West Virginia's spring gobbler hunters can't seem to catch a break. For three years in a row now, sportsmen have sat silently in the woods and listened in dismay to the sound of fewer and fewer turkeys gobbling.

This year doesn't promise to be much better. A moderate uptick in breeding success should put more gobblers in the woods, but most of them will be jakes. Hunters who prefer longbeards may be in for a long, challenging season.

"Things could definitely be better," said Jim Pack, principal turkey biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR). "We had three bad breeding seasons in a row before last spring, and the success we had last year wasn't nearly enough to make up the difference."

Pack said what turkeys really need is a change in the weather.

"Turkeys are ground-nesting birds," he said. "When the weather is wet and cold, their breeding success falls off sharply. Until we get a dry, relatively warm spring, that's going to continue to be the case."

Photo by Ron Sinfelt

In fact, he added, hunters shouldn't limit their wishes to just one year.

"There's nothing wrong with our turkey population that some good breeding conditions wouldn't cure," he said. "Two or three above-average breeding seasons would put us right back on track."

According to the DNR's annual Brood Survey, the number of turkey poults rose 46 percent as a result of 2004's relatively dry spring weather. That will be great news in 2006, when all those young birds reach sexual maturity and the toms begin gobbling their heads off. In the meantime, however, hunters can expect to encounter long-bearded turkeys about as often as they encounter mossy-racked 10-point bucks.

That's certainly unwelcome news for the 125,000 sportsmen expected to participate in the April 25-May 21 season. Coming off three seasons in which the harvest plunged from a record 17,875 to a disappointing 13,385, an alarming 12,535 and a horrifying 10,461, one can understand their disappointment.

Last year's dismal harvest statistics make it difficult to predict what counties might yield good hunting this season. For years, DNR officials have used a fixed benchmark to separate the exceptional counties from the also-rans: If a county yields at least one gobbler per square mile of habitat, it's considered an upper-tier turkey producer.

Last spring, only four counties met that criterion. Unfortunately for sportsmen, all four are located in the Northern Panhandle and three of them are too small to be considered statistically significant.

To calculate which counties are truly worth looking at, West Virginia Game & Fish considered three criteria -- the counties' 2004 harvest ranking, the counties' 2004 ranking in gobblers killed per square mile, and the counties' relative abundance of public hunting land.

Mason County tops this year's list. Mason's hunters killed 393 turkeys last spring, the most in the state. The county's average of 0.97 birds per square mile ranked fifth. A first-place finish in one category and a fifth-place finish in the other gives Mason an average ranking of 2.5, best among any of West Virginia's 55 counties.

Two large and highly productive public hunting tracts also contribute to Mason's lofty ranking.

The 3,066-acre McClintic Wildlife Management Area (WMA) near Point Pleasant isn't exactly classic turkey territory, but this WMA manages to contain a fine turkey population nevertheless. Only a minor portion of the McClintic property contains the big-woods habitat gobblers seem to prefer. Most of the tract consists of wetlands, grown-over farmsteads and brushy lowlands. The main access roads to McClintic are off state Route (SR) 62, approximately two miles north of Point Pleasant.