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.
“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. 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. “Last 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 you 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 back roads and count a hundred turkeys in a dozen fields or less. He agrees with me that now such a sight is 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 close to where I live. They gather in a few places from adjacent lands of three hundred acres or more. One place they gather is along the lower Pomme de Terre River bottom above Truman Lake. About 20 years or so ago that river bottom field of thirty or forty acres had more turkeys in it than I could count, easily seventy to eighty birds. Last year there were between 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 20 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 come to wild turkeys. I interviewed the director, Jason Sumner, a couple of months ago and he sat there and told me that there was an increase in turkey numbers this past year. To have the director of the Department say such a thing is ridiculous.
He is not going to ever be out there counting flocks like Dennis and I do. He and the 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 and high for these past 10 years.
And 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 10 years ago. National forestland is much the same as it has always been in terms of good or bad turkey habitat. But numbers of turkeys on my neighboring land are getting scarce! I once heard eleven gobblers about 12 years back within a square mile of my home. You might hear one or two now on an April morning, but they grow silent in May, easy for hunters to find, call and kill.
Ten years ago on my place I was feeding seven long-bearded gobblers behind my home. Now there are none! The last single gobbler to feed there was three years ago. None since! I quit hunting several years ago because there are too many of us out killing turkeys in the spring and 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 turkey in my area I have changed from a gun to a camera and I encourage hunters in the Ozarks to do the same. As for my advice for the Departments of Conservation in any Midwest state… Let the flocks alone in the fall or allow a one-week season only in October. Change youth season to the back end of the regular season. Set the regular season back one week. Shorten it to only two weekends. Allow only one gobbler in the spring for two years along with all of the above, and you’ll see recovery in wild turkey numbers. But the Missouri Department would never option for any of that because it would cause them to lose money through the loss of turkey tags. Their main goal is not wild turkeys, it is the sale of wild turkey tags!
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