# Best way to attract turkeys



## paul harning (Sep 5, 2012)

Help! acorn crop failed this year and a large flock of turkeys wandered away looking for greener pasture. The whitetails are too. What can we plant so that in future years we have more to offer then acorns? Would chock cherries, black cherries, and grey dogwood help attract the turkeys? Do they eat clover and rye grass like deer? Some of the oak woods have become so dense that there is no ground cover, should we thin them out? If so, how much?


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## noshow (Sep 24, 2010)

Buckwheat and sorghum. Deer and turkeys love the stuff. Alos chufa for the turkeys


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## wild bill (Apr 20, 2001)

noshow said:


> Alos chufa for the turkeys


last i knew chufa was illegal to plant in mi.


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## Linda G. (Mar 28, 2002)

Chufa is illegal, and won't grow in most areas of Michigan anyway...it's too cold here. 

Try planting crabapples, pin cherries, choke cherries, nannyberries, currants, pear trees, apple trees, hazels, dogwoods, grapes, different kinds of oaks, and in mid-southern MI, try hickories...chestnuts, too. Chestnuts will grow in northern Michigan, too, although they're very slow to grow. High bush cranberry, too, although it's not preferred and is only eaten as a starvation food. 


And of course, that horrible invasive exotic...autumn olive...which during poor mast years is often the only thing, besides highbush cranberry, that will fruit. But even that is in short supply up here this year. 

Annual plantings...oats...corn...clover...they'll eat rye grass seed, and the poults will go for the insects in the rye in the summer, hens will pick at the seed heads, but it's not preferred...

if there's no food around you, put some corn out IF you are not hunting turkeys this fall...they'll be back...


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## Luv2hunteup (Mar 22, 2003)

Contact your local NRCS office and get on the spring mailing list for the tree and shrub sale. Start by picking plants that produce berries favored birds.
http://www.mi.nrcs.usda.gov/contact/Field Offices.html


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## Forest Meister (Mar 7, 2010)

Sounds like it might be time to do a bit of thinning in the oak woods to let enough light in to allow for some diversity on the forest floor. Thinning will let more light into the crowns of the remaining trees too and as a general rule the added sunlight will stimulate any given tree to produce more acorns then it otherwise would.

As for annuals that will attract and hold turkeys, I have had good luck with oats planted early in the year so that they are ripe in time for turkey season. Plant along with some white clover and you have a double whammy and an attractant for the next several years. FM


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