By Dan Kibler

When I think about the areas of North Carolina that have traditionally been the hottest for wild turkeys, a handful of counties comes to mind: Caswell, Ashe, Alleghany, Wilkes and Person. For years, they have had the best habitat and the most birds of any areas in the Tar Heel State.

But according to the list of counties with the largest turkey harvests (according to the annual harvest figures gathered by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission), some new names are moving toward the head of the list.

And that's the kind of trend that gives Mike Seamster, the commission's biologist in charge of gobblers, hens, jakes and jennies, a warm feeling when he's seated in front of his computer. By looking at harvest trends over a period of years, combined with restocking efforts and poult production numbers, Seamster can just about predict when an area's turkey population is about to bust open like a kernel of popcorn.

He was right on several years ago when he pointed to Foothills counties such as Burke, Rutherford and McDowell as future turkey hotspots. Ditto some of the counties along the Roanoke River - Northampton, Halifax and Bertie, to be exact. He had a good idea about the season when the birds from the northwestern corner of the state - Ashe, Alleghany and Wilkes - would spread out and inhabit neighboring counties like Stokes and Surry, Watauga and Davie.

And a couple of years ago, he correctly predicted that birds from Caswell County, North Carolina's all-time best turkey county, would spread out and make Rockingham and Person counties into top gobbler destinations.

Rick Longworth of Clemmons shows off a fine Alleghany County gobbler. Photo by Dan Kibler

So what's next? Well, Seamster isn't about to make any predictions anytime soon. The state pretty much finished its wholesale restocking of turkeys several years ago, so there are no counties ready to burst onto the scene with tremendous first-year numbers. In 99 of 100 counties, the month-long spring gobbler season will begin next month, and the first-ever January season will be history in a handful of counties by the time this magazine hits newsstands and mailboxes around North Carolina.

Almost certainly, Seamster says, the harvest will finally break the 10,000 mark. North Carolina hunters have recorded record harvests in 18 of the past 20 seasons, and last season's increase of 4.5 percent (to 9,862 birds) was relatively small compared to past seasons. An even smaller increase, around 2 percent, is all it will take to push the harvest into five figures.

Although turkey populations and harvests are growing and at the highest levels they've been in perhaps 400 years, there is a small dark cloud amongst all this silver lining.

That cloud produced the rainy, cool spring of 2003. The rain and cold weather that swept across the state for six weeks, beginning in the middle of May, appears to have significantly depressed the poult survival rate across the state.

Last spring's male poults will be this season's jakes. Hunters will therefore see fewer jakes in the woods this spring in most of North Carolina.

"The jake part of the harvest will be down, but that doesn't make up the bulk of our harvest anyway," Seamster said. "In most places in the state, we've got about 85 percent adult birds in the harvest. A year later, that's when a poor hatch will tend to show up in the harvest, when those birds are (2-year-old) gobblers."

That's because a high percentage of adult turkeys taken by hunters are 2-year-old birds. A year from now, the small hatch of 2003 will mean fewer adult toms for hunters.

Seamster said that last year's hatch will probably go on record as one of North Carolina's poorest ever. Until they reach about two weeks of age and shed their down for flight feathers, young turkeys are tremendously susceptible to catching cold and dying if they are exposed to an extended period of cool, wet weather. Those last three words describe perfectly the entire spring of 2003, and preliminary results from last summer's brood survey indicate that the weather took a huge bite out of poult production.

Usually, survival of around two poults per hen is considered a good hatch. Three poults per hen is the kind of hatch that will send the turkey population in an area skyrocketing. Seamster said that the 2003 hatch will probably wind up at around one poult per hen or slightly lower.

"Overall, it's going to be a bad year; it's not a total bust, but it's way down," he said. "There were lots of hens seen without any poults at all. There were some pretty good broods seen in some areas here, there and yonder, but there was no pattern to it. Those would have been either early or late hatched birds, or birds that hatched off and just happened to make it. A lot of those poults were inundated by that wet weather."

So without a big bump from a new crop of turkeys, Seamster had to resort to a pretty reliable and accurate predictor when looking at the 2004 season - habitat. Good habitat means good hunting, in almost all cases, because the state's best turkey habitat has been full of turkeys for years.

"I think, strictly habitat-wise, the Piedmont and Foothills portions of the state probably have the best mixture of upland hardwoods and open land, pastures for brood land," Seamster said. "When you get into the far west, to Macon, Graham, Swain and Transylvania counties, we feel like certainly, the brood range is a limiting factor. In our eastern counties, we don't have a lot of good winter range, upland hardwoods and mast-producing hardwoods.

"The Piedmont and Foothills have an ideal mixture of brood range and winter range; that's why we're seeing places like Ashe and Alleghany and other Foothills counties come along like they have. And the only limiting factor in some Piedmont counties is nothing more than people. You get into counties like Guilford and Forsyth that have gorgeous turkey land, but there are lots and lots of people."

The harvest in the northwestern mountains was off 13 percent last year, and Ashe and Alleghany counties, which have been in the top five in overall harvest almost since the commission began keeping records in the mid-1970s, fell out of the top 10. Wilkes County, No. 2 in 2002, had a 20 percent drop; Watauga County was off 10 percent and Stokes off almost 15 percent. Seamster doesn't have a good explanation for an area he has always said has the most turkeys per square mile in the state.

"There are still plenty of birds up there the guys tell me; and Dowd Bruton, who used to work for us and is now a regional biologist for the National Wild Turkey Federation, tells me there are gobs of birds out there all over the place," Seamster said. "So it's kind of strange to see the harvest go down - at least the reported harvest. It makes me wonder.

"Looking at it over time, we've seen the harvest fluctuate like that from year to year. It will be down one year and up the next - bouncing all over the place. I don't know how to explain it, especially in some of our far western mountain counties. They'll kill 50 or 60 one year, 30 the next, then 70 the next, then back down to 35. It doesn't have anything to do with the hatch, so it's hard to explain. Sometimes, rainy Saturdays are probably as good an answer as anything."

Rain, of course, cuts the turkey harvest on any given day because the large majority of hunters have a harder time calling turkeys in on a rainy day. A county that experiences a couple of rainy Saturdays at key points in the season can have a reduced harvest even if the turkey population is growing.

Ashe, Alleghany, Stokes and Surry counties are all relatively small, and still, their harvests are among the best in the state in terms of turkeys killed per square mile. In fact, all four were judged to have enough birds to be part of the experimental weeklong season that debuted this past January. A total of 729 turkeys were taken in those four counties last spring. Neighboring Watauga added 157, and 329 birds were taken in Wilkes, which hit an all-time high in 2002 with 408.

Based on past harvests, the northwestern area may be most affected in terms of harvest this year by last spring's reproductive failure. Across the state, adult gobblers make up only 15 percent of the overall harvest, but in the northwestern corner of the state, the percentage rises to almost 33 percent.

"In some of our counties where jakes make up 30 to 40 percent of the harvest, the reproductive failure could impact the harvest a little bit this year," Seamster said. "In a lot of the western Foothills and northwestern Piedmont, our hunters tend to harvest a lot of jakes. One thing I have seen is, that in newly opened areas, inexperienced hunters, maybe out there hunting for the first year, they're tickled to death to kill a jake and they won't hesitate. In other areas that have had turkeys for decades, like Caswell, even when the harvest was lower, hunters have tended not to shoot jakes."

The most productive area last spring was the northern Piedmont, those counties just to the east that hug the Virginia border. They occupied four of the top five spots in total harvest led, as usual, by Caswell County, the heart of North Carolina turkey country, with 475 birds killed. Granville was second with 339, and Person and Rockingham tied for fourth with 296 turkeys each.

"We made a couple of releases in Granville County - one in the southern end and one over in the northwestern end - and there were already some birds moving in from Virginia and from the western border, and it was just a matter of them getting a foothold all across the whole county, then getting a couple of good years of reproduction," Seamster said. "We haven't really stocked Rockingham. We put one release in the northwestern corner of that county back in the '80s, and the birds have been slowly building up there. There have always been birds on the eastern side of Rockingham, and it's a fairly large county as well. There have been a few birds across the county, and their numbers have slowly started climbing over the years. More recently, in the late 1990s, it has really started jumping, when the birds from both sides met in the middle.

"I would expect to see Person, Rockingham and Granville stay up there, now that they've gotten there. They're all still pretty rural counties, with a good mixture of open brood range and wintering range. They're going through what Ashe and Alleghany did about 10 years ago when they jumped up so much."

Caswell County had a harvest of better than two birds per square mile last season, and the Caswell Game Lands remain among the most productive public-hunting areas in the state. Last season, hunters took 38 turkeys off the game lands. Public hunting opportunities are nil in Rockingham, but Granville shares the Butner-Falls of Neuse Game Lands with Wake County, and 18 birds were taken there last season, and the Person Game Lands contributed another 23 turkeys.

Seamster also likes Vance County on the eastern end of the northern Piedmont, but says it doesn't get as much attention because its relatively small area keeps the overall harvest numbers down. In 2003, hunters took 115 birds out of 160 square miles of habitat, a percentage that is a match for most of the state.

"Vance is a real small county, and the lake (Buggs Island/Kerr Lake) takes up a lot of it," Seamster said. "It surprised me a little that it's jumped to over 100 birds, but it's an area that has a lot of birds, and I would expect it to continue to do well - I just don't ever expect the harvest to be over 200 or 300 like Granville or Person.

"Next to it, Warren is a fairly good-sized county, and we've released a lot of birds down there - we made several releases - but a lot of that county has been heavily timbered over the past 10 years; it's really been hammered. There are still some timbered drainages, and that's where we've released birds - where we've got the hardwoods along the drainages."

Seamster has always been excited about the western Piedmont and Foothills counties that were heavily stocked with birds in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Counties like Rutherford, Burke and McDowell have not let him down, with extremely good harvests in their first half-dozen years of having open seasons.

Last year, Burke was seventh overall with a harvest of 252 birds; Rutherford was 10th with 235 and McDowell was 13th with 206. The three counties have that near-perfect mixture of upland hardwoods, especially in the higher elevations, and good, open brood range. And all three have extensive public-hunting areas, including the South Mountains and Dysartsville Game Lands and the Pisgah National Forest. Hunters took 63 birds on public hunting areas in Burke County last year, 54 in McDowell and 20 in Rutherford - which has only the two game lands and no national forest land.

Seamster was prepared for drops in the harvest last year along the Roanoke River, which has some of the best turkey habitat in the eastern half of the state. Much of the fertile bottomland hardwoods was flooded last spring during the extremely wet weather, so Northampton's 20 percent drop (to 255 birds, sixth in the state) could be understood. Halifax was eighth overall with 247. "A lot of that has to do with the Roanoke River," Seamster said. "When it gets out of its banks, it puts a lot of water on a lot of great hunting territory - probably the best hunting territory in that portion of the state. It may not have directly impacted the birds, but it would certainly have impacted the hunters, and it may impact reproduction for this season."

Montgomery and Anson counties are among the most productive areas in the southern Piedmont, with extensive public land in both. The neighboring Sandhills area has not produced a lot of turkeys, but it hasn't had an open season for very long.

Both the extreme western mountains and eastern Coastal Plain have habitat that, in many areas, lacks high-quality winter range for turkeys. In the western mountains, the open brood range that allows for tremendously productive year-classes is missing, even though there are plenty of hardwood forests that make up the turkeys' winter range. Down east, it's the opposite. There's plenty of open land, much of it under cultivation, but a lack of mature hardwoods is a problem.

The top-producing counties in the western mountains include Madison (177 birds in 2003), Buncombe (175), Yancey (156), (Cherokee (129), Macon (102), Mitchell (86), Haywood (77), Graham (76) and Polk (76). The lure of those areas, however, is the tremendous amount of public land in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests. The game lands portion of the harvest in some counties is over 50 percent; for the entire area, it is around 30 percent.

Down east, turkey populations have only been established, and seasons have only been open, for a handful of years. The best hunting seems to be centered in two areas: those counties along the Roanoke and Chowan river basins (Northampton, Halifax, Bertie, Chowan, Hertford, Gates) and counties in the eastern farm belt (Duplin, Sampson, Bladen, Columbus, Jones and Lenoir).