As we look ahead to meeting the challenges of declining turkey populations, it’s not a bad idea to look back. I can remember life before turkeys, and it’s nowhere near as good as life with turkeys. While I was growing up in Iowa, if you saw a deer, you told people about it. If you shot a deer, you were a local celebrity. But if you saw a turkey, you were hallucinating, because there had not been turkeys in this state nor in many others since 1910.
Attempts to release game-farm turkeys in the 1920s had failed, as introductions of pen-raised birds usually do. Cannon nets, invented in 1948 and first used successfully in South Carolina in 1951, made live-trapping flocks of wild turkeys possible. Cannon-netting spread across the country as flocks recovered. By the time I reached young adulthood, I was aware that there were turkeys in Missouri and even a few in southern Iowa, and the birds were spreading in my direction. Turkeys were scarce but huntable in my area when I applied for my first tag in 1987.
Turkey trappers waited in blinds over piles of bait. After a successful shot, they packed live turkeys into boxes, each bird in its own cardboard box that was, by design, such a snug fit that the bird couldn’t move and hurt itself trying to get out. This part I saw first-hand in the late 80s, because I had convinced the Iowa DNR that our farm would make a great turkey-release site. Ours was one of the very last watersheds in the state without birds, and our farm held plenty of timber. The biologist who came out to see it liked the location, the habitat, and the hill overlooking a small valley. He told me the best release sites included a high spot so they could aim the turkeys at the opposite hill.
On the day of the release, a pickup with 17 boxes holding 17 turkeys trapped that morning in southern Iowa three hours away drove up the hill. And, just as the biologist said, each one, upon release, took a running start, launched, and flapped and glided across the valley into its new home. From that stocking, turkeys spread for miles up and down the Old Man’s Creek watershed, as the DNR hoped.
With the state now completely stocked, Iowa, along with other states that had finished restocking, switched to trapping and trading turkeys to other states for river otters and other animals in need of restoration. And, the National Wild Turkey Federation ran a successful program that allowed states to legally “sell” turkeys to other states, which otherwise was a Lacey Act violation. The NWTF acted as broker, receiving cash donations from the state getting turkeys, and giving cash grants to the states transferring turkeys. That grant money then went toward buying more public turkey habitat. It was a win for everyone while it lasted, and it lasted until virtually all suitable habitat in the United States had turkeys.
Meanwhile, having called to and shot the very first turkey I ever saw a couple of years earlier, I had struggled to get on another. I was even wondering if turkey hunting was really for me until 1990, when the DNR decided birds were well enough established that we could hunt them on our place. One May morning in 1990, I sat down against a wide soft maple in the creek bottom of our farm and listened to two toms gobble on the roost across the creek. At dawn, they pitched from the branches and slanted down across the creek, practically landing in gun range and strutting the rest of the way right to me, a sight no one could have possibly seen on the spot for the past 80 years. As the birds walked down the barrel of the Winchester Model 12 braced on my knee, I picked one, and set the bead below the white head that seemed to glow in the early morning gloom. I pulled the trigger at 25 yards. My springs, like so many other people’s springs across the county, were never the same after that.