2011 Turkey Season Forecast

Harvests continue to climb statewide, but some counties are definitely better than others.

If you compared North Carolina’s spring wild-turkey harvest from, say, 20 years ago, with last spring’s county-by-county numbers, one thing would stand out — other than the sheer number of places where gobblers were killed in 2010.

The counties atop last spring’s harvest report were barely on the report back in 1985. Two of them combined for a total of a dozen birds tagged 25 years ago, and one of them didn’t even have an open season — and wouldn’t get one for another decade. Last year, more than 2,000 gobblers and jakes made fatal mistakes within the borders of those five counties, about the same number killed statewide in 1993.

The paths that Northampton, Rockingham, Halifax, Wilkes and Stokes counties took to the top of the heap were different, but alike, at the same time. They were all sites of major restocking programs in the 1980s and 1990s, and although the habitat in the “Fab Five” was great, it was certainly not alike across the board.

Northampton and Halifax counties share the Roanoke River as a boundary, both boasting top-drawer bottomland habitat — vast agricultural plantings of peanuts and soybeans plus old-growth timber in the vast low-lying swamplands.

Rockingham lies in the northern Piedmont, along the Virginia border, a land of rolling hills and creek bottoms, woodlots and clearings. Stokes County shares its eastern border with Rockingham, and that part of the county is quite similar, but the western and northern reaches of the county are more foothills or even mountainous in some places. Even so, the entire county could be described as a patchwork quilt of woodlots and fields.

Wilkes County, the land of Junior Johnson, apple orchards and short-track stock-car racing, is more mountains than foothills, with land along the Blue Ridge escarpment pushing 3,000 feet above sea level.

One thing the “Fab Five” have in common is a distinct lack of public game lands. The great majority of all of the acreage in the five counties is privately held. Another is that when North Carolina’s 2011 spring wild-turkey season opens on Saturday, April 9 — kids get a 1-day jump on April 2 for Youth Day — there’s no reason to think they won’t be at the head of the pack again.

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission has made no changes to turkey regulations for this spring; the daily bag limit remains one bearded bird, and hunters are allowed to tag two birds per season. All turkeys must be registered with the Commission’s 1-800-IGOTONE toll-free, big-game reporting system.

Evin Stanford, a biologist who is the big-game project leader for the Commission, expects this season to unfold like the past two or three — maybe even another record harvest — barring something unforseen such as a weather event.

“We have been setting records the past few years — the harvest was up nine percent last year — and I think this year will be probably be close to last year,” Stanford said. “but when you have a season that’s only five weekends long, if you have bad weather one or two weekends, that can affect harvest numbers.

“I expect the harvest in the coastal plain and piedmont to be about the same as it was last year, but the mountains may be down a little. We had poor reproduction in the mountains in 2009 — the jake harvest was down 27 percent last year — so there will be fewer of the 2-year-old gobblers that are the most vocal. But the reproduction in 2010 was better, so we may have more jakes around, and the harvest may adjust in the direction of jakes.”

Conversely, the hatch was poor last spring in Piedmont counties, so Stanford expects hunters in that part of the state to see fewer jakes this spring, but because the percentage of jakes in the harvest is lower, it shouldn’t affect the harvest negatively until perhaps 2012.

The top five counties last year area all Piedmont or coastal plain, with the exception of Wilkes County, which bridges from foothills to the northwest mountains and has habitat characteristics of both.

The more “traditional” turkey counties — Caswell, Ashe and Alleghany were 1-2-3 every year in harvest for decades — have experienced a steep slide. Caswell was the only one of the three in the top 10 last year, sixth with 333 birds, but the harvest in Ashe and Alleghany in the northwestern mountains has plummetted.

Stanford said that “hunter migration” might have some thing to do with the lower harvests. As the flock has expanded into all 100 counties, avid hunters who for years travelled to Ashe, Alleghany and Caswell to fill their tags no longer need to make the often long drives to those areas.

“With more opportunities available, hunter effort gets spread out,” Stanford said. “Some traditional areas are getting less hunting pressure than they did 10 years ago, but what’s happened in those counties is probably a combination of hunter migration and having fewer birds.

“In some northwestern counties, we’ve had several years of poor productivity, which would affect the population.

“One other thing is, there is a phenomenon being experienced across the Southeast; areas with long-established turkey populations seem to see a decline in productivity, population level and harvest. The are perceptions that populations in some of those areas are down from where they were in the late 1990s, and no one knows why. It’s not a problem just in North Carolina, but in Georgia and South Carolina and Virginia and other Southeastern states.”

So by being late-comers, the Fab Five counties haven’t hit that “wall” yet.

“I really think the increases in the number of turkeys and in the harvest in those areas, most of it is habitat-related,” he said. “Good habitat is conducive to stimulating the growth of turkey populations. It’s driven by good habitat.”

Northampton County

Northampton County is a triangle-shaped chunk of land whose northwestern corner is along the Virginia border on Lake Gaston’s northern shoreline. Its southern border follows the Roanoke River toward the south and east for about 35 miles. It is traversed from west to east by US 158 and north to south by I-95.

For years, Northampton and its southern neighbor, Halifax County, were the top two in overall deer harvest in North Carolina, and the past several seasons, they’ve been in those same spots in the spring wild-turkey harvest.

The first turkey tagged in Northampton County after North Carolina set up mandatory reporting was in 1977; it was another five years before the harvest reached double figures, and it passed the 100 mark in1999. Since 2000, the annual harvest has more than doubled, with 465 turkeys tagged in 2010.

“We always had birds here; we never got totally depleted,” said Gil Cutchin, who operates the 8,000-acre Occoneechee Neck Hunting Lodge on the Roanoke River in Northampton County. “That helped as far as we were concerned. Now, all of the county has them; they added in all around us. They just filled in where they could find good habitat.”

The Commission stocked a handful of sites away from the riverbottom in the 1980s, and Mike Seamster, then the wild-turkey project leader (now retired), said turkeys did a great job expanding away from the river along creeks and other watercourses.

The Northampton harvest really exploded in 2005 and 2006, a couple of years after two excellent spring hatches, and the population has been growing ever since.

“It has been a stable progression,” said Cutchin (252-583-1799). “At one time, they were only along the river — they prefer to be right along the river of creeks, around water. Probably 99 percent of my turkeys roost over the swamp. But people started seeing ’em in places where we hadn’t seen ’em before. They started moving toward higher ground. We’ve seen them adapt to the pines, roosting over dry land, and we had to adjust to that when we hunted ’em. We call it ‘tennis-shoe hunting’ because you don’t need high boots to hunt them.”

Rockingham County

For years, Rockingham County was just a “good neighbor” — to Caswell County, the No. 1 county in North Carolina turkey-hunting annals, at least until the past few years.

Now, the northern Piedmont county that’s wedged between Stokes and Caswell has become one of the turkey-rich areas in all of North Carolina, with the harvest consistently tremendous over the past five seasons.

Last year, Rockingham hunters killed 432 turkeys, tying Halifax County for the No. 2 spot in total harvest. It was the first time the harvest exceeded 400 birds, but the fifth consecutive season in the 300s.

Marshall Collette of Greensboro, a pro staffer for Quaker Boy calls and Mossy Oak camouflage, is intimately familiar with northern Piedmont turkeys, and he’s not surprised that Rockingham has come on like gangbusters.

“The habitat in Rockingham is just like in Caswell, but I don’t think here’s been as much timber cut in Rockingham the past few years as there has been in Caswell,” Collette said. “There were always birds in the eastern and northeastern parts of the county, in pockets, but now they’ve spread over the entire county.”

From a healthy flock near Belews Lake at its “Four Corners” southwestern junction with Forsyth, Stokes and Guilford counties to the extreme northeastern corner where it borders Caswell County and Virginia, turkeys are thriving in Rockingham.

Collette thinks it goes a little deeper than just excellent results from the Commission’s restocking program. He thinks landowners and lease-holders have contributed mightily to the turkeys’ expansion across the county.

“I think the biggest thing that’s happened is a lot of people are doing a whole lot with food plots,” he said. “You’re having to pay so much money now to (lease) land, people are doing a little extra to make sure they get the most out of it.

“You’ve got more people turkey hunting now, and more people taking care of their land, planting stuff that turkeys need.”

Collette also believes the hatches in Rockingham County the past several years have been better, locally, than the overall hatch the Commission has reported.

“Despite what the Commission has reported, I think there have been good hatches in Rockingham the past couple of years,” he said. “I’ve talked to farmers in Rockingham and Caswell who said they saw more little turkeys running around last year than they’d ever seen before.”

Halifax County

The explosion of the turkey population in Halifax County has come as no surprise to David Boyette, who operates Woodstock Guide Service out of Scotland Neck. He believes that conservation programs that pay landowners not to cut field or creek borders have had a positive impact not only on small game such as rabbits and quail, but also on turkeys.

“I believe turkeys, as well as small game, have been helped by some of those programs,” said Boyette (252-826-2514). “They have had a big impact on our turkeys.”

Boyette has been hunting in Halifax County since the 1960s. He operates his guiding business on three farms along the Roanoke River that cover 2,000 acres. Years ago, he said, only one of those farms had turkeys.

“When I was a little boy, starting to hunt around Scotland Neck, there were always birds along the river in the deep swamps. The hunt club I grew up in, there was only one man who turkey hunted, and he killed a bird every two or three years,” he said. “In the last 20 years, it seems like they’ve gotten everywhere. Two of the farms we hunt, you used to never see a turkey, and now you’re seeing more and more birds there everywhere.”

Boyette believes that Halifax, like Northampton across the river, has always had tremendous wildlife habitat, as has been shown by the deer harvest in those counties. Now that turkeys have been restocked across the area, they’re taking advantage of the habitat.

“I think the habitat is a whole lot of it,” he said. “Turkeys around here are just exploding, and it doesn’t seem like they’ve been affected by the coyotes like the rabbits have.

“All of our wildlife here has been exploding. We’ve got as many deer as we can have on the land, and we’ve got turkeys, and now we’re getting hogs.”

Through the 1970s and early 1980s, hunters reported taking a handful of in Halifax each year, according to Commission harvest records. The harvest really took off around 2000 and has been growing steadily ever since, with 432 birds taken last spring — tying Rockingham County for No. 2 on the statewide list.

Wilkes County

Midway between Winston-Salem and Boone on US 421 sits Wilkes County, formerly the moonshine capital of North Carolina, the home of Doc Watson and Junior Johnson, and one of the best counties in North Carolina for just about any outdoor activity.

Wilkes County covers a wide area, from the rolling foothills on the county’s eastern border with Surry and Yadkin counties, to the highcountry where it shares a border with Alleghany and Ashe counties west of the Blue Ridge escarpment (eastern continental divide).

It has been for years one of the overall leaders in deer harvest, and for the past eight or nine years, it’s held the same spot among counties in total spring turkey harvest — fourth in 2010 with 384 toms tagged.

The first turkey was tagged in Wilkes County in 1982, but it was 1988 before the harvest reached double figures and another nine years before 100 birds were taken in a single season. The big jump was between 2000 and 2001, when the harvest jumped from 270 to 400 birds, then 408 in 2002.

Chris Kreh, the Commission’s wildlife biologist for the northwestern corner of the state, said Wilkes County’s big jump came a bit earlier than the other members of the Fab Five, and it’s been steady to slightly lower ever since.

“Wilkes’ harvest has been pretty flat the last few years, but when you look at some of the counties it borders — Ashe, Alleghany and Watauga — they’ve slipped a lot lately, had terrible hatches the past six to eight years,” Kreh said. “Wilkes was way ahead of Stokes 10 years ago. The harvest has stayed up largely because of it’s a big county.”

Wilkes has a big slice of public game lands, the 6,000-acre Thurmond Chatham Game Lands that it shares with Alleghany County on the Blue Ridge escarpment, and Kreh said the flock fills the entire county.

“The amount of mixed habitat is really good,” he said. “You’ve got a percentage of forest and a percentage of fields; it’s really perfect. You get a variety of different habitats packed into a small area, and turkeys do real well in those kinds of places.

“The other thing that helped both Wilkes and Stokes counties is that they got enough turkeys for the flock to really take off,” he said. “If you don’t have birds, you don’t have anything to build on.”

Stokes County

One of the real success stories to be written by the Commission’s restocking program is Stokes County, where there was not even an open season until 1996.

The Commission stocked birds in several areas around the county, including the Sauratown Mountain/Hanging Rock area in the southern end of the county and the area around Sandy Ridge and the Dan River to the north.

“The flock grew from a small population,” Kreh said. “It has been booming in terms of harvest numbers, and that jives with what people I talk with have been seeing.

“I think the whole county had got good numbers of birds, but the single biggest flock is in the Walnut Cove area, around the Dan River — but there are good numbers everywhere. We’ve had them all over the county the past five or six years. There were some pockets then that weren’t filled up, and they started to fill in.”

Kreh said the habitat in Stokes County is as good a mixture of the open “brood range” and wooded “protection” zones as there is in North Carolina. When the flock expanded across the county, birds moved through areas of good habitat.

“Turkeys aren’t tied to rivers and riverbottoms in this part of the state the way they are Down East,” Kreh said. “They tend to move around in areas that have the correct mixture of habitat — interspersed forest and fields — and we’ve got a better mixture of habitat than the do in the eastern part of the state.”

The Stokes County harvest took off two different times, between 1999 and 2002 and against between 2003 and 2006 — both coming roughly two years after some great spring hatches. The past two seasons, the harvest has been 329 and 368 birds, respectively, despite less-than-ideal hatches the previous three springs.