For the past half-dozen or so years, a handful of counties have dominated the annual harvest figures. Caswell County is probably North Carolina's best-known county for wild turkeys -- the Caswell Game Lands are probably the most productive public acres in North Carolina, at least in terms of the number of birds killed per square mile.

Caswell was the top-producing county from the time the commission started keeping score in the early 1970s through 2003. Its harvest broke the 400 mark on several occasions, but the past two years, Caswell has taken a back seat to Wilkes County, which led the state last year with a harvest of 334, compared with 320 for Caswell.

The two counties, however, are perfect representatives of the two best areas in North Carolina for turkeys -- the northern Piedmont and northwestern mountains. There's little doubt in Seamster's mind that the two areas have the best turkey habitat and the heaviest flocks. The habitat consists of brood range -- a combination of open pasture land and woodlands that provide plenty of forage for young turkeys -- plus heavily wooded areas that offer turkeys some measure of protection.

Wilkes and its two neighbors to the north -- Ashe and Alleghany counties -- have long been among the top producers in North Carolina. Seamster, at one time, believed that Ashe and Alleghany had the best turkey populations in the state, but their total harvests, even though close to the top in the state, were somewhat limited because both counties are relatively small in area and have very little public land open for hunting.

Adding to the area's reputation in the past five or six years has been Stokes County, which has jumped into the top five statewide in total harvest, finishing third last year with 306. Three other northwestern counties -- Watauga, Surry and Yadkin -- all had harvests of at least 130 turkeys.

Even more impressive over the past handful of years has been Caswell and the northern Piedmont, one of the areas that had a smattering of turkeys even in the early 1970s. The most productive areas are north of the I-40/ I-85 corridor, away from the state's most populated urban areas, such as Greensboro, Burlington and Raleigh-Durham.

Besides Caswell's 320 birds taken last spring, Granville ranked fourth in the state with 305 birds, Rockingham was fifth with 291 and Person was eighth with 241.

Seamster doesn't expect his big harvest increase to come in the northwestern corner of the state or in the northern Piedmont.

"I think you'll probably see the big counties level off a little," he said. "They'll bump up and down a bit, depending on the level of the hatch, but I don't anticipate seeing those counties continue to have big increases. Obviously, we've seen some of that over the past few years, but we're reaching the carrying capacity in some of those counties."

Seamster's hopes for a 10,000-bird harvest are based on two things: a very successful hatch in the spring of 2004 and the growth and expansion of turkey populations in counties that have not had open seasons for very long.

The commission spent much of the 1980s and 1990s moving and restocking turkeys into areas with suitable habitat but not resident population. Last year, for the first time, all 100 counties in North Carolina had an open spring gobbler season.