By Burl A. Dallas

The spring 2004 turkey season promises to be the best you have ever seen, and perhaps ever will see. "God smiled on turkeys this year," said John Burk, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's chief turkey biologist.

But actually, the last three years have seen strong turkey hatches and survival in almost every part of the state - and that rarely happens.

With the exception of South Texas, the Lone Star State saw 2001 produce a bumper crop of turkey poults, perhaps the fourth-best hatch on record. Toms from that spring will be fully mature this year, and your chances of meeting one over the barrel of a shotgun are excellent.

"Realistically, because production has been so good for the last three years, hunting prospects should be good everywhere in Texas for the next two years," Burk predicted. "We'll be living off the fat of those good hatches."

"Our season is timed so birds are most vulnerable during the fat years," Burk explained. "If we have a dry winter and hens don't get enough protein, they won't make eggs. In such times, toms gobble in February and March and are done by the time the (hunting) season opens. I've always been a proponent of 'Later is better.' No matter where I've been, the later in the season you go hunting, the better off you are - except during those dry years."

Photo by Mike Lambeth

Texas is primarily Rio Grande turkey country, and those birds require less moisture than do the eastern subspecies birds that inhabit the state roughly from Interstate 45 to the Sabine and Red rivers.

"With the exception of the Panhandle, this year as you went north and west in Texas, it got drier," Burk noted. "Production in the western and upper Hill Country was not very good - there was basically a hole in the northwestern portion of Rio Grande range where production this year was poor - but 2001 was really good. When you get two excellent years out of three, that's probably the best you can expect.

"We've been in about a 10-year decline, but I think the last couple of hatches can turn that around. We've had habitat fragmentation and some declines in habitat quality, but production has been so good the last three years, we should reverse that trend."

Anyone who's watched a tom gobble his head off while making a beeline for the caller and then veer off at the last minute because of a fence, a creek or a passing hen - or for no apparent reason at all - knows that turkeys are very picky. It should come as no surprise, then, that eastern and Rio Grande turkeys have opposite ideas about whether rain during the nesting season is a good thing.

As Rio Grande hens live where spring weather can turn quite hot and very dry, they rarely nest more than a quarter-mile from water. Periodically during the day, a hen will dip her wing and breast feathers in water before continuing to brood her eggs. This keeps the eggs within the narrow range of temperature and humidity necessary for the chick to survive.

Eastern turkeys, on the other hand, live where rainfall is normally plentiful and the shady woods are cooler. Predators are a bigger problem during the nesting season than is drought. Rain may in fact be the worst thing that can happen to an eastern turkey during nesting.

"Some research associates rainfall in May with decreased production," Burk explained. "It's called the 'wet hen theory.' If you have a wet year, you have increased predation, because the predators can smell the wet hen on the nest. The last two years, we had low rainfall in May in East Texas, and this year we had no rainfall at all in May; we set production records those first two years. But in the data I have for 2003, the trend is inconsistent.

"The poults-per-hen observations are about 2.9; in the two prior years it was about 4. I expected a tremendous hatch, but we may not have had it. Turkeys are habitat-sensitive, and a lot of land-use practices in East Texas are not turkey-friendly. People who manage for turkeys generally do better."

Eastern turkey populations have sharply increased in northeastern Texas, especially along the Red River in Lamar and Red River counties. In Walker, San Jacinto and Polk counties, turkey numbers are going down, but numbers are higher in parts of the Angelina and Sabine national forests. The reason might surprise you: woodpeckers!

"You have to burn to have turkeys in East Texas," Burk remarked. "Southern Angelina and southern Sabine national forests are still the best public lands for easterns, because they are red-cockaded woodpecker country where the Forest Service burns - and what is good for woodpeckers is good for turkeys."

Better still, all you'll need to hunt the turkeys in the wildlife management areas there will be a hunting license and annual public hunting permit.

While turkey populations are on the rise in parts of East Texas, declines in other areas mean that the population is roughly stable on average. However, the birds are increasing their range - expanding into suitable habitat when and where they can find it. Burk reports that some turkeys have traveled up to 70 miles to colonize new areas.

The excellent hatches in 2001 and 2002 mean that, for the next couple of years, more mature gobblers will haunt the woods in East Texas than have been seen there in more than a century. You'll still have to hunt hard to bag a big eastern tom, but you can take consolation from the fact that the hunting's better now than it was in your grandfather's day.

TPWD biologist Billy Lambert adds that Rio Grandes can be found along the western edge of the district, with scattered populations of easterns throughout the region - which makes for a peculiar situation in Grayson County. The birds on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land around Lake Texoma are Rio Grandes, but are hunted under the regulations for easterns: one gobbler only during the spring season. But don't let the restrictions put you off.

"It's so close to Dallas/Fort Worth that there are lots of people hunting them," Burk said, "but I've had hunters tell me of hearing 30 gobblers."