Photo by John Ford

Over the past 30 years, turkey populations have dramatically changed here in the Mountain State. It was not all that long ago when the southern counties south of Interstate 64 contained but a few turkeys. Looking at the spring gobbler harvest data from 1976 is pretty revealing as to how far we have come. In the spring of ‘76, there were four gobblers checked in McDowell Country versus 276 birds checked in for the 2006 season. Fayette County tallied two birds versus 267 birds in 2006. Moving just slightly north, Mason County had one bird checked in ‘76 versus 495 in 2006, which incidentally led the state in spring gobbler harvest.

At that time, the Northern Panhandle counties were just starting to get their initial transplants of wild birds through a trap-and-transfer program. In 1977, I was working and living in Roane County and that spring there were two birds checked in for the entire county. In 2006, there were 294 birds checked in. The bottom line is that finding an area where there are turkeys in the Mountain State is no longer the problem; the problem now is finding an area to hunt where you will encounter a minimal amount of interference from other sportsmen.

It used to be that most of your die- hard spring gobbler hunters would head for the mountain or Eastern Panhandle counties to pursue longbeards. Most of the older turkey hunters remember how it used to be a matter of being able to find a few turkeys. That has changed over the past 30 years to looking for places that have low numbers of hunters.

These days, chances are good you can roll out your front door just about anywhere in the state and find decent numbers of turkeys to hunt. Nonetheless, there are now places in the state that would be fitting of the “sleeper” classification. Those would be areas that have an excellent kill per square mile of area but due to their size probably will not jump off the page at you. Another type of area that I would qualify with this designation would be counties whose turkey population has declined somewhat, as have many of the counties for the past seasons. Despite these declines, these counties may still have good to excellent gobbler kill densities per square mile of area.

Recently retired turkey biologist, Jim Pack’s base line criteria for good gobbler densities is one gobbler killed per square mile of area. That base line criterion is still a good starting point, although with the downward shift in populations due to poor brood survival over the last several seasons, now I would probably drop back to .7 to .9 gobblers killed per square mile of area. In addition, I would look for areas that had excellent harvests four or five years ago, but are starting to rebound rather well from their downward population spiral.

A number of counties out of each district within the state could possibly meet the criteria for “sleeper” counties. Most of the Northern Panhandle counties could all be potential candidates, as they are small in total acreages but still have had decent to excellent harvests even recently. Brooke (1.31 gobblers killed per square mile of area), Hancock (1.56), Marshall (.97) and Ohio (1.26) would all fit the base line criteria. In addition, all four counties have experienced a mild rebound in turkey numbers over the past season.