What’s in your Crop?

[putt]

IMG_2925 400x400.JPG (81.2 KiB) Viewed 379 times

I haven’t seen this subject posted before, so maybe you can have some fun with it. Post a photo or description of your turkey’s crop contents if you think they’re of interest.

The attached photo is from a last fall Wisconsin tom’s crop, & has some pretty generic contents. The tom was taken from an early morning group of 3, shot at the edge of a good friend farmer’s field. Crop is stuffed full of wheat & soybeans.

This is the first crop contents that I’ve bothered to photograph, & I had a motive here. By emailing the photo to the farmer friend I pretty much guaranteed that he’d always want me to hunt his turkeys once he saw the crop contents. The wheat he had just planted & the soybeans were an adjacent neighbor’s.

I haven’t been hunting turkeys for too many years, so my experience with checking turkey crops is limited. In fact most of my spring toms have been taken early to mid morning so their crops have been pretty much empty. They apparently had other things on their minds besides eating.

[Duke0002]

I always check the crop. Good to see what they're feeding on.

[Hookspur]

Here's the contents of a tom's craw that I found rather interesting. I grouped similar items together for this picture, but I can't remember what-all they were and didn't write them down. Seems like the bottom right pile of stuff was tubers of some sort, along with about 20 whole acorns, a small pile of grass blades and another leaf greenery, a couple big centipedes broken into pieces, a few ants, probably 50 little round beetles, 11 june-bugs, a dozen meal/inch worms, and more than 30 other various assorted bugs of one category or another. Nothing like a little variety in your diet!

[Chief Many Longbeards]

i'll check the craw if it looks almost full and in the spring the contents usually look like the above pic - a little bit of everything. dont have any pix, though.
if i get one off the roost, the craw is usually empty.
with fall birds, sometimes the craw is stuffed entirely with harvest residue - corn or soybeans. once a fall bird's craw was packed with grasshoppers. another time i shot a jake and his craw looked like it was about to burst- he'd ate several dozen hickory nuts. dont know how he swallowed them all.
btw ... is it craw or crop? us hillbillies pronounce it craw

[Mossberg835]

Its technically called a crop. I've found some pretty sweet things in the crop. For example, about 3 years ago there was a heavy growth of wild grapes. The deer and the turkeys were all eating them up. We shot 4 turkeys that fall and everyone of them was stuffed full of grapes, big purple/blueish grapes. I know people say what a turkey eats doesn't usually make the meat taste like the item they ate, but the were eating
So many grapes the meat tasted kind of like a grape. We've also found some huge broad plants in the crops, salamanders, etc.

[charlie elk]

From a fall bird

Turkey crop contents 09182008 (2).JPG (104.27 KiB) Viewed 322 times

Late in day spring gobbler from WI swampland

spring turkey crop contents.JPG (123.67 KiB) Viewed 322 times

btw ... is it craw or crop? us hillbillies pronounce it craw

A crop (sometimes called a croup or a craw, or ingluvies) is a thin-walled expanded portion of the alimentary tract used for the storage of food prior to digestion that is found in many animals, including gastropods, earthworms,[1] leeches,[2] insects[3], birds, and some non-avian dinosaurs.
My "hillbilly bone" sometimes causes me to call it a craw too. The above is a definition from the encyclopedia so it sounds like we are all correct. My grandpa always called it a croup and taught me to check it on every bird I kill.

Many times the turkeys I shoot have empty crops, craws or croup.

[putt]

Here's the contents of a tom's craw that I found rather interesting.

Although I've heard that turkeys will eat most anything, I didn't expect a crop/craw photo with that incredible variety. Thanks for the education Hookspur.

I wonder how a turkey chooses what to eat? Doesn't seem like it's taste. When you swallow whole the stuff described here so far ... acorns, hickory nuts, grapes, junebugs ... there can't be a lot of taste going down. Apparently they eat anything that moves, or doesn't move.

[Hookspur]

The wild turkey's diet is pretty-much confined to anything slow enough to catch and small enough to fit down their throats!

[kygobbler]

Im starting to be concerned about some of you. I get cutting the craw open and seeing whats inside but to go as far as taking pictures of it.

[charlie elk]

Im starting to be concerned about some of you. I get cutting the craw open and seeing whats inside but to go as far as taking pictures of it.

Heck, while selecting which pics to post I got a little concerned too.