✨Meet our team!✨ We are excited to welcome a few new members to the AWESM lab this year! Meet Surya Deepika Garugu, a new PhD student! Learn more about Deepika here: instagram.com/awesmlab/

The first year of turkey trapping is in the books! With captures complete, our crew is now focused on tracking movements, gathering data on nesting habits and poult health, and recording acoustic data. All capture and handling of wild turkeys was approved by IACUC protocol 2260.

Did you know you can actually “see” turkey gobbles? This picture visualizes sound waves created by a gobbling turkey - the gobbles are green spikes outlined by a thin box. The shorter green spikes above the boxes are another bird calling at a higher frequency. 📷@WildTurkeyNerd

Have you ever wondered how we catch #turkeys for research tagging and sampling? There are several ways, including drop nets, rocket nets and walk-in traps! For our project with @NEGameandParks, @NECFWRU, and @universityofga, we used walk-in traps. Here’s how we did it:

And we're off! The Nebraska wild turkey project has hit the ground running. So far, our team has deployed GPS transmitters on 51 birds (on our way to 120 total). Stay tuned for more updates! 📷: @NeblandMagazine/@NEGameandParks

Meet our amazing wild turkey field technicians! For the next several months, they will work with the students on the project to capture wild turkeys, fit them with GPS transmitters, take genetic samples, and track the turkeys’ movements. Thank you, techs! We appreciate you 👏