinion, for her to have taken on.”
Given the time of year and the ferocity of the hen’s defense, Charles Ruth, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources Big Game Program Coordinator, believes she likely had a clutch of eggs or poults close by. “That looks like a rat snake to me—and they are definitely egg eaters and would eat young turkeys if they could catch them,” he describes.
Researchers understand mom turkeys have protective impulses; cam traps have actually captured them attempting to run racoons or possums that threaten their young. “But this video with this large snake is a pretty dramatic example,” Ruth says. Fending off predators is dangerous, and some hens will leave their nests or poults when confronted with something they aren’t sure they can best. Not this one.
“She jumped in the tree with it, she chased it around the base, she pecked its head and tossed it around,” remembers Magalis. “She just really gave it a hard time, until finally the snake slithered into a hollow portion of the tree, and even then she continued her assault.”
A mom turkey’s habits can offer her offspring a battling opportunity in a world where the stats are stacked versus them. Only three-quarters of female turkeys even try to nest each season, and just a quarter of those nests effectively hatch. “At that point, a hen has already spent twenty-six to twenty-eight days incubating the eggs on the ground, and that’s tough,” Ruth says. “Then, she’s going to spend another three to four weeks brooding the young birds on the ground, keeping them warm at night under her wings, and that’s tough too. They get picked off like crazy.” By the time she parts methods with a brood at summer season’s end, just 4 turkeys, usually, will have made it out of approximately a lots.
But if this video is anything to pass, we’d bank on this brood beating the chances.
