Count Mike Seamster among the people who were surprised when North Carolina’s turkey harvest last spring didn’t set its 19th record in the past 21 seasons.

Seamster, a wildlife biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, has headed the state’s wild turkey project for years. He was shocked that hunters didn’t break the 10,000 mark in statewide harvest, and he was even more stunned that the harvest dropped by 10 percent to 8,841.

Last, but not least, he couldn’t believe his eyes when the harvest report came back showing Caswell County, No. 1 in the state since the commission starting keeping count in the mid-1970s, down almost 100 birds and now is no longer the highest-harvest county in the state.

Seamster knew that cold, rainy weather in late May and early June had crippled the 2003 hatch, but he didn’t think the missing year-class of birds would affect the harvest until this spring. Instead, he saw a drop in the number of jakes — juvenile male turkeys — killed, and overall, a big drop in the harvest.

Where does that leave him this year? Still shaking his head a little bit, hoping that things don’t go from bad to worse.

“I don’t look for the harvest to be way down this year, but I don’t see it going up, either,” Seamster said. “I’d say it will be around what it was last year.”

How can Seamster paint a picture that’s not trimmed in gray or black after a huge drop in the harvest last year and a decided drop in the number of young gobblers in the woods?

For one thing, he’s optimistic that the turkey population is still growing and expanding in a number of areas that have not been open for hunting for many years. He’s counting on adding a fair to good harvest from Wilson County, which has a spring season for the first time this year — the last area in the state to open — and he’s counting on a huge hatch this past spring filling up some hunters’ tags.

“We had a bad hatch (in 2003), and that showed up a little bit last year; our harvest of jakes was down a little bit,” Seamster said. “And last year, we went to telephone and Internet reporting only for turkeys, and our reporting rate may have been down.”

There aren’t going to be many 2-year-old birds this spring as there would normally be with a good hatch, he added. This could be an important problem for many hunters, because 2-year-old turkeys make up a large percentage of the harvest of gobblers. They gobble, but they have yet to become as educated as 3- and 4-year-old birds. Nevertheless, there’s some good news coming.

“We had what looks like a good hatch last year, and we needed it after last season,” Seamster said. “Even before we started getting our (survey) cards in, I was getting excellent word-of-mouth reports from around the state of people seeing hens with good broods, with big broods.

“We should have a bumper crop of jakes out there this spring. Obviously, there will be older birds from previous years, but those birds will be harder to call. I don’t think you’ll see a big decrease or increase in the harvest this year. I doubt we’ll top 10,000 this year; it will be more like 9,000. And the following year, we should get a good bump up.”

Seamster is relying on the commission’s stocking work through the 1980s and 1990s, when more than 5,000 birds were relocated from in state and out of state to areas in North Carolina that had suitable habitat, but no existing flocks or flocks small enough that hunting could not be permitted.

Wilson County is the last of the state’s 100 counties to get an open spring season, and Seamster expects some areas that were stocked in the mid-1990s to bolster the harvest in the coming years — particularly the western Piedmont.

“The population is still growing in some areas; in some of the areas we stocked in the mid- to late 1990s, it’s still growing pretty rapidly,” Seamster said.

There are counties that have been up high for a long time — Caswell, Alleghany and Ashe, for example — that are leveling off, but a lot of the western Piedmont counties — Burke, McDowell, Cleveland, Rutherford, even Davie, Davidson and Rowan — are doing well.