The wild turkey is America's largest ground-nesting bird. It generally requires a lot of forest -- 2,000 acres or more -- to mantain the food it needs to thrive. The reason for this is that in the dead of winter wild turkey depend on acorns and other mast nuts and seed for survival. This food is only produced in abundace by mature hardwood trees -- oak, beech, dogwood, cherry and gum.
A century ago, virtually all the stands of such trees had been logged out in the Eastern U.S. As the trees vanished, so did the wild turkeys.
The turkey was further pushed towards oblivion by rapid improvements in gun accuracy, and weak game laws that had yet to to catch up to the changing dynamics of landscape and technology.
By 1910, there were fewer than 30,000 wild turkeys left in America. Then, as incredible as it now seems, and amazing turnaround occured.
In 1900, the Lacey Act ended commercial hunting of wild animals. Probably no law has done more to improve the status of American wildlife, as commerical hunters bled the land white, shooting everything that moved. Wild game merchants sold pigeons for a penny apiece, and ducks for only a little more. Hunters using cannons loaded with shrappnel would shoot 400 ducks in a day in Eastern Shore marshes, while market deer hunters would set up bait stations near roads and shoot 20 deer in a night. The Lacey Act ended market hunting, which set the stage for the restoration of the game species necessary for recreational and sport hunting.
In 1911 the Weeks Act authorized the U.S. government to buy millions of acres of eastern mountain land that had been chopped clean of forest in order to obtain wood for railroads, paper, firewood and timber. This was one of the very first "big governmental bailouts" of industry. Unlike most of the others that followed, however, this bail out left America with a permanent and positive legacy: most of the National Forests in the Eastern United States.
With the Depression and migration to cities, more and more marginal farmland began to revert to woody plots. Spontaneous regeneration and Civilian Conservation Corps tree-planting worked together, and hardwood forests began to reclaim the land.
The 1937 Wildlife Restoration Act (aka, the Pittman-Robertson Act) initiated a new tax on rifles, shotguns and ammunition with the revenue raised going to fund wildlife conservation.
Pittman-Robertson Act funds enabled wild turkey eggs to be gathered, and poults were hatched and released into the wild. Unfortunately, pen-raised birds were quickly decimated by predation and starvation. Some thought the extinction of wild turkeys was only a matter of time. Restocking turkeys was not going to be as easy as restocking streams with trout.
New tactics were tried. A few wild turkeys were caught in wooden box traps intended for deer. They were moved to suitable habitat, but they too quickly perished. The reintroduction of wild turkeys was beginning to look hopeless.
After World War II, game managers began to experiment again. This time, cannon nets -- large nets propelled by black powder rocket charges -- were used. These net enveloped an entire turkey flock at once.
Moving an entire flock of wild turkeys seemed to work. The first few flocks that were relocated began to thrive, in part because regrown forest provided more food stock for the birds to live on. The millions of acres of mountain land purchased in 1911, thanks to the Weeks Act, had become stands of maturing hardwoods in the National Forest system.
Systematic restocking of wild turkey continued through the 50s and 60s, and by 1973, when the National Wild Turkey Federation was formed, the population of wild birds in the U.S. had climbed to 1.3 million.
With the creation of the National Wild Turkey Federation more sportsmen and private land owners were recruited for habitat protection and wild turkey reintroduction.
Today, the range of the American wild turkey is more extensive than it was in pre-Columbian times, and the total wild turkey population has climbed to 5.5 million birds.
Wild turkey hunting is now a billion-dollar-a-year industry, with 2.6 million hunters harvesting about 700,000 birds a year.
Today wild turkey still depend on oaks for food in the dead of winter, but they also glean corn and soy from mechanized fields where so much is left on the ground. Provided there are a woods and water nearby, and hunting is regulated, the wild turkey will continue to thrive despite all odds.
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