Thanksgiving turkeys are abundant this time of year. But their wild brethren — the less plump variety strutting around the edge of forests — are less plentiful, especially in East Texas where researchers and state officials have spent decades trying to bolster their numbers.
Their efforts have run the gamut: they’ve traded armadillos for turkeys. They’ve planned “super stocking” events. And in recent years, they’ve even started adopting troublesome turkeys found strutting around other states’ airports.
“We get a lot of problem birds,” said Jason Hardin, the wild turkey program leader for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “Birds that upset other people. But once we put them on the landscape, they seem to do fine in East Texas.”
East Texas was once home to hundreds of thousands of turkeys. But unregulated hunting and logging, which removed the trees where turkeys sleep and hide from predators, dwindled the population to just 100 in the 1940s.
Various efforts have boosted that to between 3,000 and 5,000 East Texas turkeys. But there are only a few self-sustaining groups, prompting Hardin and others to analyze past efforts as they bring a couple hundred new birds to the area each year.
“We don’t want to be continually going in and putting more birds,” he said. “We want them to be a self-sustained population.”
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Roughly 10,000 wild turkeys were released in East Texas over 25 years.
“It was successful in that we now, today, have a wild turkey (hunting) season in 12 counties in East Texas,” Hardin said. “But we stocked 54 counties. We released about 10,000 birds, and we don’t even think we had that many in East Texas today. So it was successful, but nowhere near as successful as we had hoped.”
The department’s current effort is building upon that restocking push. In 2007 and 2008, Stephen F. Austin State University and Texas A&M University found that many of the 10,000 turkeys had been released to landowners who promised to be good stewards but did not necessarily have the proper habitat for these wild birds.
Stephen Webb, a wildlife scientist with Texas A&M University’s Natural Resources Institute, also noted that a lack of habitat management can hurt turkey populations. Turkeys like to live on the edge of forests where they can access trees to roost in and open landscapes to forage and build nests. These open areas can become overgrown if not properly managed. And with much of the state being private land, this cost often falls on landowners.
There’s more, so read the rest. I for one did not know that there are two different species of wild turkey in Texas – the one native to East Texas is the one with a low population, while the Rio Grande Valley variety is quite plentiful, mostly in Central Texas. There’s some research going on to see how that species might fare in East Texas. The national population is less now than it had been, so importing birds to restock is not as viable, so we’ve got to figure this out for ourselves. I hope we can do it.