Wednesday, October 23, 2024
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Stop feeding the turkeys

by By JIM ELLIOTT
| June 14, 2024 7:00 AM

I don’t know when the Merriam turkey was introduced to Western Montana, but it was and they have prospered. I can vouch for it. 

In the 1980s and ’90s I broke out about 65 acres of timberland into cropland and I planted a lot of oats to “tame the soil.” I put up a lot of the oats as hay and word spread fast in turkey-dom. 

In short order my haystacks began to look like the rear end of a threshing machine because the turkeys scratched the bales to get at the oat kernels and popped all the strings. This meant that I had to use a pitchfork to load the hay onto a wagon.

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