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By Wilson Harley
ESPNOutdoors.com
Hope springs eternal in the days leading up to opening day of turkey season. Hunters across the Southeast have been marking the days off their calendars, patterning shotguns, dusting off box and slate calls, practicing mouth calls on the drive to work.
But for hunters in many parts of the Southeast and Midwest, opening-day optimism is a rarer commodity this season.
Eastern wild turkey populations have declined in many areas, leading to a corresponding drop in hunter success.
"It's happening all across the Southeast," said James Earl Kennamer, chief conservation officer for the National Wild Turkey Federation in Edgefield, S.C.
Kennamer and other turkey biologists point to several potential causes for declining turkey numbers, including loss of nesting and brood habitat, the cyclical nature of wildlife populations and various other factors that may be contributing to the decline.
"Where I live in South Carolina, we've had some extreme weather events in the last five or six years," Kennamer said. "We were under extreme drought conditions for an extended period, and then this past year we've been 20-plus inches above normal."
Kennamer is quick to point out that there's no need to ring the death knell for eastern wild turkeys. Too much "gloom-and-doom" talk, he said, can hurt the cause of turkey managers and hunters who are trying to reverse the trend through habitat management and research that hopefully will lead to increased turkey numbers.
But there's enough concern among turkey managers and hunters that numerous wildlife biologists and land managers gathered in Arkansas in late January for a two-day meeting, a sort of "turkey summit" where state turkey biologists, representatives from the National Wild Turkey Federation and officials from state and federal natural resources agencies searched for solutions to the sliding turkey numbers.
"We wanted to get a lot of good heads in one room and see if there's something we're missing, something we should be doing that we're not," said Mike Widner, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's turkey program coordinator, who convened the meeting.
Arkansas's turkey hatch has been below average since 2002, and the state's turkey kill has declined dramatically in the last six years. Following a peak harvest of nearly 20,000 birds in 2003, success has dropped steadily; hunters checked about 11,000 birds during the 2009 spring season.
With several consecutive years of below-average brood production, the AGFC has instituted a more conservative spring season for the last few years, shortening the length of the season and starting it later in the spring. Last fall, the AGFC also closed archery and firearms fall turkey seasons.
Other states in the Southeast and Midwest have experienced similar declines. Missouri hunters checked a record-high 56,882 turkeys in 2004; that number dropped to 45,416 in 2008, a decline of nearly 25 percent. Missouri's poult-to-hen ratio, a key indicator of turkey reproductive success, has hovered between 1.0 and 1.2 for the past three years, well below the 10-year average of 1.9.
South Carolina, which is home to the headquarters of the National Wild Turkey Federation, saw its turkey kill fall to an estimated 16,234 birds last year, a nearly 10 percent drop from 2008 and more than 36 percent down from South Carolina's record kill of 25,487 in 2002.
The Arkansas meeting included state turkey biologists from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Oklahoma, and representatives from the USDA Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NWTF, the Arkansas Forestry Commission and two private timber companies.
The first half of the meeting centered on presentations from various participants
the general status of turkeys in the Southeast and Midwest, habitat management on public and private lands, and a history of turkey restoration and brood production trends.
The second part of the meeting featured open discussion about possible reasons for declining turkey numbers weather, predators, genetics, prescribed fires, nesting and brood habitat, supplemental feeding, illegal kill, agricultural activity and commercial forestry.
Kennamer, who has studied turkeys for decades, pointed to loss of brood habitat as a key issue in the decline, noting that long-term landscape changes may have an adverse effect on turkey populations.
"If turkeys are not doing well, it's because a component of their life-cycle habitat is missing," Kennamer said. "And that's usually brood habitat, the most crucial component. It's probably not one thing (that's causing the decline), but if it is, it's brood habitat."
Prescribed fire intentionally burning the forest to reduce catastrophic wildfires and improve wildlife habitat was one of the meeting's biggest discussion points. Participants generally agreed fire was useful to increase brood habitat for wild turkeys, but they differed on the best ways to implement burns to achieve diversity. The consensus was that land managers should try to increase growing-season burns to stimulate desired plant communities in forests and increase turkey habitat.
Supplemental and artificial feeding was another hot topic. Several participants pointed to the practice's negative effects such as aflatoxin poisoning, disease, predator attraction and increased poaching.
"We need to take a look at feeding and baiting to see if it's contributing to the decline," Widner said.
The effectiveness of predator control stirred debate among wildlife managers, with most agreeing that it may be effective on a localized level, but that it's far too expensive and time consuming to implement statewide.
Kennamer used Texas as an example to demonstrate that the presence of large numbers of predators and large turkey populations aren't mutually exclusive.
"Texas has lots of turkeys," Kennamer said, "and Texas has lots of coyotes."
Widner pointed to a proposed research project in Arkansas' Ozark Plateau that would put GPS transmitters on hens nesting in areas where ecosystem restoration had been conducted through large-scale prescribed fires.
"Research isn't cheap," Widner said. "We're still hoping to get that off the ground, but it will take several partners contributing funds to see it happen."
Another topic was the natural progression of restored turkey populations. Kennamer noted that turkey numbers often rise dramatically in places where turkeys have been restocked, only to drop back to lower, more stable levels.
Kennamer compared it to the boom that often takes place when a new lake is constructed. New lakes typically undergo tremendous fisheries growth and a corresponding jump in fishing success. But they eventually slow down and stabilize at lower success levels.
With many states increasing their turkey stocking efforts throughout the 1970s and 1980s, turkey managers now speculate that some of the recent declines could be part of the natural cycle of restored turkey populations.
Meeting participants are developing a list of action items to pursue. Items include increasing educational efforts on the negative effects of supplemental feeding, increasing use of prescribed fire and other habitat enhancements, working with industrial forest owners to increase habitat practices beneficial to turkeys and other wildlife, strengthening feral hog regulations and conducting more research to drive management decisions.
"There was a lot of good discussion, but the work is ahead of us," Widner said. "Like any meeting, if we don't go forward and make some progress and try to address some of the things that came up, the meeting was pointless.
"I think most of what's happened in recent years has been out of our control. We know that if we put the right habitat on the ground, turkey numbers will respond under the right conditions. Meanwhile, we just need to keep our fingers crossed that we hatch some turkeys."
Kennamer concluded the meeting with thoughts on habitat, the key factor in any wildlife population, and said one of the biggest problems limiting eastern wild turkeys is loss of habitat and the interspersion of different types of turkey habitat, particularly nesting and brood-rearing habitats.
He also called on participants to work with the NWTF to use research to find a scientific foundation on which to base future management decisions.
"The eyes of the turkey world are upon what we've done here the last couple of days," Kennamer said.
