Understand Turkey Anatomy - What You Need to Know (Snood, Caruncle, Wattle)

So I am one of those guys that is just ate up with turkeys. I could hunt turkeys all year round. They are definitely my favorite animal to hunt. The only sad part is we only usually get about four or five weeks of season where I live. So, you know, I do the countdown, wait all year for turkey season to come around. In the meantime, I do a lot of traveling, doing a turkey dissection seminar for NWTF, Jake's Days, churches, youth groups, anything like that. Any type of scenario where somebody wants to learn more about turkeys, because I'm just, I'm infatuated with them. So today in this first part of this series, we're going to talk about everything basically from the neck up. To get that started, let's just talk a little bit about the outside of the turkey's head and compare that from a gobbler to a hen. So when you look at the gobbler here versus the hen, you can see that there's some definite differences that makes them easy to distinguish. The head of the gobbler is normally much larger and the hen is, of course, smaller and has totally different colorations and the snood is usually not as pronounced as well as the car uncles and the waddle. So let's talk a little bit about the anatomy of this external portion of the turkey's head. So at the very top of the turkey here, we have the crown. That's this portion here. We have the snood, which you know, it can be filled with blood and hang quite low across the beak, or it can be retracted and just be a little tiny nub here at the top, which is all a sign of the turkey's mood and attitude at the time. As we come down across the turkey here, we have these minor car uncles, which are these little bumps all over, and then the major car uncles, which are these giant ones down here towards the base of the throat. Also here is the waddle, or dewlap, that hangs directly below the chin of the turkey, if you will, and all of this is controlled by the turkey. He can control the colors based on his mood. Of course, we realize that we're always looking for that white head coming through the woods, so this red, white, and blue, the all-American bird, as we like to call it, is really distinct among the gobbler. So also when we look at the side of the gobbler's head, we notice that there are some pits here, some nares, or a nose, if you will. As we come back, we have the eye, which takes up a huge part of the side of the turkey's head, and then we have the ear, and so the ear is not pronounced at anything. It just kinda has a little bit of a hole right there, and we'll talk about that in depth here in a moment, but as far as this turkey's anatomy on the head goes, we start with the beak, which is very specialized. The beak is not only used to pick up food, small food at some times, grit or stones to help them in digestion, but also it'll dispatch prey, so if you've ever seen a turkey whipping on a snake, smacking it over and over again to try to kill it before it gets it down, or even a small frog or anything, their beak is quite formidable for small prey, but it's also quite delicate, so with that same beak that they're using to dispatch something that they're going to eat, they will also use to, of course, preen their feathers. When we see these turkeys and they're so beautiful and the feathers are perfect, that takes a lot of time, and a good part of the turkey's daytime routine, whether in the roost or on the ground, not during breeding season, of course, is spending time preening, getting all those feathers just right, and especially after rain, they like to get out into an area to dry off and they'll work those feathers over for quite a bit to get them dry and perfect, so the beak is very specialized for all of those things. Now, as we talk about this ear, turkeys' hearing is quite amazing. In fact, they can hear a mile or more away, and a lot of that is low frequency, and so the spitting and drumming that the gobblers do is easily heard by the hens a long way away, and of course their gobble is also a low tone and can be heard a long way away. As you know, as a hunter, you can hear them a long way off, and sometimes you think they're a lot closer than they are because they can be so loud, but that little bit of an ear canal right here allows them to hear each other at extreme distances. Now, when you look at a turkey's skull compared to the side of their head, you can see that this little hole has a whole lot of surface at the base of the skull, so that aids in them being able to hear, so all the hearing organs are in this little hole, and if you ever look in one real close, you can see there's a lot of structure in there that takes a lot of area of this skull up. Even though that there's a cavity in here for the brain, you can see that there's two sides here that really take up a lot of the hearing organs because it's specialized, and of course they can hear tones and frequencies, and they can distinguish between those, and that's often why calling is so important. A gobbler can identify a hen just by a certain tone or a raspiness, and that's why changing calls sometimes in tough situations is so important because you're trying to get a little bit of a tone there that the turkey is recognizing, something that appeals to that bird, so the ear is very specialized. Now, like us humans, we have a little bit of a cup around our ear canal, so we kind of have these little satellite dishes, if you will, that stick out where you see a turkey often bobbing their head, turning from side to side very quickly. They're using the whole side of their head as, if you will, as like a satellite dish to channel that sound into that small canal.