The Outdoor Journal by Kyle Carroll

From the mid 1980s to the early 2000s, Missouri saw the great come back of the wild turkey. Through efforts of private landowners, conservation organizations and the Missouri Department of Conservation, wild turkeys returned from near extirpation to every woods in every part of the state. As populations expanded, more and more counties opened to turkey hunting. Total spring harvest of birds reached 40 and 50,000  on a regular basis, topping out at 60,744 in 2004. The season was expanded to three weeks and a full month of hunting was added in the fall as the turkey flock continued to thrive. Missouri was a destination state for turkey hunting much like Iowa and Kansas are for deer hunting today. If you added the total turkey harvest of all the eight states surrounding Missouri, it didn’t equal the number of birds taken each spring in the Show-Me state.

When the final numbers were added up after the spring season this year, Missouri has officially collapsed to about half its former harvest of spring turkeys. This years spring turkey season total harvest during the regular season was just under 32,000. A far cry from where it was 20 years ago.

For some years now, the Missouri Department of Conservation’s position on the great turkey collapse has been that reintroduced populations often peak and then settle into a more sustainable level after predator populations adjust to the new population. That may be true to some extent, but in the case of the wild turkey, we have a ground nesting predator population explosion, mostly unrelated to the turkey returning to the landscape.

In the early 80s, when the turkey populations were expanding rapidly, fur prices were at record highs. A large raccoon pelt would bring $40 in 1980. That would be the equivalent of about a $90 raccoon pelt price today. The result is that in the 1980s and even into the 1990s it was not unusual for 250,000 raccoon pelts to be harvested. Today, that number is around 20,000 pelts harvested a year. That's hundreds of thousands of raccoons that are not being harvested each year, resulting in a 200% increase in the raccoon population. The rise of the raccoon population and the decline of the wild turkey population correspond pretty closely. Predators aren't the only problem that turkeys face, but they are the biggest one at the moment.

Next week we will discuss the Department of Conservation's response and what you can do to address the problem on a local level.