Widespread turkey troubles likely destined for broad discoveries
Predator control won't hurt, but the full wild turkey population puzzle likely is much more complicated
That first close gobble always gets me with a tingle somewhere between the hairs on the back of my neck and my unsuspecting heart.
I’m always looking for it, hoping for it, but it always feels—unexpected.
Thunder is thunder and it does to your senses what it will.
Follow it with the deep bass hums of gobblers drumming and scratch of wingtips dragging through oak leaf litter so close I can feel it as much as hear it. These are rejuvenating spring rituals.
It was not lost on me how fortunate I was to play with three mature gobblers Friday morning while so many hunters simply can’t find any turkeys this season. I held a Canon camera instead of a shotgun but the thrill was still there.
My simple yelps drove them mad as they ignored a friend’s photo blind in Osage County, in place on a high ridge food plot since October. They returned to the blind and circled it four times looking for her. The sound of my camera shutter made them gobble.
These poor boys were lonely and hot to trot.
Lonely, like a lot of turkey hunters wondering where all the turkeys have gone. In places from western Oklahoma to Georgia and the Carolinas, the foul voice on springtime winds is again repeating, “where have all the turkeys gone?”
Even in a good year turkeys face long odds for reproduction. A hen lays eggs on the ground and doesn’t roost in a tree again—hopefully with her young—for seven weeks. So, as with all ground-nesting birds, one of the greatest success factors year-to-year is simply the weather. But, surely, widespread declines surely are more complicated than that.
The reports aren’t good
Several other states share Oklahoma’s condition, with depressed populations, shortened hunting seasons, and reduced bag limits, but that is little comfort.
A select few Oklahoma turkey hunters have reported on social media they are seeing as many turkeys as ever. That’s happy news.
There are “pockets” where populations are good as ever, according to Eric Suttles, southeast region wildlife supervisor eastern wild turkey project leader for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. Maybe those pockets will expand.
The Wildlife Department reported an average 9% population drop-off for 2022. Regional winter flock surveys were down 11% in the northeast, 8.2% in central, 8.7% southwest, and 9.8% in the northwest, Suttles said.
Waterfowl guide Brad Albeck wins for giving the most dismal individual wild turkey population report of the season.
“It’s a train wreck,” he said of his south-central Oklahoma haunts. “Two years ago at this time I counted 182. Today I saw five. That’s how bad it is.”
The Osage property I hunted two years ago has “three or four birds,” which is better than the zero seen all summer 2021 but far from the 30 or so of years past.
The photoshoot location I enjoyed Friday had eight jakes running around in the winter months and now has a few hens and four mature gobblers. It at least holds some promise. Too bad it wasn’t 8 young hens instead of a flock of pre-pubescent knuckleheads hanging out all winter. All those jakes do, at least, indicate a successful breeding season last year in spite of the February 2021 deep freeze.
Of predation and people
The most common call of hunters who pay attention to their grounds is for predator control. Some want bounties on coyotes and bobcats so landowners or trappers can at least recoup some of the expense of pursuing furbearers whose furs bring little value these days.
The predator-prey dynamic has fascinated me since I first read Paul L. Errington’s “Of Predation and Life” in college—because anyone studying wildlife biology at Iowa State University read all of the professor’s books.
A conservation pioneer and a contemporary of Aldo Leopold, he was finally awarded the Leopold Medal in March 1962. That was two months before I was born and eight months before his death. It was a long time ago, but his words, like Leopold’s, continue to ring true.
A century ago, that young trapper financed and fed himself through study at South Dakota State College with the furs of muskrat, minks, and coyotes, and recognized there was much more to the predator-prey relationship than hard-earned field observations and simple math.
As wise are the words of Errington, one unfortunate and infamous quote by Alaska Gov. Wally Hickel remains the most illustrative I can cite to reflect our all-too-human habit of removing our own actions and expectations from wildlife population pictures. We seem loath to think our contributions anything but curative.
“You can’t let nature run wild,” Hickel said.
Errington, who penned the preface to his posthumously published predation book near his life’s end, summarized his observances like this:
“Predation is easy to misappraise (sic) on superficial grounds and I made the usual mistakes in my early appraisals,” he wrote. “As I gradually learned more and more about living requirements of wild animals I came to know that animals, whether predators or prey, could not be expected to live where they did not belong.”
As much as we think we provide plenty of places where wildlife belongs—I wonder.
From where I sit
Dwindling songbirds and pollinators and decreasing water quality and vanishing riparian zones are subjects on my writer’s to-do list as much as the mystery of dwindling quail and turkey populations.
I suspect we will identify a lot of problems for turkeys and that they might vary from location to location. Like most, I just have a lot of questions.
The Wildlife Department launched turkey studies this year. They are collecting DNA samples from every county for genetic study and to look at blood work, Suttles said.
Turkeys in southeast Oklahoma were fitted with GPS packs this winter and another batch will get them in southwest Oklahoma next winter, he said. Tracking turkey movements and habitat use will give biologists an up-to-date better picture of how the birds use their habitat and what impacts the birds and their nests.
My reporting leads me to other questions.
What is a narrow buffer along a creek to help stem erosion but too little too late for streams plagued by intensifying flash floods caused by upstream urban development and an ambush corridor custom-designed to help predators?
Habitat should be gauged by geometric shape, just like my house or yours. Are linear acreages along waterways really helping? Are government incentives for habitat in need of some tweaking to give taxpayers maximum bang for our bucks?
Should we be funding and expanding precision farming practices now on par with efforts focused on soil conservation efforts of the 20th Century?
We spray crops and plant seeds treated with neonicotinoid pesticides to grow plants that systemically poison insects with repeated dosages. It makes farming more efficient and helps keep down the price of food for our growing human population.
But scientists linked “neonics” to reduced pollinator populations almost 10 years ago. More recently the science is conclusive that it impacts birds that might eat the treated seeds or the poisoned insects.
Bees and sparrows and butterflies live in the same world as turkeys and quail. Will neonics end up on a list alongside the DDT of the 21st Century?
The use of wildlife feeding stations has exploded and the dangers for wildlife that ingest corn tainted with aflatoxin is a documented problem for turkeys.
Likewise, concentrating ground-nesting birds around a food source that also attracts raccoons during the nesting season can lead to problems. In general, concentrating wildlife around feeding stations can help spread diseases. People are being advised to take down bird feeders to protect songbirds from avian influenza this month. Are we feeding our turkeys to death?
The answers are out there. At some point, I hope to have those hairs rise on my neck and feel that flutter in my heart with hoped-for but unexpected answers.
As an Apache Chief told me on a ridge in Wyoming, “Management, once started, a vicious cycle has begun.”
I made it all the way to the bottom! Great photos.