My grandfather got his first breech-loader shotgun in 1911 by guiding turkey hunters in the fall and winter in north Texas County on his father’s land bordering a northern section of the Big Piney River. He did so by scattering corn to feed them, then scaring turkeys off the roost during the night and waiting for them to come back to the bait and the roost the next morning at first light.

He saw big flocks of wild turkeys during his youth but he told me he saw wild turkeys decline in the late twenties and thirties to near extinction in the Ozarks because of three reasons. First and foremost, diseases brought in by farm families in tame turkeys, primarily something called blackhead disease. Secondly were the free-ranging hogs, which decimated acorn crops before the years end making that food source unobtainable during the cold snowy months. But the biggest decline wasn’t due to the predators that like to eat wild turkeys and destroy eggs, nor was it due to habitat loss. It was due to hard times and the coming depression.

“Country folks were hungry,” he told me. “Gettin’ enough for them big families to eat was hard and turkeys was danged easy to kill, so they got kilt and et more than anything else. In the depression time if’n you had a hog or cow you was rich! Those who had chickens got ‘em stole or et by hoot owls!”

“I was a trapper and hunter and fisherman from the time I was a boy,” he said. “You could eat fried muskrats and boiled possum, even a beaver or a bobcat. Wa’n’t no coons to be had after awhile but ever farm boy knew where turkeys roosted. So they got cleaned out. I use ta take a turkey er two up to Houston and sell one for a dime or a quarter. By1930 you couldn’t find one. Nor a deer neither.”

As I tape-recorded his recollections back in 1966, I understood how those problems eliminated the wild turkey a hundred years ago. Today, much the same things are coming about. There are too many predators, but men are the number one predator and there are more now than ever. Gobblers are too easy to kill.

Like my grandfather, I guided turkey hunters in the 1970’s and 1980’s in Arkansas and Missouri, and one spring, even in Kansas. I worked at calling turkey gobblers for men who were well off, doctors, surgeons and dentists who could afford to pay a lot of money for the experience the hunt provided. None were interested in just killing a gobbler. Often a friend and I would set up a camp in the National Forest or on a river in the Ozarks. There were so many wild turkeys back in those times that anyone who could hunt three days had a very good chance to get a gobbler. Most mornings at daylight we could hear three or four gobblers if not more. We almost never failed.

There were some years I spent more time trying to get a client a gobbler than I spent hunting by myself. In the years I guided hunters, nearly thirty-five clients killed more than sixty turkeys, which I called in. And that was the key to it… they didn’t want to ambush one, or kill one off the roost or even use a decoy. It was old time turkey hunting at it’s very best.

Most of today’s young hunters don’t seem to care about that. There are things today that were not thought of then. Decoy’s, calls on smart phones, permanent blinds, and baiting are only a part of it. I’ll talk about some of that next week.

I learned a lot of what I know about wild turkeys thru my grandfather and then turkey biologists working for the Missouri Conservation Commission back in the 1960’s. The Missouri Department of Conservation didn’t exist then and we’d be better off if it didn’t exist now in my opinion.

The ‘Department of Conservation’, established in 1982 after the1/8 cent conservation tax passed and money became plentiful for them, DID NOT EVER STOCK WILD TURKEY OR DEER. The “Conservation Commission” did that back in the 50’s and 60’s. The latter agency we refer to today as the MDC, stocked some grouse and prairie chicken that have gone nowhere and the otter, which we watch decimate our streams and private ponds today.

The Declining Wild Gobbler — part 2

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.