![whats a snood whats a snood](https://images.teemill.com/nq0rrbcn4vjyamvbeq4ony0otjz50ww57xkjolzs0ossh8fc.jpeg)
![whats a snood whats a snood](https://images.garmentory.com/images/4503510/small/buttercup-large-snood-20201205033806.jpg)
In that study, hens showed a clear preference for toms with longer snoods. If a hen wanted to choose a mate with good genes that might help her offspring grow large, live long, and avoid parasites, a tom’s snood is a good advertisement for his genes. In another study, Buchholz found that longer-snooded toms carried fewer parasites. Like it did for the other males, a tom’s snood signals a lot of information to a female assessing potential mates-it indicates how old and how big he is, and even says something about his health. While the mating display is the main draw for getting a hen to check him out, a tom’s snood helps him out again here. Once the males have established who’s going to have a chance to mate, the final choice goes to the hen. Buchholz noted that snood length correlates with age, body mass, and testosterone, so, to competitors, the snood could be a good indicator of a tom’s aggressiveness, age/experience, size, and overall condition and fighting ability. A big snood, this suggests, says to the other turkeys that this is a tom you don’t want to tangle with. The birds tended to avoid confrontation with other males with longer snoods, and wouldn’t even feed near them. With that in mind, Buchholz looked at how toms reacted to other toms with snoods of varying sizes. The dominant males, the ones who won fights and got a choice mate, had longer snoods. Of all the characteristics he looked at, only “relaxed snood length” seemed to be a reliable predictor of how a tom would do in bird-vs-bird combat. He looked at various characteristics of dominant toms that fight and win, and compared them to those of subordinate toms that lose fights or run from them. That is, did bigger turkeys tend to win more scuffles? Did older ones? He also wanted to see if the turkeys used any of these predictive cues when sizing each other up. Richard Buchholz, an animal behaviorist who focuses on turkeys, wanted to figure out which, if any, characteristics of a tom turkey could predict how they fare in dominance fights. Then they'll either fight, or one will flee.
![whats a snood whats a snood](https://i.cbc.ca/1.2160015.1382498359!/httpImage/image.jpg)
When two toms are trying to establish dominance, they’ll size each other up. Having a long snood almost always means that a hen will want to mate with him and that another tom will back down from a fight. That goofy-looking piece of dangling flesh helps a tom both with choosy hens and with competition from rival males. Sometimes a good mating display isn’t enough to win a mate, and toms will attack and fight each other to secure a hen. They’re all competing for the same limited number of hens. The second problem for a tom looking for love is the other toms in the area. Come mating season, a tom will strut around, gobble, puff out his chest, fan his tail, and drag his wings to attract the hens, who then pick which of the toms they’ll mate with. In the realm of turkey mating, the hens wield the power of choice and the toms have to get a hen's attention and win the opportunity to reproduce.
![whats a snood whats a snood](https://nationalpurebreddogday.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/fa0316a589793564d62cc130c5012bbd.jpg)
One is his potential mates, the female turkeys (a.k.a. When a male turkey-known as a tom-wants to mate, he faces two hurdles. And it's there to let the other turkeys know that its owner is kind of a big deal.