If you’re an avid hunter then you probably correlate spring with TURKEY HUNTING! For most, you probably LOVE it (and I mean are crazy about the gobblers), or you probably have just never been!
Turkey hunting is one of my favorite seasons. Whether I am personally hunting them or just accompanying someone on their hunt to help them harvest one of those thunder chickens, (a term used in the hunting world that means turkey), it can become an addiction real quick, but thankfully the season only lasts a couple months!
Although we may take this season for granted now, it’s because of hunter’s conservation efforts that turkey season even exists.
Before European colonization, the population of wild turkeys in North America was estimated to be approx 10 Million. By the 1930s, that number had dropped to a mere 30,000 birds due to unregulated hunting and habitat destruction.
Early on in restoration efforts, states began to run game farms in the hope that domestically raised turkeys could be released in order to bolster the wild population. In reality, almost none of the farm-raised turkeys survived to reproduction age.
The Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 provided much-needed funding for conservation efforts aimed at restoring wild turkey populations. One of the most significant advances in that restoration started in South Carolina when Herman Holbrook devised a method of netting wild birds in order to transfer them to areas in need of repopulation. Through this trap-and-transfer method, the wild population of turkey rose from 320,000 birds in 1951 to 1.4 million in 1974.
Nonprofit turkey hunting organizations such as NWTF, founded in 1973, continued the conservation effort with programs aimed at habitat restoration and proper management programs.
Today, the wild turkey population in North America is estimated at between 6-7 million birds, making this hunter-driven conservation effort one of the most successful in US history.
Be sure to follow along with Blood Origins to continue to learn the TRUTH about hunting.
Source: Schorger, A.W., 1966; Kennamer et al. 1992; Mosby & Handley, 1943; Tapley et al. 2001
