Tompkins: Turkeys in Texas, Kentucky tale of two states | Outdoors | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

By SHANNON TOMPKINS Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Shannon Tompkins Houston Chronicle

An abundance of insect-rich openings carpeted with native grasses is crucial to survival of turkey poults. A lack of this “brood habitat” is one of many factors limiting East Texas’ eastern turkey population.

On a cool late-April morning, in a beautiful creek bottom carpeted with glistening trillium and wild violets and crackling alive with singing warblers and cawing crows, I scratched out a series of yelps on a slate call, and three wild turkey gobblers thundered back.

Minutes later, a huge black gobbler warily strode through the open understory beneath the oak and hickory forest and into an acre-sized opening nearly knee-high with native grasses.

The big bird spotted the hen decoys, gathered himself and threw everything he had into a ground-shaking gobble. His paintbrush-thick beard danced on his chest as his body convulsed.

Hidden in a thick clump of cane, I smiled behind my camouflage mask and drank it in. Finally, after all these years, I had accomplished a personal goal: calling a long-bearded eastern turkey gobbler within gun range in country where my ancestors once hunted these same birds.

While the sense of connecting with family history and tradition were real and gratifying, a twinge of melancholy colored the moment.

I’d always hoped this meeting with an eastern gobbler on “home” ground would occur in East Texas, where my family has lived for nearly 200 years.

But after years of failure and frustration trying to find an eastern gobbler in East Texas, it took a trip to Kentucky — the region my ancestors left when they came to Texas in the 1820s — to accomplish that goal.

Kentucky is awash in eastern subspecies wild turkeys. Estimates are the Bluegrass State holds almost a quarter-million wild turkeys, and the birds are found in each of the state’s 120 counties. Each spring turkey season, about 80,000 Kentucky turkey hunters take 25,000 or more birds.

Optimistic estimates place Texas’ eastern turkey population at 10,000 birds. Annual turkey harvest in the 43 East Texas counties that have a spring season has hovered between 250-400 birds this decade, most often closer to 250. And a third or more of those gobblers are taken from just two counties in the far northeast corner of the state. In some East Texas counties open to spring turkey hunting, not a single bird is reported taken during the spring season.

The disparity between eastern turkey populations in Kentucky and Texas is stunning when you consider that, 30 years ago, both held almost none of the birds.

Both saw native populations of eastern turkeys evaporate in the early 1900s, victims of unregulated hunting and, in Texas, extensive loss of habitat.  Click Link Below for Full Story!

via Tompkins: Turkeys in Texas, Kentucky tale of two states | Outdoors | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.