The Department of Wildlife Sciences, New Mexico State University, and the New Mexico Wild Turkey Federation have developed a personal computer system for distinguishing individual male wild turkeys. The system determines census and distribution data for the State endangered subspecies of Gould's wild turkey Meleagris gallopavo mexicana. Since the bird is endangered, more conventional means such as capture, tagging and telemetry are not allowed. Programming provides software for acquisition of data, production of spectrograms and oscillograms, cross correlation and auto correlation and a data management capability. During the spring mating seasons of 1987 and 1988 field recordings were made of gobbling in a limited area of SW New Mexico. The data was processed by the computer and revealed a total of 9 recorded individual gobblers for 1987 and 11 for 1988. It also showed that 4 of the birds recorded in 1987 were also recorded in 1988, and movement data ranged from 1.6 to 11.2 kilometers. The system has proven to be a valuable tool in determining census data and movement information on the male Gould's wild turkey in SW New Mexico. Plans for future use are for the differentiation of subspecies, identification of individual females and the analysis of specific turkey calls.
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