Want to know a place where every turkey hunter has nearly a 50-50 chance of killing a tom turkey that’s 5 to 10 pounds heavier than the national average?

To the surprise of many Iowa turkey hunters, that place is our own Hawkeye State. Most Iowa hunters have never hunted turkeys outside of the state’s borders, and simply assume that all turkey hunting is like Iowa’s turkey hunting.

Wrong.

John Burk, Midwest region biologist for the National Wild Turkey Federation, previously worked for the NWTF in Texas. He has observed that Iowa’s turkeys are not the national norm.

“In Texas, if you shot an eastern wild turkey, you’d be happy to get a 20-pounder, and the average is probably around 15 pounds,” Burk said. “In Iowa, eastern wild turkeys average around 20 pounds, and the big ones run 25 pounds and larger.”

Iowa’s turkeys not only grow larger than do turkeys in many other states, but are often more populous per square mile of suitable habitat as well. When biologists refer to the “carrying capacity” of an area, they mean the area’s potential to provide adequate food and habitat for a particular game species.

“Iowa’s carrying capacity for turkeys is very high,” remarked Iowa Department of Natural Resources turkey management biologist Todd Gosselink. “With all the cropland we have, nutrition is never an issue. The only limiting factor is habitat, and turkeys have turned out to be much more flexible with habitat than anybody every expected.”

The surprising flexibility of the Hawkeye State’s wild turkeys has been well documented. Once believed to be denizens of the deepest forest, and therefore limited to the small areas of Iowa that have large blocks of contiguous timber, turkeys surprised wildlife managers by flourishing in narrow bands of timber along rivers, brushy draws and even small isolated woodlots.

“I’d say that 95 percent of Iowa that has turkey-favorable habitat now has turkeys in it,” Gosselink said. “Most of that 95 percent could carry more turkeys than it already has, so our total turkey population is still increasing, though maybe not as rapidly as it did during the ’80s and ’90s.”

Turkey numbers are so strong in some areas of the state that Gosselink has noticed that new ways of measuring turkey hunting success are being used. Hunters used to consider whether or not they got a turkey. Then, after the population got large enough that it was easier to get a turkey, they began comparing sizes of birds, he has observed.

“In the past couple years I’ve heard guys comparing notes on how long it took them to get their birds,” he said. “Guys talk about getting their birds 30 minutes after they left their truck, 20 minutes, even 10 minutes after they started hunting. Personally, I’d just as soon spend a day or two getting my bird, because I like the time in the woods, but it’s certainly a compliment to our turkey hunting opportunities that guys can gauge their hunts by how many minutes it takes them to get a bird.”

WHERE THEY ARE

Whether you’re in search of a turkey dinner, a trophy tom, or just a gobbler of some sort, your search will start near trees. While turkeys are quite content to feed in open grain fields or grasslands, they seem genetically programmed to roost in trees.

“It doesn’t take a big tree to provide a roost, so you can find them along any river or creek with even small trees, especially during the summer,” said Gosselink. “They tend to migrate to tracts of timber during the winter simply to have more shelter from the weather. But in the spring you can find them just about anywhere there are trees.”

That in mind, it’s easy to understand how it happens that Iowa’s best turkey hunting is in northeast, east-central, southern and far western Iowa: Our state’s largest forested areas are there, so that’s where the most turkeys are. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that huntable and locally dense populations of turkeys aren’t present in north-central and northwest Iowa.

“Wildlife biologists joke that north-central Iowa from Mason City down to just north of Ames, is an ‘agricultural desert,’” said Gosselink. “Great farmland, but not the best wildlife habitat. There are turkeys in that area, and there are probably as many per mile of forested habitat as there are in other parts of the state. There just aren’t as many square miles of forested habitat in that part of the state.”