By Larry Brown

How are Iowa turkeys doing? Well, would you believe that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources is actually concerned that there may be too many in some areas? (Nope - that's not a misprint!)

Suffice it to say that as far as Hawkeye State turkey hunters are concerned, the news could hardly be better. During the spring 2003 season, Iowa hunters harvested nearly 22,000 gobblers - a new record. And nearly half the hunters (45.4 percent, to be exact) were successful. While there are states (mostly south of us, and with a lot more timber than we have) that have more turkeys than we do, we're right at the top when it comes to hunter success. In fact, many of the more-noted turkey states have never approached our 45 percent success rate.

Hawkeye State turkey hunting is a much bigger success story than even the experts ever anticipated. Let's take a quick look back at the history of turkeys and turkey hunting in Iowa, and then we'll get down to the nuts and bolts of how things are shaping up for 2004.

Two factors made a big impact on our native turkey population. First, there were no hunting regulations in the 1800s; settlers killed the birds year 'round for food. Second, the settlers cleared much of the timber as they began to carve their small farms out of the wilderness that was 19th century Iowa. By 1956, the IDNR estimated that only 2.6 million acres of timber remained in the state, and much of that was unsuitable for turkey habitat, owing to overgrazing. But by then, the turkeys had been substantially absent from the state for some 50 years anyway. Nevertheless, the IDNR had been successful in increasing white-tailed deer numbers (the first modern season was held in the early 1950s), and their biologists thought they might be able to restore turkeys as well.

Photo by Bruce Ingram

Initial attempts to restore the turkey in Iowa involved pen-raised birds released into the wild; they didn't survive to reproduce. Later restoration attempts were made with birds captured in the wild. Initially, these involved either the Rio Grande or Merriam's subspecies, which are Western birds. Unable to adapt to Iowa habitat, they too perished.

Successful restoration began in 1966, when eleven birds of the eastern subspecies, captured in Missouri, were released in Iowa. The first release took place in Shimek State Forest in extreme southeastern Iowa. This was followed by a release in Stephens State Forest. By 1974, it was estimated that bird numbers had increased to about 500 in both forests.

Since 1971, Iowa's turkey population has been high enough that the IDNR has been able to trap them and transplant them to other areas within the state. In fact, since 1980, they've been sufficiently numerous that the IDNR has been able to trade them to other states for prairie chickens, grouse and river otters. All across the state today, the IDNR has concluded, there are turkeys wherever the habitat is capable of supporting them.

The history of modern turkey hunting began 30 years ago this spring, in 1974. That year, just 300 licenses were issued for three zones, and 102 gobblers were harvested. The three zones were Shimek State Forest, Stephens State Forest, and the extreme northeast corner of the state.

Iowa held its first fall season in 1981. About 2,000 licenses were issued - good for any turkey rather than just gobblers, as in the spring season. The hunter success rate was about 47 percent.

In the fall of 2002, the last year for which data are available, there were nearly 14,000 turkey licenses issued; the hunter success rate was about 49 percent.

For the lowdown on our turkey flock, I spoke with Todd Gosselink, the IDNR's forest wildlife biologist and the man in charge of our turkey program. As you might imagine from what you've read so far, he's very optimistic about the future of turkeys and turkey hunting in Iowa.

"We estimate the total turkey population in Iowa to be about a quarter of a million birds," he said. "Everyone seems to be seeing more birds."

That got us to the part about Iowa possibly having too many turkeys. "Especially in the winter, you can see some really big flocks - maybe up to hundreds of birds," said Gosselink. "People are used to seeing flocks of dozens of turkeys, but not huge bunches like that.

"It ends up causing concern. People think the birds are nothing but a nuisance, and some landowners become concerned about crop depredation. From the studies we've done, however, turkeys don't seem to have much impact on corn. They don't knock the stalks down like deer and raccoons do. They will eat the waste grain off the ground, but that's not a problem for the farmers, anyhow. They can have an impact on some specialty crops, like ginseng and strawberries, but we don't raise much of either of those here in Iowa.

"It's more a case of educating the public than anything else," he observed. "They get the perception that there are so many turkeys that they're impacting the crops, and usually that's not true."

Of course, one of the major problems in this misperception is that where there are a lot of turkeys, there are usually a lot of deer, too - and raccoons. The turkeys end up taking the blame for damage caused by other animals.

However, one thing about turkeys and agricultural crops is true: If it weren't for our farmers, we would not have nearly as many turkeys as we do. Original estimates by the IDNR were that we might harvest 1,000 or so birds per year. Obviously, from the numbers given earlier, we've gone way beyond that!

The reason for that original conservative estimate is that turkey density in many other states is controlled by the food supply. In a state with a lot of woods and not a lot of farmland, the birds have to subsist almost entirely on the mast that they find in the forest. While Iowa turkeys do indeed eat mast, they almost all live close enough to farms to eat waste grain. Because they have this readily available additional source of food, our turkeys exhibit densities much higher than those in most other states. Some of the other states may have more birds total than we do because they have more timber, but we have far more per square mile of timber because of the corn and other food our birds can find.