"I see many counties like those," Seamster said. "They are in the 50 to 100 range right now, and the population is still growing rapidly. If you put a percentage on it, it's a pretty good percentage of growth. You'll see the population continue to grow, and the harvest will probably continue to grow over the next five to 10 years."

Besides the northern Piedmont and the northwestern mountains, the area with the best combination of current population and harvest levels and potential for growth are those counties along the Roanoke River. Two of the best counties in North Carolina are Halifax and Northampton -- by sheer coincidence, the Nos. 1 and 2 counties in terms of total deer harvest. Hunters took 264 turkeys in Halifax County last season, ranking sixth in the state. Northampton produced 227 birds to finish 10th. Their neighbor, Bertie, has had a consistent harvest between the 150 and 200 mark.

"Those river counties have the potential to have Caswell-Alleghany-Ashe kinds of numbers," Seamster said. "We've always had birds along the river, but about 10 years ago, we stocked six sites in Northampton that were away from the river. We found out that when we put birds in close to the river, they really didn't expand away from the river, so we took them to other parts of the county, and they really took off."

Counties in the western North Carolina mountains have had consistent harvest levels for years. Seamster and the commission finished stocking the western third of the state first, and flocks in the remote country have been at consistent levels for the past 10 years. They will never reach the levels of the northwestern mountains or northern Piedmont, Seamster said, because there is a limited amount of brood range, but there is good habitat, and a big portion of it is in the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests.

"We really have some good game lands for wild turkeys: Caswell, Pisgah, Nantahala, certainly the Uwharrie National Forest, the Croatan National Forest, and Thurmond-Chatham up in the northwest corner," Seamster said.

"Some of our permit hunts are really high-quality hunts; some of them are our most popular hunts. If you apply and get picked for one, it's a great hunt to get drawn for."

Those include hunts on the Roanoke River National Wildlife Refuge, the Sandhills Game Lands, the Dupont Game Lands in the western part of the state, and the Butner-Falls of Neuse Game Lands, Jordan Game Lands and Shearon Harris Game Lands near Raleigh.

Seamster fears that a poor hatch for the spring of 2005 might have an effect on the overall harvest this spring, but he doesn't think it will keep it under the 10,000 mark.

Last spring's hatch was the second poorest on record, trailing only a horrible hatch in 2003 that negatively affected the 2004 harvest. Seamster said that statewide the hatch was a poor 1.7 poults per hen. Broken down by area, it was two in the Coastal Plain, 1.5 in the Piedmont and 1.8 in the mountains.

"All three regions were pretty low," Seamster said. "Anything above three poults per hen is considered exception, and around 2.5 is a pretty good year. But you get it down about two, and it's fair at best, and below two, it's poor.

"One thing that contributed was, we had an unusually late spring, and we had some pretty cool, damp weather through the nesting season, especially in the western part of the state," he said. "The weather started breaking up about when the birds were hatching off, and we were hoping that, with things being late, a lot of the hatch would be after the rainy period, but it doesn't appear that it was."