CARBONDALE, Ill. — Some Illinois landowners and farm organizations have expressed concerns that increasing wild turkey populations are damaging corn, wheat, soybeans and milo.

Even the Illinois Department of Natural Resources receives complaints of turkeys eating berry crops. But researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale say turkeys are not to blame, following a study on turkey populations.

So if it’s not turkeys, what’s responsible for the crop damage? Deer, the researchers claim.

The latest study, recently published in the Journal of Integrated Pest Management, agrees with what Illinois researchers have declared for years: Claims that wild turkeys do great damage to agricultural crops are mostly exaggerated. Faculty and students at SIUC’s Cooperative Wildlife Research Lab focused on a large chunk of private land located in Jackson County.

Prompting the study is a growing turkey population that continues to expand range and increase in numbers. Flocks of turkeys using agricultural fields tend to attract attention and turkeys maybe blamed for depredation caused by other wildlife species.

So the study looked at the food habits of turkeys using the agricultural landscape and the frequency, seasonality and severity of any crop depredation, as well determining damage caused by other wildlife species, such as deer or raccoons.

“Specifically, we quantified food habits of turkeys during spring, and summer crop damage attributable to turkeys,” noted Alan Woolf, who headed the Wildlife Lab and wrote the study. “Our goal was to provide wildlife managers with information regarding how much turkeys actually damage crops in Illinois.”

According to the findings, “turkeys did not cause any definitive damage to row crops in Illinois. However, turkey use of waste grains, especially corn, as a food source in agricultural landscapes has been documented by several researchers.”

Hunters in the state were used for the SIUC study, as gizzards were collected from 118 of their harvested turkeys.

“Corn and soybeans were found in fewer than 30 percent of samples, but these crops were consumed as waste grain and no young plants were detected,” a report on the study indicated.

SIUC researchers also sampled newly-planted corn and soybean fields for wildlife damage. More than 11,150 corn plants were inspected, with researchers finding only 0.4 percent damaged – and only one damaged plant was attributable to avian sources.

Of 53,918 soybean plants sampled, 4.7 percent were damaged by wildlife, and none were attributable to turkeys. They sampled 8,944 ears of corn and only 1.7 percent of ears were damaged, though none by turkeys.

Why turkeys get the blame is because they often show up during daylight hours in corn and soybean fields where crop damage has occurred at night. The real culprits turn out to be deer and raccoons, whose nocturnal activity accounted for 95 percent of the damage in the fields studied.