What Do Wild Turkeys Eat? [10 Studies Compiled]

Hunters must understand their target’s biology to effectively hunt it; this includes understanding what it eats. A hunter that knows what their quarry is eating throughout the hunting season, and how that may change throughout the season, will have a much better chance of being successful. This can be especially true for turkeys, who can often be tough for hunters to get close to. Knowing where a tom’s refrigerator is will make that much easier!

Turkeys eat a wide variety of food items including nuts, insects, grasses, forbs, berries, and even small rodents, frogs, and reptiles. Much to the bane of farmers, turkeys also eat row crops including corn and soybeans. A turkey’s diet will depend on subspecies, season, and habitat. 

During the spring, male turkeys or toms and jakes, are focused on hens, but the hens are focused on finding food. Throughout the rest of the year, all turkeys are keyed in on the most nutritious food sources they can find! Before we dive too far into it, here is a quick set of links you can click to go to a specific section of the article if you already know what you are looking for.

• How Can Hunters Use a Turkey’s Diet to Their Advantage?
• How Do Food Resources Change Seasonally?
• What Do Wild Turkeys Eat by Subspecies?
  • Eastern Wild Turkey
  • Rio Grande Wild Turkey
  • Merriam’s Wild Turkey
  • Gould’s Wild Turkey
  • Osceola Wild Turkey
• The Last Peck

Turkeys are opportunistic feeders and omnivorous and their diets vary by season, subspecies, and the type of habitat they are occupying. This can make it difficult to know what the birds are eating in your area. Luckily there has been a fair amount of research conducted on turkey diets. In the rest of the article, we will discuss what turkeys eat, and dive into the five subspecies diets. 

How Can Hunters Use a Turkey’s Diet to Their Advantage?

When you’re scouting you can look for preferred food sources to help them key in on areas that turkeys may use during specific times of the year, especially during hunting season. A good example is if you find an oak stand in an area where they aren’t prevalent. Turkeys love eating acorns, and the oak stand would be a great place to start looking for turkeys in the fall. 

Likewise, if you are a landowner interested in increasing the number of turkeys on your land, you must understand turkey’s preferred food sources throughout the year. If you manage your land in a way that compliments the turkeys preferred food sources then you are more likely to keep the birds on your land throughout the entire year, and have a greater chance of increasing the flock size. 

Food is one of three things that turkeys need to survive. The other two are water and cover. If you can find an area or manage your land so it contains all three, you will have a much better chance of finding or having turkeys in that area. 

If you want to learn more about cover, you should read my other article right here all about turkey roosts and the types of areas they like to roost most.

How Do Food Resources Change Seasonally?

Turkey’s food resources change seasonally almost everywhere they live. This is because turkeys will change their diet based on their biological needs and what’s available. Crop plantings and harvests, tree nuts dropping or fruit ripening, and even insect hatches are examples of large changes that can modify turkey’s patterns and diets. 

Some seasonal changes are weather and elevation-dependent. In the mountain-west, turkeys migrate from high-elevation areas to lower elevations in the winter, much like elk and deer. Depending on the elevation, there are different plants and animals and therefore different food resources available. 

The same thing can be said for the turkeys throughout the midwest and northeast or anywhere that gets snow. Once all the shrubs, crops, grasses, and forbs are covered in a fresh blanket of snow that is too deep for the birds to dig through, the turkeys have to turn elsewhere for food so that they can survive the winter. 

Like I mentioned earlier, during the spring, toms are going to be focused on hens, but hens will be focused on food sources. After you find a good food source, using a hen decoy can bring in a tom. If you are not so sure what to do during the fall season (if your state has one) then check out this other article I wrote titled Should You Use Turkey Decoys During The Fall.

What Do Wild Turkeys Eat by Subspecies?

There are five subspecies of wild turkeys in the United States and all of them eat similar food items, but there are some key differences. The different subspecies of turkeys occupy different habitats and therefore, consume different foods. 

Additionally, their maturity can change their diet as well. Juvenile turkeys consume much higher proportions of insects than adults. This is important to keep in mind if you have an early-season turkey hunt and are legally able and willing to harvest younger birds. Unless otherwise stated, the diets discussed below are general turkey diets and are not separated by age. 

If you’re not sure what subspecies of turkeys you have in your area then you can review the range map below that was produced by the National Wild Turkey Federation in 2009.

The National Wild Turkey Federation produced this great range map and they wrote a detailed article describing the different subspecies of turkeys found in North America. Once you review the map and learn which subspecies of turkey is in your area or where you will be hunting next, you can focus on the typical diet of that subspecies below. 

Eastern Wild Turkey

Eastern wild turkeys are omnivorous, primarily consuming plant matter, seeds, and nuts. A smaller proportion of their diet consists of insects and sometimes small rodents. A study conducted by Dalk and others in Missouri found that 75% of Eastern wild turkey’s diet in their study area consisted of plants, seeds, and nuts, while around 25% were insects. In an additional study, Glover and Bailey found that over 98% of Eastern Wild Turkey’s diet in West Virginia consisted of plants, seeds, and nuts while only less than 2% consisted of insects and other items.

As you can tell Eastern Wild Turkeys primarily focus on plants, seeds, and nuts. I reviewed several other studies that had similar findings and were well within the range of the two discussed above. More importantly for hunters and landowners, some of the studies reported specific species of plants that Eastern Wild Turkeys preferred. 

The figure above is appended from the Glover and Bailey study and shows the three most important food items found in Eastern Wild Turkey diets by month in their study area in West Virginia. Below is a table appended from a publication by the NC State Extension, also showing the diets of Eastern wild turkeys during the different seasons.

The information in the table and figure above are great examples of Eastern Wild Turkey diets. The information provided here should help you key in on what turkeys are likely eating in your area and during specific parts of the year. 

Remember, turkeys aren’t picky. If you don’t have beech nuts in your area, then the birds are probably keying in on other nuts like hickory or pecans. Additionally, if there is fruit available like serviceberries or crab apples, then the turkeys may also focus on those when they are ripe. 

Rio Grande Wild Turkey

Like Eastern Wild Turkey, the Rio Grande is also omnivorous. AgriLife Extension Wildlife & Fisheries reported that the Rio Grande turkey’s diet consists “of about 36% grasses, 29% insects, 19% mast, and 16% forbs”. They also reported that juvenile wild turkeys primarily eat insects like grasshoppers, beetles, and spiders. 

In Utah, Benjamin Stearns published his master’s thesis on the diet of Rio Grande turkeys. Below is a table I made summarizing the data he collected and published.

2007		2008
Spring	Summer	Spring	Summer
10.3% Grass	46% Grass	10.3% Grass	13.1% Grass
53% Forbs	30% Forbs	53% Forbs	48.5% Forbs
36.7% Shrubs and trees	24% Shrubs and trees	36.7% Shrubs and trees	38.4% Shrubs and trees

As demonstrated, the diet of turkeys is largely dependent on where they are living. In Central Utah, insects didn’t make up a large proportion of the bird’s diets. In contrast, in Texas, nearly 30% of Rio Grande turkey’s diets consisted of insects. Similarly, the birds in both areas consumed large proportions of grasses and forbs. 

Merriam’s Wild Turkey

Merriam’s eat a wide variety of food items. Mark Rumble and Stanley Anderson published an article characterizing Merriam’s wild turkey diets in the Black Hills of South Dakota. During their study period, they found that Merriam’s turkeys had eaten 78 different types of food items. These items included crops, grasses, forbs, insects, and seeds. Below is a figure from Rumble and Anderson’s article showing the different categories of forage the turkeys were eating from May (M) to April (A). 

Additionally, the United States Department of Agriculture reported that in Colorado, Merriam’s turkeys consume acorns from Gambrel Oak when abundant in addition to pinyon-juniper nuts, grasses, seeds, and berries. They also reported that insects are a critical food source for poults. 

Gould’s Wild Turkey

Gould’s wild turkey diets are generally similar to the other subspecies we’ve already discussed. Darryl York and Stanford Schemnitz reported Gould’s wild turkeys are primarily eating fruits, grasses, forbs, and insects. Below is a figure appended from their article.

More specifically, though, Gould’s turkeys in New Mexico were commonly consuming juniper fruits and manzanita. The birds also ate pinyon nuts and acorns. In the spring, mustard forbs, pinyon rice grass, grass seeds, and sideoats grama were the most important forage.

In the summer, the birds preferred to eat barnyard grass, insects, and the same fruits they consumed in the spring. They also primarily fed on sumac berries and pinyon rice grass as the most important diet item in the fall. Interestingly, similar to Merriam’s turkeys, the authors reported that Gould’s turkey diets were most varied in the winter. During the winter, plant fruits and mustard forbs were the primary diet items. 

Osceola Wild Turkey

Finding research on the Osceola turkey’s diet proved to be quite difficult. However, I did find a little bit on the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission website. They reported that Osceola turkeys eat “a wide variety of leaves, grass, seeds, berries, insects, worms, snails, frogs, and small reptiles”. 

I wish I could provide you with a little more specific information on what these birds eat, but if it’s on the web, I couldn’t find it! The good news is that they seem to eat similar items as the other subspecies. After all, it is a turkey, you will be just fine finding a few standard popular food sources on your Osceola property like ripe fruit, and local grasses expressing a lot of seed. 

If you are at your wits end trying to find an Osceola’s favorite food, you can approach it with the tried and true method of using a locator call. I wrote an entire article about it right here that you should check out. 

The Last Peck

Hopefully, you gleaned a lot of useful information about turkey diets from this article. I think the most important thing to remember is that a turkey’s diet will change based on the habitat you find them in, the season, and the life stage. You can use the information in this article as a solid starting point to learn about what the turkeys may be eating in your area. 

Although nothing beats plain old scouting. Get out on your property and look for a few of the food sources you saw here today, and look for turkey sign close by. Something like grass or insects can be tough or impossible to scout for; the place is covered in them! Although fruit and nuts are easier to narrow in on. Spend some time learning what these plants look like, and not only will you become a more successful turkey hunter, but you will also become a more well-rounded outdoorsman. 

Thank you for reading my article! I hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any questions or feedback, please send me an email at Patrick.Long@omegaoutdoors.net. If you want to learn more about me or Omega Outdoors, visit my About Page. Otherwise, I hope you have a great day, and check out some of my other articles while you’re here!