Green Space

Dear EarthTalk: How are wild turkeys faring in the U.S.? Occasionally I'll see some crossing the road, but how well could they be doing with all the development going on around them?

No one can be sure how many millions of wild turkeys roamed what was to become the continental United States when the Puritans dined on them at the first Thanksgiving in 1621 near Plymouth Rock, but there were obviously enough of the birds to make them easy prey. By the late 1700s turkeys across the frontier were being harvested with reckless abandon. The food shortages that accompanied the Civil War accelerated demand for wild turkeys, and their numbers started to dwindle to startlingly low levels.

Caption: By the early 1900s, only 30,000 wild turkeys roamed the continental U.S., having been exterminated across almost half their former range. Today, as many as seven million roam the countryside across every U.S. state except Alaska . Photo courtesy: emagazine.com/Vicki DeLoach, Flickr.

But things started to turn around for wild turkeys when Congress passed the landmark Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act (Pittman-Robertson Act) in 1937, which placed an excise tax on guns, ammo and other hunting gear. A portion of the billions of dollars raised from the law have been and continue to be allocated toward restoring wildlife habitat across the country.

By 1959, wild turkey numbers jumped topping half a million birds across the U.S. A 1973 wild turkey census by the then newly formed National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) turned up something like 1.3 million birds.

Turkey hunting is traditionally an autumn pursuit, culminating at Thanksgiving, of course, but each state has its own laws regarding when and where turkey hunting is allowed.

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