Turkey Time In Kentucky

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Action, money brought American bird back from brink of extinction
By David Burns
Lexington Herald, December 2003

It's almost Christmas, another occasion for turkey, and a good day to express gratitude for the amazing survival of wild turkeys.

Some frontier Kentucky species are extinct. Woodland bison are probably gone forever. Gone, too, are whirling clouds of passenger pigeons and beautiful golden-headed Carolina parakeets feeding in cocklebur patches.

The ungainly wild turkey seems out of place in our modern world. They are America's largest ground-nesting bird and require a lot of forest, 2,000 acres or more. And not just any trees. They must be mature hardwoods -- oak, beech, dogwood, cherry and gum -- 40 years old or more, able to produce the abundant mast that wild turkeys must have to survive.

A century ago, virtually all stands of mature hardwoods had been heavily logged. Lumber companies cut any big tree they could skid down the mountain.

As the trees vanished, so did the turkeys. By 1910, fewer than 30,000 were left. Then, an incredible turnaround.

The Lacey Act of 1900 ended commercial hunting of wild animals. The Weeks Act of 1911 enabled the U.S. government to buy millions of acres of eastern mountain land, mountains that had been chopped clean of wood for railroads, paper, firewood and sawn timber.

With the Depression and migration to cities, marginal farmland began to revert to woody plots. Spontaneous regeneration and Civilian Conservation Corps tree-planting worked together, and hardwood forests began to recover.

The 1937 Wildlife Restoration Act (Pittman-Robertson Act) taxed rifles, shotguns and ammunition, raising revenue to fund wildlife conservation.

The funds enabled wild turkey eggs to be gathered, and poults were hatched and released into the wild. But pen-raised birds were quickly decimated by predation and starvation. Some thought the extinction of wild turkeys was only a matter of time.

Restocking turkeys was not going to be as easy as restocking streams with trout. A few wild turkeys were caught in wooden box traps intended for deer. They were moved to suitable habitat, but they too quickly perished.

The reintroduction of wild turkeys was beginning to look hopeless.

Pearl Harbor put a stop to almost all wildlife management. But after World War II, game managers began to experiment with cannon nets, large nets propelled by black powder, that enveloped entire flocks. The experiments proved that when an entire flock was moved to an area with suitable habitat, the turkeys thrived.

Fueled by a successful strategy -- and Pittman-Robertson money -- wildlife managers began moving more flocks to prime hardwood habitats.

By 1960, after 50 years of regrowth, there was far more habitat than in 1910. The millions of acres of mountain land purchased in 1911 thanks to the Weeks Act had become stands of maturing hardwoods in national forests. Habitat restoration, game laws and systematic restocking resulted in a dramatic recovery. By 1973, when the National Wild Turkey Federation was formed, the population of wild birds had climbed to 1.3 million.

In the 40 years since its founding, the federation has grown into one of the largest conservation organizations in the United States, spending millions to expand wild turkey habitat and to coordinate restocking programs with state wildlife agencies, land owners and hunters.

Today, the range of the American wild turkey is more extensive than it was before Columbus, and the total wild turkey population has climbed to 5.5 million birds.

Wild turkey hunting is now a billion-dollar-a-year industry, with 2.6 million hunters harvesting about 700,000 birds a year.

Wild turkeys have been given a second chance. You don't have to be a nature buff to see this as a sign of hope that the natural environment can be preserved. A second chance may be all that nature needs.

The wild turkey is the bird Ben Franklin considered a better symbol of America than the bald eagle. Its recovery prompts similar hope for elk and moose, for osprey and falcons, for river otter and sea otter, and for bears, wolves, bobcats and cougars

If we take our boot off Mother Nature's neck, the old lady will jump to her feet. Ease the pressure on natural systems, and wild turkeys and other species can and will survive. Some, like whitetail deer and beaver, could even become a nuisance. (Where are Kentucky's long hunters now that we need them?)

The return of wild turkeys is a message of hope about the future, and a good story for "turkey time" at Christmas.

Give Kentucky forests a chance, and much of the natural wonder of old Kentucky will be here for us and future generations.

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David Burns of Washington, D.C., is a member of the board of the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust.