Reply #9: This is the result of HOW wild turkeys are manged. [View All]

My experience is with Pennsylvania NOT Maine, but the whole East Coast underwent a similar deforestation, and reforestation process. This is the key to understanding WHY Turkeys are becoming more and more common since about 1990 throughout the Eastern US. Turkey population has expanded in the Eastern US for two related reasons. First, the change of Rural America land area NOT held by larger farms. Many workers on farms in the 1800s lived on subsidence farms independent of the larger and more productive farms. As Agricultural mechanization these workers were NOT needed and could no longer find work on the larger farms. In Search for work many left the Rural areas and moved to the Cities. No one wanted their Subsistence Farms so they were just abandoned (many NOT even sold for taxes when the taxes came due in the 1920s and 1930s). This abandonment started early (about 1890s) but increased from 1900-1950 (much of it in the 1920s and 1930s). Most of these subsistence farms were NOT wanted by larger farms do to how small the subsidence farms were and hard to combined with other farms.

At the same time of this move by Rural Subsistence workers to the city, you had another set of deforestation occurring throughout the United States. This was logging. Logging had occurred since Colonial times but increased in the years after the Civil War and before 1900. This deforestation caused by the Logging added to the acreage being abandoned after 1900. The actions of these two groups, the abandonment of subsistence Farms AND the Deforestation of Forests on land NOT later used for Agriculture affected how forests changed over the last 100 years.

My father who came of age in the 1930s, hunted a lot of doves, bobwhites etc. When I hunted with him in the 1970s he noted how the population of these birds have DROPPED since his youth. The reason was simple. Bobwhites, doves etc love open abandoned open fields, like the fields abandoned by the subsistence farmers when they moved to the City (and the cut down trees by deforestation). By the 1960s these fields had turned from semi-open fields to second growth timber. Young short trees with plenty of cover. Deer thrived in this type of forest, while Bobwhites declined (and doves survived). Thus in the 1960s you read stories about how they was more deer in the US then had been in 1492. The country as a whole had become deer friendly.

By the 1970s the forest was changing once again, this time to full growth "Mature" Forests. Deer do NOT thrive is such forest, the trees are to tall for the Deer to eat and the trees block sunlight from hitting the forest grown so nothing grows under the trees. A lot of Deer hunters have complained about the drop in deers since the 1960s, and this is why. The forests are no longer as deer friendly as the forests of the 1950s. On the other hand Turkeys thrive, wild Turkeys car fly and eat the seeds the trees produce. Thus the country as a whole do to permitting the forest to mature have produce a much better environment for Turkeys then the country has had since the 1800s. Today you have deer hunters complaining about the lack of Deer to hunt in Pennsylvania. They blame the Game Commission for permitting to many does to be taken in Doe season, they do NOT want to hear it is do to the change in the forest, they notice the increase number of Turkeys and hunt Turkeys and think the Game Commission did a great job on Turkeys, but have a hard time understanding that what made the turkey population to boom also is causing the Deer Population to drop. Turkeys will continue to expand until you see a drop in the acreage kept in Mature Forests. They is talk about increasing logging in Pennsylvania but no one wants a return to what happened in this state in the late 1800s.

The second cause of the Increase in Wild Turkey Population is a change in HOW the State's Game Commission tried to increase turkey population in the wild. In the 1970s a movement among turkey hunting groups began to cut out farm raised wild Turkeys from being released into the wild to be hunted. Such Farm raised turkeys had been produced since 1900 as part of an effort to provide hunters with turkeys to hunt. The problem was being farm raised they were medically treated to make sure they did not die on the farm. When released into the wild they would mix with the actual wild turkeys and spread what ever diseases they had to the Actual Wild Turkeys. The net result was drop in wild turkey population. The Actual Wild Turkeys would get the whatever the farm raised turkeys had and be killed off by the Disease, and the Farm Raised Turkeys were NOT wild enough to survive the Winter. The end result was a drop in the number of Wild Turkeys.

It took over 20 years to get the various State Game Commission to STOP releasing Farm Raised Turkeys. This was done by the early 1980s and you then started to see a slow increase in actual wild turkey population. The Game Commission also adopted a policy of trapping existing wild Turkey in areas where they were plentiful and moving them to areas where Turkeys had existed in historical times, but did not exist in the 1970s. This help speed up the spread of Wild Turkeys.

The above two factors are the biggest reasons turkey population has expanded over the last 30 years. The maturing of the Forests AND the ending of releasing Farm Raised Turkeys. Together this has resulted in the spread of Turkeys to almost everywhere Turkeys were native to in 1492 (Including the City of Pittsburgh, so even urban areas have sizable turkey populations today, something unthinkable in the 1970s).

Side note: Releasing farm raised Turkeys sounded like a good idea in 1900, hatcheries had been growing fish for a while by 1900 and the fish survived much better in the hatcheries then in the wild. Fish commissions them would release the fish for fisherman to catch. No harm seems to occur to wild population of fish, so turkeys, pheasants and other birds were treated the same. It took over 50 years for people to realized it was NOT working and was in fact HURTING. Once that was discovered it took 20 years to get people to STOP demanding Game Commission raise and release Turkeys, and another 20 years for turkeys population to grow so large to prove the harm caused by Farm raised Turkeys. Now they are going into states that have not had a Turkey population to hunt in generations (Maine). Good intentions sometime lead to bad decisions, that is why we have to be careful to what we do. Artificially raising fresh water fish works, but when it came to turkeys such practices lead to DECLINE in the number of Turkeys. The same with other "improvements" once done, the results have to be check to make sure more good is occurring then harm, and important lesson from the above history of Turkeys in the 10th Century.