Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2014 - 19

C Wild Turkey Comeback
Nancy Henderson

Creature
Feature

Wild turkeys, nearly gone by the early 1900s, began a comeback in the Depression.

By the early 1900s, it was apparent
that wild turkeys were disappearing
from the Southeast at an alarming
rate. House builders and farmers had
cleared much of the native bird's prime
habitat - grassy forest edges with lots
of grasshoppers, and mature oaks and
hickories for nighttime roosting and
winter food - and there were no regulations on hunting. According to the
South Carolina-based National Wild
Turkey Federation, the population had
dwindled from an estimated 10 million
when the European settlers arrived to
200,000 at its lowest in the 1930s.
"Obviously the species was in trouble," says Tom Hughes, assistant vice
president for NWTF conservation programs. "Their numbers had declined
to a point where they were either
completely gone from a number of
states, or very rare."

A glimmer of hope came, ironically,
during the Great Depression, when
many Americans lost their farms and
left to seek work elsewhere. "That
period actually turned out to be good
for turkeys because it meant that what
had been heavily farmed as land was
slowly reverting back to forests, and
that the rural population, which often
depended on wild turkeys and other
wild game for an addition to the family nutrition, were suddenly not
there," says Hughes. New hunting
restrictions helped too, but even that
wasn't enough.
Experts in the fledgling science of
wildlife biology began looking for
solutions, gathering eggs from the
nests, raising the poults in rearing
facilities, and returning them to their
homes.
"And none of that worked," says

Experts in the f ledgling science of wildlife
biology began looking for solutions,
gathering eggs from the nests, raising the
poults in rearing facilities, and returning
them to their homes.

Hughes. "It was money wasted ...
because what we came to realize was
that, for a wild turkey to survive in the
wild, it had to grow up with a wild
hen that taught it what to look for
and what to stay away from. So we
found out that you can't raise wild
turkeys in pens."
What did work was moving the
birds to other forested areas. "The rub
there was trying to catch 'em," says
Hughes. The breakthrough came in
1951, when Herman "Duff" Holbrook,
a turkey biologist working in South
Carolina's Francis Marion National
Forest, came up with the idea to use
cannon nets, which were known to
successfully snare geese and other
waterfowl. And, says Hughes, "We
were off to the races with restoration."
Employing small "cannons," or
rockets, to unfurl baited nets over the
turkeys, conservationists from state
wildlife agencies were able to capture
and move the birds to areas where
they were scarce or nonexistent. But
that was expensive, and federal legislation prevented the sale of wildlife, so
the NWTF raised funds for special
transport boxes and developed a system that enabled states with few or no
turkeys to reimburse donor states for
trapping costs.
"And many populations grew from
the release of only 10 turkeys to a population of thousands or even tens of
thousands," says Hughes. Now, he
notes, "We estimate that we're getting
pretty close to pre-colonial numbers,"
with around 7 million turkeys in 49
states, including those in the Blue
Ridge and others where the big birds
didn't originally exist. The NWTF calls it
"the greatest conservation success
story in history."
NWTF officials plan to conserve 4
million acres of critical wild turkey habitat over the next decade.
"It's the largest of the grounddwelling birds, and it's confined to
North America," says Hughes. "So it is
truly our country's iconic bird." 
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014 | 19
Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2014

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