Abstract Understanding space use during key life‐history periods is critical to understanding demographic outcomes of most species. For gregarious species, similar space is often shared by individuals and across generations during these key periods. The eastern wild turkey ( Meleagris gallopavo silvestris ; hereafter, wild turkey) is a well‐studied, gregarious North American galliform, but research evaluating shared space use among individuals and across multiple generations is lacking. We evaluated spatial overlap among female wild turkeys and interannual site fidelity during the pre‐laying period to determine if interannual breeding site fidelity exists for wild turkeys. We used 174 first nesting attempts from female wild turkeys captured during 2014 and 2022 in west‐central Louisiana, USA. We paired ranges between individuals for the pre‐laying period based on whether they were captured together (trap‐site cohorts) within their available pre‐laying space (available cohorts) or outside of that available distance (dispersed cohorts). For each set of cohorts, we developed candidate models and used the best‐performing model to predict the probability of pair‐wise overlap between individuals. We found that trap‐site cohorts were likely to share space during pre‐laying ( x̄ probability = 0.788, SE = 0.018). For available cohorts, the probability of overlap depended on the distance between females, with females within 3.1 km having a probability of overlap ≥0.5. Dispersed cohorts overlapped <1% of the time. We found no biologically relevant variation within or between years for any pair of cohorts. Our results suggested that female wild turkey flocks exhibit interannual breeding site fidelity, which likely affects individual movements and leads to clustering of nest locations temporally. For wild turkey flocks, local resources or demographic pressures (e.g., food resources, predator abundance, harvest) may affect demographic outcomes similarly for local populations over multiple generations if they show fidelity to these breeding sites.
Michael J. Chamberlain (Sun,) studied this question.