The turkey harvest in South Carolina was down again for the 2008 hunting season. While hunter success was still good, according to harvest data, the downward trend is certainly not unexpected, according to Charles Ruth, Deer and Turkey Project Supervisor for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR).

South Carolina hunter Bubba Geddings slings a gobbler over his shoulder at the end of a successful turkey hunt. Photo by Terry Madewell.

Ruth said that during the 2008 spring season it is estimated that a total of 15,118 adult gobblers and 2,186 jakes were harvested for a statewide total of 17,303 turkeys.

"This figure represents an 8.9 percent decrease in harvest from 2007 when 19,289 turkeys were harvested," Ruth said. "Plus, it is a 32.2 percent decrease from the record harvest established in 2002 when a survey estimated 25,487 turkeys were harvested. The reduction in harvest seen since 2002 can likely be attributable to one primary factor: poor reproduction. This lower harvest number is certainly not surprising to our staff here at the agency. With the poor reproduction, I doubt we could have expected anything different.

"Reproduction in wild turkeys has been poor five of the last six years," Ruth said. "Not surprisingly, the spring harvest following each year of low recruitment has been down. Unlike deer, wild turkeys are much more susceptible to significant fluctuations in reproduction and recruitment, and these measures of production have simply not been good recently. Lack of success is typically associated with bad weather, such as cold and wet, during nesting and brood-rearing season."

Ruth added that another factor in the overall issue for poor reproduction and less harvest in many parts of the state is the drought conditions for the last two years.

"Although dry conditions are typically good for turkey reproduction, there is likely a limit to what constitutes dry in terms of being beneficial to turkeys," Ruth said. "Under the conditions that much of the state experienced during the last two summers, the production of food in the form of seeds and insects could have been limited, as could the vegetative growth that is important brood-rearing cover. Finally, habitats are continually changing in South Carolina. Although timber management activities stimulated the growth in South Carolina's turkey population in the 1980s, considerable acreage is currently in even-aged pine stands that are greater than 10 years old, a situation that does not support turkeys as well."

While the poult survival for the 2008 summer season survey is not disastrous, it is not what the turkey population needed to really bounce back.

"Our annual survey showed a little better result than recent years with the 2008 recruitment," Ruth said. "It appears that wild turkey reproduction increased in 2008, but this increase was only slight. Although wild turkeys nest primarily in April and May in South Carolina, the survey does not take place until late summer. Therefore, the survey statistics document poults that actually survived and entered the population going into the fall. Although average brood size was good, with hens averaging 4.2 poults, 49 percent of hens observed had no poults at all by late summer leading to a total recruitment ratio of 2.1. Recruitment ratio is a measure of young entering the population based on the number of hens in the population. Both of these statistics were lower than biologists would like to see and represent what could be considered a "break-even" situation.