Outdoors with Larry Dablemont: What about wild turkeys?

Dennis Whiteside is a float-fishing guide who travels down a dozen or more streams across the Ozarks of Missouri each year, through all seasons. He also is someone very knowledgeable about wild turkeys, and he reports on what he sees through a survey that he turns in regularly to the state’s Department of Conservation.

Hunt turkeys with a camera (Photo submitted by Larry Dablemont)

“I’ve done it for about 15 years,” he says, “I turn in the results on the form they gave me, and I wonder why I do it.” They have never responded in any way. But this past spring and summer was the lowest number of turkeys I have ever seen while floating rivers with dozens of clients. “Ten to fifteen years ago I would see lots of turkeys and hear lots of gobblers as we floated,” he told me. “This spring I saw one hen with three poults and heard only a few gobblers.”

Dennis also counts numbers of turkeys on hunting trips and during spring drives through the Ozarks. We talked about how, years back, we would see eight or ten strutting gobblers and hens in March and April back in the reaches of green fields along timber edges. You could drive Ozark backroads and count a hundred turkeys in a few green fields. He agrees with me that this spring such a sight was seldom seen—the turkeys are mostly gone from those places.

I follow turkey populations in the Ozarks too, in five different counties. But I count them in December and January when turkeys group together in flocks assembled in winter gatherings of adjacent lands of three hundred acres or more. One place they gather is along the lower Pomme de Terre River just above Truman Lake. I check it several times each winter. About 20 years or so ago that river bottom field of 30 or 40 acres had more turkeys in it than I could count, easily seventy to eighty birds. Last year there were only fifteen to twenty turkeys coming to the field each evening to feed, flying from the deep woods across the hills beyond the river.

The decline in their numbers was little by little over the years, but numbers never as low as what I counted last spring. If those numbers I have seen in years past are compared to what I saw last winter, many areas have only about twenty percent of the flocks we had 15 to 20 years ago. The Department of Conservation doesn’t have any idea what we have when it comes to wild turkeys. I interviewed the director, Jason Sumner, a couple of weeks ago and he sat there and told me that there was an increase in turkey numbers this past year. Not in the Ozarks there wasn’t. He goes by what he is told while Dennis and I go by what we see.

I gave him my opinion but he is not going to ever be out there counting flocks like Dennis and I do. He and turkey biologist, Nick Oakley, echo the same refrain that the alarming drop in wild turkey numbers is due to habitat loss and predators. As for the predators, the number of bobcats, hawks, owls and raccoons have remained constant for these past 10 years. Yes, there are too many predators and egg-eaters! But the idea that habitat loss is a factor is easily proved to be false.

The five thousand acres around me is exactly the same as it was ten years ago. National forestland is much the same as it has always been in terms of good turkey habitat. But numbers of turkeys on my neighboring land are getting scarce. I once heard 11 gobblers about 12 years back within a square mile of me.

You might hear two now on an April morning but they grow silent in May, easy for too many hunters to kill. Ten years ago on my place I was feeding seven long-bearded gobblers behind my home and now there are none. The last single gobbler to feed there was three years ago. None since! I quit hunting seven years ago because there are too many of us out killing turkeys in the spring and the fall.

Several southern states have changed season lengths; bag limits have been reduced and regulations altered. Missouri has done nothing, and it is making turkey numbers pretty lean. To help the wild turkeys in my area I have changed from a gun to a camera, and I encourage hunters in the Ozarks to do the same.

Let the flocks alone in the fall, change youth season to the back end of the regular season. Set the regular season back one week, shorten it to only two weekends and allow only one gobbler in the spring for two years, and you’ll see some recovery in wild turkey numbers. But the MDC would never option for any of that because they are afraid it would cause them to lose the hundreds of thousands they make through turkey tags. More about wild turkeys in a future column.

I wrote a book about the wild turkey and if you would like to know more about getting a copy contact my office at 417-777-5227 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com. You can write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613.