A quick chat with wild turkey expert Dr. Michael Chamberlain

Back in 2011, wildlife researchers began noticing a trend: declining wild turkey numbers in parts of the country. The initial concern focused on southern states and the southern Midwest.

“Originally that’s where the concerns kind of blossomed,” said Dr. Michael Chamberlain, a National Wild Turkey Federation distinguished professor at the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. “But I think the evidence is pretty clear that since then there’s a growing recognition that populations are declining in a number of other states, including some of the northeastern states and some of the Upper Midwest states.”

Chamberlain, an avid turkey hunter and one of the most well-respected turkey researchers in the country, has been a leading voice in spreading this message with the hope of finding solutions. His social media channels, which he uses to post information on turkey research, gained traction at the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Shutdowns came in the spring. People were turkey hunting and interacting more online during a period of social distancing.

“I think a lot of people started realizing that they had a problem in their area and a lot of other people had the same problem,” Chamberlain said. “People started becoming much more aware of the situation facing the birds.”

Outdoor News recently spoke with Chamberlain about the current state of the species. The conversation ran the gamut from the latest trends to his thoughts on record harvest in some states in the north to a word of warning for those who might think good bird numbers today guarantee good future hunts.

Outdoor News: What’s the state of the wild turkeys now? Have we seen population improvements recently?

Chamberlain: Some populations seem to have corrected a bit. Examples would be Louisiana and Arkansas. The (state game) agencies made pretty sweeping (hunting) regulation changes and coupled with, I think, increased awareness, those populations have rebounded a bit. Not where ideally we’d want them to be, but they’ve improved.

You can go to some states – like Mississippi – (and) the population declines there haven’t seemed to be the same.

And then you can go to states like Georgia, where I live, and South Carolina next door. Those populations appear to still be declining. It depends on where you are on the landscape, which to me speaks to how complex the issue facing the bird is.

There’s so much variability.

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ON: Based on the solid research happening now, what do we think is causing the declines?

Chamberlain: We have a pretty firm grasp on the realization that productivity is just very low. We’re not making turkeys in a lot of populations like we need to be. Then in some populations we’re seeing that adult survival is lower than we want.

There’s a variety of underlying issues. Most informed people would never argue that habitat loss, habitat degradation are two of the big issues pushing these declines in productivity. As a society, we’re losing high-quality, early-successional habitats.

Here in the South, hardwood forests are being cut and converted to either pine-dominated forest or infrastructure, residential areas. The loss of hardwoods is problematic for turkeys because they rely almost solely on hardwoods during the fall and winter, and the mast that those hardwoods produce carries turkeys into the spring in good body condition. If they don’t have access to the abundance of acorns, they travel more, burn more energy, and enter spring at lower body weights, and that’s problematic.

ON: Regarding that low productivity, I’ve heard you point out that few hens actually raise broods. What percentage of hens are successfully raising chicks into adult birds?

Chamberlain: I would speak more in generalities. Most hens in their lifetime are not producing a poult. It’s a relatively small percentage of the population and that varies from population to population.

Some hens are better (at reproducing). They’re just wired differently. They’re more productive, they’re more fit. Those tend to be the early nesters, and nests that hit the ground earlier in the nesting season are more likely to hatch.

The socially dominant hens are the hens that are preferentially breeding with toms, and they are nesting first because they’re socially dominant relative to the other hens around them in a breeding group. They’re more likely to hatch (a nest), and it’s those hens year after year after year. Not the same hens living 5, 6, 8, 10 years. What I’m saying is the socially dominant hens that are better, more fit, those are the ones that are producing most of our poults.

ON: Is this true across the country?

Chamberlain: It depends on where you are. For instance, some of the Midwestern populations, during a good year you may see 40% or 50% nest success. That’s telling you a fairly large percentage of the hen population is successful, but we don’t see that across the South. We’re seeing this chronically low productivity.

ON: What’s the solution?

Chamberlain: It speaks to the need to ensure that those birds are carrying over from year to year. That’s one of the reasons you’re seeing regulation changes. From the hen’s perspective, what is causing these hens to be lost? Well, they’re being killed by predators. Maybe you’re in a state where there’s fall harvest. Part of the reason a state agency might discontinue fall harvest is because they see that there’s some segment of the hen population that’s being harvested in the fall and they’re trying to carry those birds over for another year.

Down where I’m at, hens are illegal to harvest, and we don’t really have fall hunting seasons in the Deep South. We’re in a situation where harvest of females isn’t even a relevant topic. So, what other things can we do?

OK, so if we’re losing these critical habitats such as hardwoods, could that be part of the reason that we have hens that are going into the nesting season and they’re lighter on weight? If they’re lighter on weight, are they more likely to have to take breaks from incubation to forage because their body condition is not as high? If they’re doing that, are they creating more scent trails to and from a nest and making the nest more visible to predators?

Start going down these rabbit holes and you realize that all of this is complex and there’s no silver bullet. That keeps me up at night, honestly, because it’s so complicated to try to think through. At a population level, how do we make more turkeys?

ON: We have had record spring turkey harvests in Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois in recent years. Hunters shot more than 50,000 birds for a second straight season in Wisconsin. What do you think of that? How much do you believe harvest numbers indicate the health of an overall turkey population?

Chamberlain: It’s important to understand that harvest, in a lot of ways when populations are at a certain level, tracks hunter effort. Turkey hunters have become more efficient. We have better camo, better calls. We have technology, we have mapping systems, decoys, and improved shotshells that allow us to be more efficient and effective than even 20 years ago.

But as (turkey) populations decline and they get to a lower density, you start to see that sometimes there’s a decoupling of the effort and the harvest relationship. In other words, like what we’re seeing here in Georgia. Our harvest is continuing to decline, yet hunter effort is consistent.

What we’re seeing in some of our other populations is the harvest is still trickling down at a broad scale and our populations are declining slowly. Yet we’re taking about the same percentage of toms out every year.

If you have a declining population of males, yet you’re taking the same percentage out every single year, eventually that math doesn’t add up.

You’re going to have a tipping point where your population is declining at a greater rate.

That’s what agencies are trying to prevent is getting to the point where they have to implement more restrictive changes like quota systems and low bag limits.

ON: What can hunters do to help turkeys?

Chamberlain: Keep buying a hunting license. Keep supporting your state wildlife agency because your dollars are the economic engine that runs those agencies.

Try to identify any acreage on the landscape on which you could positively impact turkeys through management, whether it’s your property, your buddy’s property, your family’s property, whoever. Use the science that we know improves habitat, vegetative conditions for turkeys and try to implement that on whatever scale that you possibly can.

If we all tried to make a positive impact on the footprint that turkeys live within, then the future is much brighter rather than if we take a nihilistic attitude and say, “Well, I can’t do anything.” We can all play our part.

ON: What’s your message to the hunter who says, “I am hearing a bunch of birds. Turkeys are doing great by me. This is someone else’s problem.”

Chamberlain: I would say 20 years ago I was in the same situation. Right down the road I can recall hunts where I was paralyzed – there were so many birds gobbling around me in so many different directions, I didn’t know where to go. Now you will not find that situation across 99% of the southeastern United States. Don’t assume things can’t change.

If you’re in an area where turkeys are doing well, be proactive and not reactive. Seek ways to conserve habitats to ensure the persistence of these areas where turkeys are thriving. Do what you can to make sure that landscape is conserved because if it’s not, you could be where we are in the South pretty quickly.