Return of the Wild Turkey

The return of the wild turkey is one of the most remarkable wildlife recovery stories in the nation’s history.

Just before dawn, on a warm spring morning, a wild turkey breaks the silence from his treetop roost on South Carolina’s Sumter National Forest. Like a crowing rooster, the male bird welcomes the sunrise, his guttural call echoing through the forest.

Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.

The gobbler flies down from his roost and is joined by the hens of his flock. Together the birds amble through the dense brush, scratching among the leaf litter in search of insects and acorns.

Few, if any, turkeys remained in upstate South Carolina by the 1930s, but birds reintroduced a half-century ago thrived, and now the wild symbols of Thanksgiving dinner inhabit every corner of the state—and much of the nation.

The return of the wild turkey is one of the most remarkable wildlife recovery stories in the nation’s history. The birds, which roamed much of North America prior to settlement by Europeans, were on the road to extinction a century ago. Reduced to an estimated 30,000 birds during the Great Depression, today wild turkeys number 6.5 million from coast to coast.

The strutting birds can be found from New York’s Long Island to Florida’s Everglades to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and even in Hawaii. Alaska is the only state without wild turkeys.

"What we found is if you leave them alone and protect their habitat, they are very compatible with humans," says James Earl Kennamer, senior vice president of conservation programs for the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF). "Turkeys and humans can co-exist."

In the 1950s, state and federal agencies began preserving and improving habitats for wildlife species whose numbers had been declining because of hunting, farming, logging and urban development. They also started trapping and moving white-tailed deer and turkey to areas where the animals had been greatly reduced or eliminated altogether.

Wild turkey recovery was greatly advanced by a cannon-propelled net previously used to capture geese and ducks. In 1951, Duffy Holbrook, a trapper for the South Carolina Wildlife Resources Department, and Bill Baldwin, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee, reduced the twine and mesh size and used black powder to propel the large net over feeding turkeys. The modifications made it possible to capture large numbers of turkeys from healthy populations and release them in areas where there were few, if any, birds.

"The first time we ever used it, we caught 18 turkeys," recalls Holbrook, 81, of McClellanville, S.C. "That net is the same kind that people use today."

From 1950 to 1959, Holbrook and Baldwin captured 340 turkeys on the Francis Marion National Forest in the lush lowlands of eastern South Carolina and relocated them to the Sumter National Forest and other wildlife management areas upstate. The birds adapted to their new homes immediately, and today wild turkeys are present in all of South Carolina’s 46 counties.

Coast-to-coast recovery

South Carolina’s success story has been repeated in states across the nation. Over the last half-century, wildlife officials have trapped turkeys where remnant populations existed—primarily in swamps, backwoods and other remote places where humans hadn’t intruded—and moved them to new locations, expanding the adaptable birds to their original range and beyond.

Missouri was one of the first states to complete its wild turkey restoration program in 1979. Since then, more than 30 other states have followed suit, aided, in part, by creation of the NWTF in 1973.

The sportsmen’s organization, headquartered in Edgefield, S.C., initially helped by bringing state wildlife officials together to share information and coordinate recovery efforts. "We became the clearinghouse for them to do a better job at what they were doing," says Kennamer, a NWTF biologist for 24 years.

With its 500,000 members and more than 2,100 state and local chapters, the NWTF also provides volunteer labor and money to promote habitat restoration and turkey recovery, as well as supplying containers to transport birds within and across state boundaries. More than 180,000 turkeys have been transplanted since the group’s inception.

Prolific birds

Missouri, for instance, has supplied more than 5,000 turkeys to 16 states and Canadian provinces since 1958. In some cases, Missouri exchanged turkeys for other wildlife species, including river otters from Louisiana and Texas, prairie chickens from Nebraska and Oklahoma, and ruffed grouse from Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Recovery of the wild turkey has been successful because of the hard work and dedication of wildlife officials and volunteers who trap and transport them to new locations and plant food plots for newly transplanted birds.

The adaptability and resilience of the birds also have advanced their recovery. Wild turkeys produce large broods. The average hen lays between 10 and 12 eggs each spring, and typically four to five of the young birds reach adulthood.

Wild turkeys also are very adaptable, able to survive on a variety of foods—from grass to grasshoppers to grain left in farm fields after harvest—and in a variety of habitats. The five subspecies native to North America—the Eastern, Florida, Gould’s, Merriam’s and Rio Grande—live in woodlands and swamps, mountains and deserts.

In some locales, turkeys have proliferated to the point that they are considered a nuisance for eating crops in farmers’ fields, fouling lawns and automobiles, and competing for the food of other wildlife. Still, growing flocks are a welcome sight in most places, particularly among hunters and wildlife watchers.

In Minnesota and Wisconsin, wild turkeys are advancing north to areas once thought uninhabitable because of winter snows and cold temperatures. "Turkeys are defining range way beyond where we thought they could survive," Kennamer says.

The birds, which were hunted to extinction in Wisconsin in the 1880s, now number more than 300,000 statewide. "There are more birds now then there were pre-settlement," says Scott Stankowski of Stevens Point, Wis. (pop. 24,551).

Stankowski, a turkey hunter and science teacher at Lincoln High School in nearby Wisconsin Rapids, developed a teaching manual in 2003 that incorporates lessons on the wild turkey with subjects such as art, math, English, social studies and technical education.

If the next generation does as much for the birds as the present generation, the wild symbols of Thanksgiving dinner will be gobbling across the United States for years to come.

For more information on the National Wild Turkey Federation, call (800) 843-6983 or log on to www.nwtf.org.

A Founding Father's Favorite

Founding father Ben Franklin wanted the turkey, rather than the bald eagle, to be our national bird. "The turkey is . . . a much more respectable bird, and a true original native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards," Franklin wrote in a 1784 letter to his daughter.

Stuart Englert is American Profile's Senior Editor.

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