What Is a Baby Turkey Called?Baby Wild Turkeys (Poults), Week by Week

Every summer, the wild turkey hens on our 30-acre habitat in Gratiot County, Michigan, lead their broods out of the tall grass and across the yard. The babies look like little brown and tan puffballs on legs, and they are much tougher than they look. Here is everything we have learned, and checked against the Michigan DNR and the National Wild Turkey Federation, about baby turkeys: what they are called, how fast they grow, and what to do if you find one on its own.

What Is a Baby Turkey Called?

A baby turkey is called a poult. The word covers both wild and domestic turkeys from hatching until they are a few months old. You will sometimes hear newly hatched poults called “chicks,” and that is fine in casual conversation, but “poult” is the correct term. A few popular websites claim that only domestic babies are poults and wild ones are chicks. That is not right: the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the NWTF and state wildlife agencies all call wild turkey babies poults.

Once a poult is old enough to tell males from females, the names change:

What Is a Female Turkey Called?

An adult female turkey is a hen. A young female in her first year is a jenny. Hens are smaller and duller than toms, with brown-tipped breast feathers that help them stay hidden on the nest. Fewer than 1 in 10 hens grow a beard.

What Is a Jake Turkey?

A jake is a young male turkey, usually about a year old. By his first spring he has a short beard, typically only 3 to 4 inches, and his tail fan has longer feathers in the middle, so it looks uneven when he struts. Jakes gobble and strut like adult toms, but older gobblers usually push them aside during the breeding season.

A fall flock in our yard: hens with this summer’s poults, now nearly full-grown.

What Baby Wild Turkeys Look Like

A newly hatched poult weighs only about 1.5 to 2 ounces, not much bigger than a ping-pong ball. It is covered in soft down in shades of tawny tan, brown, pinkish buff and gray, with darker markings on the head and back. That pattern is camouflage: when the hen gives an alarm call, poults scatter and freeze, and against dry grass and leaf litter they nearly disappear.

Poults hatch with their eyes open and are ready to walk almost right away. Within about two weeks, real wing feathers start replacing the down, and the young birds start to look like small, scruffy versions of their mother. By fall they are hard to tell apart from adults at a distance.

Young turkeys along the woods edge on our land. By fall, this year’s birds are hard to tell from adults at a distance.

Baby Turkey Age Chart: Week by Week

Wild turkeys grow remarkably fast. Here is what happens from the day a poult hatches until it leaves its mother. Sources differ by a few days on some milestones, so the ages below are typical ranges.

When Do Turkeys Have Babies?

In Michigan, wild turkeys have their babies in late spring and early summer. Toms start gobbling and strutting in late winter and early spring, and hens begin laying eggs in April. According to the Michigan DNR, peak hatching is in June in southern Michigan and two to three weeks later in northern Michigan. That is why July and August are when you are most likely to see hens with small poults crossing roads and fields here.

A tom strutting while a hen feeds behind him. Spring strutting is where every poult starts.

A hen lays about one egg a day in a shallow scrape on the ground, usually hidden in brush, tall grass or at the base of a tree. She does not start sitting on the eggs until the last one is laid, so the whole clutch develops together and hatches within about a day. Incubation takes about 28 days. Wild turkeys raise one brood a year, but if a nest is destroyed, about half of adult hens will try again with a second nest. They can lay a second clutch without mating again.

How Many Babies Do Turkeys Have?

A wild turkey hen usually lays 10 to 14 eggs, about a dozen on average. The Michigan DNR puts the typical clutch at 11 to 12 eggs. Younger hens tend to lay fewer, and the full recorded range runs from 4 to 17.

Not many of those babies grow up. More than half of turkey nests fail or produce no live poults, mostly because predators like raccoons, skunks, opossums and coyotes find the eggs. Of the poults that do hatch, roughly half or more die within the first two to four weeks. Cold, wet weather during those first three weeks is especially hard on them, because poults that can’t fly up to roost yet spend the night on the ground. In Vermont, biologists found that an average brood of 11 poults was down to three to seven by fall.

What Do Baby Turkeys Eat?

Baby turkeys eat insects. Poults grow so fast that they need far more protein than seeds and plants can give them, so for their first weeks they eat mostly grasshoppers, beetles, crickets, leafhoppers, caterpillars, ants, flies and spiders. The hen does not feed her poults. She leads them to good feeding spots, and they find and catch the food themselves from the first day.

Around two to three weeks old, poults start adding tender greens, soft fruits and seeds. Insects stay a big part of the diet much longer than most people expect: the Michigan DNR says insects make up 75 percent or more of a poult’s diet until it is four or five months old. By fall, young turkeys eat like the adults: acorns, nuts, grain, berries and seeds. For the full seasonal breakdown, see our guide to what wild turkeys eat.

Where Do Baby Turkeys Sleep at Night?

For their first couple of weeks, baby turkeys sleep on the ground, tucked under the hen’s wings. She broods them every night to keep them warm and dry until their wing feathers grow in. Those nights are the most dangerous time in a poult’s life, because foxes, raccoons and coyotes hunt by scent along the ground.

At about two to three weeks old, once they can flutter up, the poults start following the hen into the low branches of trees at dusk. From then on they roost off the ground like the adults. If you have ever watched a flock fly up into the oaks at sunset, as we do on our land, you have seen the result. More on that in our section on where wild turkeys sleep.

Late afternoon, the flock heads back into the birches and spruce at the edge of our yard.

How Long Do Baby Turkeys Stay With Their Mother?

Baby turkeys stay with their mother through the summer and fall, and often well into winter. At about three weeks, several hens and their broods often join up into one larger flock. As winter goes on, those family flocks break apart and regroup by age and sex: adult toms in one group, jakes in another, and hens with their young females in a third. Young jennies may stay with their mother until the next spring.

This time of year, the flocks that wander through our yard in Gratiot County are usually hens with this summer’s poults, now almost full-grown. Most people never realize they are looking at turkeys only four or five months old.

Wild turkeys in our yard in Gratiot County, Michigan. Fall flocks like this are often hens with this year’s poults.

The flock working the hillside by our drive on a hazy October afternoon.

Jake or Jenny? Telling Young Turkeys Apart

For the first few months, male and female poults look alike. By about 14 weeks, you can start telling them apart, and by late fall the differences are easy to see if you know what to look for.

Found a Baby Turkey Alone? What to Do

A poult that looks lost usually isn’t. When danger shows up, the hen gives an alarm call, the poults scatter and hide, and she may fake an injury to lead the threat away. Once it’s safe she calls them back together. Hens also respond to the distress calls of lost poults, and they sometimes adopt poults from another brood. Your best move is almost always to give that reunion a chance.

Wild vs. Domestic Baby Turkeys

Farm and backyard turkeys are the same species as wild turkeys, but generations of breeding have made them very different birds: