Seamster said that basically in that area from Winston-Salem west to the mountains, the population is still growing. There’s pretty good habitat in that area and a lot of it is rural, with good pastureland for good brood range, and birds are doing pretty well in most of those counties.

“I don’t think they’ve nearly reached their carrying capacity. Birds are just beginning to fill in the holes between some of those areas that have birds,” he said.

A handful of those foothills counties were among the top counties in North Carolina in 2004. Rutherford County was seventh with 250 birds taken, Burke was ninth with 214 and McDowell was 12th with 201 birds. The others are doing well, with Cleveland at 90 birds, Davie at 66, Rowan at 115 and Davidson at 53 birds.

For years, the biggest and best flocks in North Carolina have been in counties along the Virginia border. You could start in the northwestern corner of the state with Watauga and march eastward through Ashe, Alleghany, Wilkes, Surry, Stokes, Rockingham, Caswell, Person and Caswell counties and never set foot in an area that wasn’t heavily occupied by turkeys.

Seamster has stressed for years that those counties had a head start on the turkey business because birds from Virginia had been wandering across the state line for years. And he said that the turkey habitat throughout the area of the northwestern mountains and northern Piedmont was unmatched — tremendous expanses of timbered areas for winter range and protection, plus expanses of pastureland for the important brood range that enables hens to raise hatches of three or four poults annually.

Last season, Wilkes County had a big increase in the harvest to 365 birds, knocking Caswell County out of its perennial spot as the No. 1 county in the state. The harvest in Caswell County dropped more than 100 birds to 312, another number that stunned Seamster.

“The harvest in Caswell has been leveling off for the past few years,” he said. “It had been up to around 450 to 475 birds for several yeas. No doubt, if we had had a couple of nice hatches in a row, it could have topped 500. To see it drop as much as it did in one year was a shock to me,” Seamster admitted.

But part of the drop may not have had anything to do with the turkey population or hunter success.

“I don’t really have a reason for it. The poor hatch could have been one. With that, I would have expected it to drop a little, but not below 400 birds. I can’t help but believe that part of it was the change in our harvest-reporting system. I know we had some people who were used to checking in their birds at cooperator agents, and when they came last year and found out they couldn’t report their birds, they went on home and did nothing.”

On the other hand, Seamster said, the hunting pressure in Caswell County may have been off a little, in part because of the resurgence of birds across North Carolina. He said that was particularly noticeable on the 16,000-acre Caswell Game Lands, annually the most productive public hunting area for wild turkeys for years — as well as the most heavily hunted.

“It used to be that on opening day and every Saturday during turkey season, it would be hard to find a parking place on the Caswell Game Lands,” he said. “There are still plenty of people hunting there, but not nearly as many. People who used to travel long distances to hunt the game lands now have birds they can hunt closer to home. We used to have people driving from the coast, from the mountains, everywhere, coming to Caswell to hunt.”

The northern Piedmont and northwestern counties occupy most of the top 15 spots in terms of overall harvest. Behind Wilkes at 365 and Caswell at 312 were Granville at 296, Person at 257, Stokes at 254 and Rockingham at 251. Alleghany fell to eighth with 228, and Ashe County out of the top 10 for the first time since the state started keeping records, was 11th with 205. Even the counties that didn’t rank among the top 15 had good harvests: Watauga with 122 birds and Surry with 137.

Seamster didn’t get any real hint from the first-ever winter either-sex season held last January that the spring harvest would be way off. He was a little surprised that hunters took less than 200 birds during the weeklong season that was open in nine counties along the Virginia border. He was even more surprised that hunters took as many gobblers as hens, and that instead of using the traditional fall tactics of finding and breaking up flocks, then calling birds back, a lot of hunters went to areas where they’d seen flocks of birds during the deer season and waited in ambush, holding off and taking only gobblers.