- [Narrator] Get ready for an exciting episode of Prairie Sportsman.

Join us as we head out on a spring Turkey hunt.

And while we're at it we'll also do some Morel mushroom hunting but that's not all.

We'll also take a look at the research being done to save a declining woodpecker species of Minnesota and we'll join Nicole Zempel for a fast forage.

- Hey, it's Bret Amundson with Prairie Sportsman.

Welcome to another show.

We got a great one for you and it starts now.

- [Female Narrator] Funding for Prairie Sportsman is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources and by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org and by Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters and the members of Pioneer PBS.

- [Male Narrator] Spring Turkey hunting in Minnesota has grown increasingly popular since the first season began in 1978.

Now nearly 60,000 Turkey tags are sold each spring as hunters chase gobblers with heavy shotguns and bows but also gaining popularity is the use of sub gauges or smaller shotguns, like a 28-gauge or a .410 for turkeys instead of the traditional 12-gauge.

Today we're with David Eckhardt.

David and his friends do an annual rabbit hunt around Thanksgiving and most of those guys use sub-gauges.

- [David] We started doing it when we were 16 me and a couple buddies and uh it just kind of became an annual thing and it's growin more and more every year.

And yeah, we've had sixteens a lot of us just use twenties and then I like using a .410 too.

- This gun has been in the Eckhardt family for a long time and it isn't your average .410 - So it was my great uncles and then my dad got it after he passed and then I just started using it for the rabbit hunt cuz it's a fun, fun little gun to shoot and it's short and it swings real fast for rabbits.

I think my great-uncle bought it new and that was probably in the '70's or '80's.

Yeah, it's got the single trigger and ejectors so it's kind of rare.

It's more a top end gun.

I don't know about rare, but it's the higher end model.

It got snowed on or rained on.

It got all wet and I didn't know how to take it apart so I brought it to the gunsmith and had him professionally clean it and I went and picked it back up and he's like that's a pretty sweet little gun.

I'm like, yeah, it's awesome for rabbits.

And he's like, you know what that's worth.

And he told me and like, I'm not gonna use that on the rabbit hunt anymore but shouldn't be trudging through sticks and groves and getting all scratched up.

So - This year the rabbit gun turned into a turkey gun for David because of the gun's age he had his brother-in-law Stan Isfeld load some custom shells to ensure they'd be effective and not harm the gun.

- So we are gonna be turning these .410 hulls into these show you how, let's see, we have our empty hull and new shotgun primer here.

So we're pushing that hull up into the shell holder to resize it back to original spec and we're gonna run it up into this decapping die, which is gonna knock out the old primer.

You may not have seen it but you can hear it.

So our powder has been dropped down into the hull.

Then we're gonna use 7.5 lead shot today which is a little large for .410.

So sometimes we gotta give it a little bit of a tap to convince it to drop through the tube.

But I think it's gonna give David the, just a little extra size compared to what's normally loaded in .410 target loads, generally eights or nines.

So we set it through our series of crimp dies and that's what we're left with - [Male Narrator] With the gun ready to rock.

David put together a plan for the morning hunt and we headed out to trick a tom.

- [David] Pretty quiet morning I was surprised we didn't hear any gobbles.

- [Male Narrator] However, with late season turkeys a quiet morning doesn't always mean a bad morning.

- [David] They came out right where I thought they would.

They have a few different roost trees on that property but I they'd come off of that one the other day so I figured they'd be back in that corner somewhere.

So they were just working up the hill right to the decoys and then they'd kind of turned and skirted around a little bit.

Then they turned and came towards us again and right before I shot they started to turn and head away and it all happened so quick.

I didn't have my call out of the box so I couldn't yelp at 'em to get 'em to stop.

I took the shot and missed Batter was a little wider I guess.

I was gonna say that it might not have been in the effective range for that .410 but I think I just flat out missed - Two clean misses no one ever said using an old subgauge would be easy although this hunt didn't pan out perfectly.

There are lots of things to do on a spring morning in Minnesota and David had another trick up his sleeve to salvage the hunt.

Morel Mushrooms.

- I know that there's some on that farm so we didn't have to go very far either.

We walked about 30 yards behind where we had the blind and there was a dead tree and we found a pretty good flush of them.

- Morels make for great table fair and you can cook them up a few different ways.

- The classic frying 'em in butter and then we tried a new recipe with cream and butter like kind of a cream sauce and put that over steak and that was really good.

I'm excited to try that again.

- You know it would've been great to have some fresh turkey to cook with these Morels but by no means was this a bad hunt.

- I just like getting out and enjoying the outdoors.

I mean, I'll deer hunt as much as I can and if I don't see a deer, I'm not mad.

It's fun you see so much cool stuff when you're out you know all the critters that are out walking around and it's fun to trick 'em when they don't know you're there and they're just doing what they normally do.

When you get to get a glimpse of that, that's pretty cool.

- David had a few more spots to check out before we called it quits today but the gobblers were tightlipped and tucked away so the .410 will have to wait for its chance at redemption.

- I may try it this fall on some pheasants or something and clean it good and put it back in the safe for the next time I want to go turkey hunting.

- The next day or the day after they fled and we can go track them using VHF radio telemetry equipment - The way that you can tell what you're looking at.

First of all, it's bright easily spotted um from quite a distance.

- Here in Minnesota there are nine woodpecker species that breed or winter in the state.

And among these nine Red-Headed Woodpeckers are the only species that's been in serious uh decline.

Over the last 50 years or so Redheaded Woodpeckers have experienced pretty drastic declines throughout their North American range largely due to habitat loss.

The conversion of Savanna habitat to agriculture and urban development are probably linked to why that's happened.

In Minnesota there's less than 0.01% of that habitat left and so Redhead Woodpecker have experienced an average annual decline of about 6% which represents a cumulative loss of 95% of the population.

Oak Savanna habitat is this really unique ecosystem.

It's not really a forest and it's not really a prairie it's kind of somewhere in the middle, low density of trees combined with sort of this open understory and then a lot of prairie grasses and forbes.

For Redhead Woodpeckers that's really important because of their unique foraging trait cause they sit on a low branch, fly out, grab an insect.

We think often of of woodpecker as being species that drill holes in trees and kind of go after insects in dead wood.

This species actually doesn't do that.

I've seen them here grab a live grasshopper and a a live cicada and fly with them through the air screaming the cicadas are screaming and then just kind of shove them under a piece of bark.

They will store pieces of acorn or insects under bar tree bark sometimes in the crevices of trees.

And there's only three other woodpeckers in North America that do that.

They're actually probably one of the more omnivorous woodpecker species as well.

They're known to eat, you know anything from berries to snails to small rodents.

Actually they will eat the eggs or nestlings of other bird species.

Historically they've been tied to farm agricultural areas and maybe a habitat like this where you've got some mix of dead and dying trees and open understory and then live trees as well to support acorn supply.

In about 2007, 2008, a very I would say intrepid group of volunteers from the Audubon chapter of Minneapolis learned that there was a relatively large population of Redheaded Woodpeckers breeding here at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve.

And they got excited cuz there were birders.

They decided that they needed to start monitoring the population annually we have about anywhere between 60 and 100 adults that breed here.

And besides Cedar Creek, the only other location around in the state where we have a larger cluster of birds is Camp Ripley which is a National Guard training facility.

I joined the project in 2017 as a postdoc and was fortunate to be able to raise some money to kind of formalize the project and, and really address some of the needs in terms of identifying the kind of factors that support Redheaded Woodpeckers here.

So asking the question, why are they doing better here than than other places around the state?

How big are their territories?

Are they interacting with other species?

Who are the predators?

Where are they selecting to place their nest?

We don't have a lot of information to date about what we call vital rates.

So fledgling success, nest success, a adult annual survival.

Understanding those things are sort of help us put the puzzle pieces together.

They create cavities in wood for their own nest.

For nest success what we do is really intensive nest monitoring.

This is an active nest tree that was marked last year where we had a pair of birds nesting and we, we have a long a telescoping pole that goes up about 40 feet into the air if needed.

These cavities are often about 20 feet off the ground kind of on average and we have a camera that goes inside and get pictures and videos of what's going on inside.

We can figure out when they're gonna fledge when eggs are gonna hatch and then how many fail on a subset of our nests.

We actually cut holes into the sides of the trees.

We create little porthole doors a couple days before the nestlings are gonna fledge.

We take the babies out, we measure them we put bands on them, we mark them with a radio transmitter and then we put them back and then the next day or the day after they fledge and we can go track them using VHF radio telemetry equipment.

Some parents get really mad and they'll they'll sort of fly around.

But you know, we've done this enough where we can do it in about 15 minutes.

Survival rates of nests are the same between trees that have porthole doors and and trees that don't.

So we know that we're not actually causing harm when we do this.

Each year there are, I think an average of about between 30 and 40 nests that we monitor and we've marked anywhere between like 15 juveniles and 20 juveniles in each year.

So we're, we're approaching about 50 fledglings that have been marked to look at fledgling survival.

And then another thing that we do is we mark adults.

We've marked 77 adults over the last several years with GPS devices to track their migratory movements.

One of the things that my research is sort of pointing toward is the importance of dead trees within the landscape.

So having not just one or two dead trees here or there you really need a variety of kind of classes of decay.

They do reuse trees from year to year but as you can see, you know, dead trees they don't last that long so that once they fall over they're not, they're not usable by Redheaded Woodpeckers or other species that are cavity nesters where you have you know, dead and dying trees.

Those are landscapes that we don't maybe appreciate as much as humans because they, they're not aesthetically beautiful.

They can cause damage to houses or farms and so we we tend to sort of be quick to cut down dead trees but the reality is that a lot of species depend on dead and dying trees for for food and for for their homes for habitat.

So Redheaded Woodpeckers are what we call facultative migrants, meaning that they in some years they migrate and, and other years they don't.

We don't really understand all of the reasons why but we think that probably the the biggest reason is because it is tied to mass and to food supplies during winter.

So if you're in a location where there's plentiful acorns that you can store or insects that you can store you'll be okay for the winter.

One of the things that actually surprised us here at Cedar Creek during my research was a number of females had were essentially mating with multiple males at the same time.

There was actually a female in this area that had a nest over there and then another, she nested with another male over there So within like about 200 meters she had two different nests and the males, that means that the males then end up doing more work that nest failed this ne nest was successful and then she did it again.

They have a pretty long breeding season usually starts end of April goes through sometimes late August, early September.

So there's time to have multiple nest which is really a great strategy if you're trying to get your genes into the population.

And then typically we see this sort of process of a brood reduction where there are maybe four eggs in a nest three eggs hatch and there are three fledglings and then only two make it to fledge.

I was lucky enough to receive more an another LCCMR grant or Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund grant to look at to kind of take what we've been doing here and then take it to the next level.

One of the things we don't really understand at the statewide scale is where there are populations of Redhead Woodpeckers and where they're breeding successfully.

The way that we're doing that is by using autonomous recording units or ARUs.

So these are tiny little devices that you can strap to a tree and they essentially record sound for hours and hours and hours.

We now have artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms that can help sort through all of the sound data that we collect and kind of pick out the sounds that we're looking for much faster than we can as humans.

We're putting these devices out all over the state.

We started last summer and we're gonna do another year of of data collection next summer to try to understand where these birds are and then hopefully understand more about what needs to be done at the statewide scale in terms of habitat restoration and conservation.

My hope for my research is that it can help inform land managers and the public about what this species need needs to survive and reproduce and kind of exist.

Having a primary cavity excavator in a landscape is important because it actually they create habitat for other species, bluebirds, wood ducks mice, flying squirrels that all depend on cavities for for nesting and roosting.

They are really a a flagship species of the oak savanna ecosystems.

It would be a tragic loss to lose oak savanna completely.

It's an incredibly unique, beautiful ecosystem that evolved over millennia and I think we owe it to ourselves, you know not just species but ourselves to try to keep it for future generations.

- [Nicole Zempel] And we're sitting here looking at a very pretty fruiting of Chicken of the Woods.

A super common mushroom, very easy to to identify.

So if you're a beginner, it's it's a fantastic mushroom to kind of invite you into the the world of mycelium and fruiting bodies of mushrooms.

The way that you can tell what you're looking at first of all it's bright, easily spotted from quite a distance, but also you have I'm just gonna take a little bit of one of the pieces here.

So you have the top, it's, it's a polypore fungus and so if you see here there's little teeny tiny pores so it's a very porous surface underneath and a bright yellow color.

And then on the top it's a really pretty kind of a tangerine orange shading.

So this is Chicken of the Woods and it gets its name because yes it does taste a little bit like chicken but also texturally kind of resembles chicken a little bit.

But if you slice this up thin and you fry it up in a little butter and garlic, it is magnificent.

So you can spot chicken in the woods can be early spring to late fall and once you do spot 'em check back again the following season because they do tend to grow back in the same area.

Also, when I do harvest, I always leave a little bit because all that mycelium that you know produces the fruiting body is just under the, the surface of the wood.

So I always leave a little bit on the substrate.

Also, these are saprobic mushrooms so they do like to feed on decomposing logs or dying trees.

If you see it on a living tree life is not long for that tree.

Then it would be a parasitic fungus eating the the nutrients from the living tree.

But typically they are safrobes feeding on decomposing trees.

And another great thing about Chicken of the Woods mushrooms, they're not a very buggy mushroom.

So really if you just brush you have a brush and you can just kind of brush off any debris that's on there, but you're not gonna find like the inside filled with all kinds of bugs.

Which brings me to the next point.

You don't need to rinse these off underwater because it will become soggy and will absorb all of that water.

If I was gonna cook this tonight, which I probably will I am gonna go home and I'm just simply gonna brush it off slice it up and fry it up.

- Funding for Prairie Sportsman is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources and by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Wyndham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org and by Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters and the members of Pioneer PBS.