The Declining Wild Gobbler

Wild Turkey Nest with 8 eggs

       I came across a wild turkey nest with 8 eggs in it in late April. I doubted it would have many more because the hen was sitting on the nest incubating them before I came along in mid-morning. When a hen is laying her eggs she mates with a mature gobbler early in the day and then lays one egg per day as a rule. She may miss a day or so if she doesn’t mate, and she may lay as many as 15 or 16 eggs if there is more than one mature gobbler. Or she may lay as few as 6 or 7. First year jakes do not usually mate with any hens and first year hens do not usually mate or make a nest. But with wildlife, you can never say never. Often, even mature hens do not bring off a clutch of eggs every year. 

        Years back, Arkansas’ turkey biologist, Mike Widner put radio transmitters on twenty-some hens in the Ouachita mountains, then followed them all through the spring season. He was surprised when he found that only about 15 or 20 percent of the mature hens nested that spring. With all ground nesting birds, the number of eggs laid is not indicative of the survival of poults. It is likely that with wild turkeys about half the eggs laid do not even hatch. If they do hatch during a cold rainy period, the young poults will likely die before they are a week old. I have observed that a hen turkey can delay the hatching of poults during adverse weather by controlling the incubation period of the eggs in some fashion. It seldom happens that eggs hatch in rainy weather. But surprisingly, many hens that have their nests destroyed or eggs eaten by predators will nest a second time. In the course of the spring and summer a hen turkey may lay twenty or thirty eggs just to be able to bring forth a few live surviving young. I would venture to guess that for every young turkey you see in the fall there have been perhaps 20 or 30 eggs laid in the spring. In most states in the Midwest, wild turkeys are at their lowest numbers now in a 10-or 15-year period. Biologists in Missouri, often young people just out of college, do not have enough knowledge of the wild turkey nor experience to really know why. But it is not “habitat loss”. It is hunting pressure and the fact that hunters are twice as many today as they were twenty years ago. Adjustments to the seasons and limits are needed, as fall hunting and early youth seasons continue to knock down gobbler numbers. But conservation departments revel in the increased money those high numbers bring in and don’t want to do anything in cutting back seasons or limits because they believe it will hurt revenue. I doubt we will ever see wild turkeys in the numbers I saw in the 80’s and 90’s, but like the quail, the declining gobblers will survive for another season. It is hard to see what there are today and then know what they could be if only decisions were made by the conservation departments that could make such a big difference. We will not know what this spring and summer hatch and survival will be until we begin seeing the late-winter flocks. In my lifetime, I have killed enough gobblers. I shoot them now with a camera and urge other hunters to do the same. We have got to reduce the number of wild gobblers killed now by hunters who have found ways to do it a lot easier than with a camouflage outfit and a turkey call. In a future article I will talk about a new way of hunting that seldom fails. In the meantime I will put the story and photos of a seven-bearded gobbler on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors… and with it photos of a gobbler mating with a decoy for more than an hour.