Page 29 - Mar/Apr 2022 Outdoor Okahoma Magazine

habitat losses and subsistence hunting decimated the “In the last three to four years, numbers have gone
wild turkey population. Some estimates put the total down dramatically.”
number of wild turkeys at 30,000 birds at the beginning The declines are being seen nationwide, not just in
of the last century — for the entire continent! Oklahoma. Nationally, biologists say the turkey pop-
By 1930, most Oklahomans would say there were no ulation has dropped to about 6 million birds, which
wild turkeys to be found here. is down about 15 percent from the historic high seen
Biologists realized that even where suitable habitat around 2010. And many states are in the same situa-
remained, the birds were totally absent from the cen- tion, trying to figure out what is driving the decline in
tral and western portions of the state, and the statewide wild turkey numbers.
population was probably less than 1,000 birds. In Oklahoma, wild turkey populations have declined
In 1948, the Wildlife Department embarked on an over the past three years in all five regions where surveys
ambitious program to re-establish the wild turkey to its are conducted. Those three-year declines range from a 2.7
former range. Southwest Region Wildlife Supervisor Rod percent in the Northeast Region to a whopping 67.1 per-
Smith said turkey restoration really ramped up through- cent in the Southwest Region.
out the 1960s. The trap-and-transplant efforts proved
highly successful, not only in Oklahoma but across WINTER FLOCK SURVEYS
America. By the early 1970’s, America’s population of
wild turkeys was about 1.5 million.
“By the ‘80s, we were getting real close to completing
restoration,” Smith said. “For the last 20, 25 years, we
have not trapped turkeys and relocated them.”
Nationally, the wild turkey was becoming a very worthy
“poster child” for the wildlife conservation community.
Populations continued healthy growth, and by 2010 an
estimated 6.7 million wild turkeys were on the landscape.
Oklahoma saw similar gains. “Numbers increased real-
ly rapidly from 2000 to 2006; they really spiked,” said
Smith, the Department’s Rio Grande wild turkey project
coordinator. In 2016, the estimated Oklahoma turkey
population was just under 100,000. Today, the estimate
is 70,000 birds statewide, a drop of about 30 percent in
six years.

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Reversal of Fortunes
Southeast Region Wildlife Supervisor Eric Suttles, who
serves as the Department’s eastern wild turkey project
coordinator, said it was decades ago when biologists
noted declines in eastern turkey populations. To address
the issue, the Department established different sea-
son dates and bag limits for wild turkey hunting in the
Southeast Region.
Suttles said the effect of those changes has been to
stabilize the eastern turkey population. He said surveys
have shown modest ups and downs in the Northeast and
Southeast regions over the past decade.
“We are in better shape than the western part of the
state,” he said.
Smith tells a different story about western Oklahoma.
“The drought in 2011 and 2012 hit and really started
affecting turkey numbers. They didn’t really rebound
after that.”

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