For roughly 100 years, there were no wild turkeys in New Hampshire. Though they were once native to the state, New Hampshire’s turkeys disappeared because of unregulated hunting and habitat loss in the mid-1800s.
But 50 years ago, wildlife officials reintroduced wild turkeys back to New Hampshire. Now, those birds are thriving statewide.
New Hampshire Fish and Game have been keeping an eye on them ever since. Dan Ellingwood is the agency's Turkey Project Leader. He spoke with NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa about the success of reintroduction and how wild turkeys are faring in New Hampshire now.
Transcript
Why did local and federal wildlife officials decide to reintroduce wild turkeys to New Hampshire?
Turkeys, of course, as you mentioned, were once native to New Hampshire. So I think there was an intrinsic value and interest in bringing this native population back to the landscape.
How did officials pick which out-of-state flocks to reintroduce here in New Hampshire? Where did the turkeys come from?
The flock of turkeys that were successfully reintroduced to the state came from southwest New York, where there's a similar landscape [and] similar climatic conditions. This was a second attempt in 1975, 50 years ago now.
A couple of years previously, in 1969, there was actually an unsuccessful attempt at reintroduction from a flock out of West Virginia. That flock was introduced to Pawtuckaway State Park, but due to severe winter conditions, it ultimately didn't establish.
In this first turkey reintroduction effort, we actually did a bit of a trade with them, didn't we?
That flock of birds came out of West Virginia in exchange for 25 fishers that came from New Hampshire as a part of West Virginia's efforts to reestablish fishers.
So after the turkeys were released back into the wild here, what was next for state biologists and wildlife officials to maintain the population?
The population took hold in the town of Walpole in southwest New Hampshire. It slowly grew, and over the next 20 years, biologists, spearheaded by then-turkey biologist Ted Walski and with support from the National Wild Turkey Federation, continued to trap and relocate birds across the state from that original nucleus of birds in southwest New Hampshire. Similar actions were taking place in our neighboring states, which combined accelerated the growth and distribution of birds across the state.
So when they start having success in a certain area, a wildlife official will take a couple of [turkeys] and move them somewhere else in the state to expand?
Yeah. Between 1975 and 1995, approximately 15 to 20 occurrences of additional translocations within the state occurred.
Can you give us a bit of a recap, number wise, of the wild turkey population over the past 50 years? Where did we start? Where are we now? And what does that tell us about how the turkeys are faring over the decades?
So [a] dramatic acceleration in growth of the population, of course. Where we were in 1975, starting at zero with a flock of 27 birds brought to the state, [there was] rapid growth over the next 50 years. Currently, the population is largely stable, and our estimates are about 45 to 50,000 turkeys statewide.
Wow.
And the story is similar across many parts of the U.S.
What does that mean for people who are interested in wild turkey hunting?
The first hunting season post-reintroduction occurred in 1980 and that was a highly regulated season. As turkey populations have grown, there's been increased opportunity for regulated take of wild turkeys.
I'd say there's probably no better way to understand a wild turkey than to spend time in the woods on their home turf, observing them and pursuing them. You certainly gain another level of appreciation for how capable they are, how perceptive they are [and] how wary they are.
There's also a new wild turkey research project coming out this winter that you're leading. What are you going to do? And what are you hoping to find out from this project?
This project is going to be a collaboration with support from the National Wild Turkey Federation. It's going to consist of three consecutive winters of turkey trapping statewide. We're going to trap and leg band those turkeys. That data is going to be used to measure harvest mortality rates as a key component of annual gobbler survival. And it's going to inform some of our ongoing population monitoring. It’ll be probably the first real research that’s been done with turkeys over the last 20 years here in New Hampshire.
