Estimating density of an unmarked, low‐density wild turkey population

Eastern wild turkey ( Meleagris gallopavo silvestris , hereafter turkey) populations have been declining across the southeastern United States, including Oklahoma. Little is known about current turkey population numbers, as no robust method has been established for density estimation. Because of widespread population declines, some localized turkey populations now occur at low densities, where monitoring efforts can prove challenging because detection probability and encounter rate are low. We used the space‐to‐event (STE) unmarked abundance model on camera trap data collected at two sites in southeastern Oklahoma across two years to estimate turkey density. STE uses timelapse photography to sample across cameras at an instant in time, but species occurring at low densities may not be suitable for timelapse photography as encounter frequency between individuals and cameras is reduced with lower densities. Rather, we applied STE to a motion‐detection dataset and modified sampling duration to 1 s to approximate instantaneous sampling. Using this approach, we successfully calculated estimates of turkey density. We aimed to estimate poult recruitment as well, via the ratio of poult density to hen density; however, poult detections were too few to ensure that their detections were included in the model's sampling occasions. Consequently, we purposely violated the STE model assumption of instantaneous sampling by increasing sampling duration from 1 s to 40 s to calculate poult density; using this approach as proof of concept, we were able to show that STE can provide poult‐per‐hen ratios as a proxy for recruitment. Overall, we demonstrated the application of STE as a method for providing defensible estimates of demographic parameters for turkey, a species whose population estimates have been elusive.