"The soils are good, and where you have mature trees, you'll probably have turkeys. There are many areas with agricultural crops -- corn, soybeans and peanuts -- which provide good food and are attractive to both turkeys and deer.

"When we stocked those other counties along the Chowan River -- Hertford and Gates, for example, we stocked them along the major drainages. The habitat was not quite as good as it was along the Roanoke, but it was still quality habitat and it has everything a turkey needs. As it is in most of eastern North Carolina, that's where the better turkey habitat is. But there is good habitat away from those places."

One person who is tremendously happy with the way turkey populations have grown along the river is Gil Cutchin, who runs the 6,000-acre Occoneechee Lodge near Jackson in Northampton County, about 10 miles downstream from Weldon. He started offering turkey hunting along with deer and quail around 1990, and he's never looked back.

"The hunting is as good as it gets down here," Cutchin said (252/583-1799). "The population has been steadily growing. When I started doing this 16 years ago, there were one or two places you could go in North Carolina if you really wanted to hunt turkeys -- Caswell, and maybe Ashe and Alleghany and a few places in the mountains -- but since that time, our turkey population has been steadily growing."

Cutchin has noticed one thing that Seamster talked about. For years, most of the birds on the series of farms that make up Occoneechee Lodge were all very close to the river, in the extreme lowlands. That's changed in recent years, however.

"Now, you're seeing them in areas they've never been before. There are just as many birds on the other side of the farm now as there are along the river. They're just filling in the holes," he said. "And on the other side of the river, Halifax has really got them. And the Brinkleyville area has plenty of birds."

Although much of the land along the Roanoke remains tied up in large hunt-club leases, there are at least half a dozen hunting lodges like Cutchin's that offer guided turkey hunts, especially on the Northampton County side of the river. And in the 1990s, the commission became the steward for a tremendous amount of acreage along the river in the Bertie-Martin corridor in the form of the Roanoke River Wetlands Game Lands and Roanoke River National Wildlife Refuge.

"Because of the way we acquired much of the property along the river, the agreement we made was for controlled hunting, so we went the permit-only route," Seamster said. "What we were trying to do was provide high-quality hunting to those people who were drawn. Some of those tracts are accessible only by water, and we set up three-day hunts, on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, to try to give people a better chance at taking a bird.