With just about any other big-game animal (and no matter what anybody says to the contrary, turkeys are big game), a hunter with adequate finances can substitute money for expertise and expect to do pretty well. If you can afford the dues of a Mississippi River deer lease, for example, you're going to get a chance at some pretty good bucks.

That same high-dollar hunting club may have a good turkey population, too, but turkeys aren't very respectful of bank accounts or stock portfolios. If you don't know at least a little bit about what you're doing, it won't matter how many turkeys are on the place you're hunting, or how much you paid for the privilege of hunting there. Turkeys are great equalizers.

Fortunately, it isn't all that difficult to learn a little bit about turkey hunting. As proof of that, I offer the fact that hunters legally took approximately 20,000 gobblers in Arkansas last spring, from an estimated statewide population of 150,000 to 175,000. Clearly, the birds can be successfully hunted. But when a first-time turkey hunter steps into the woods, it becomes equally clear that there's more to it than just sitting down, calling one up and shooting him in the head.

WHERE ARE THE BIRDS?
No matter where you live in Arkansas, you're not far from turkeys. Because of a scarcity of public land, gaining access to those turkeys can be problematic in some counties and some regions, but spring turkey hunting is legal in at least part of every county in the state.

The Ozark and Ouachita regions in north and west-central Arkansas have the greatest acreages of public land, mostly in the form of national forests. Most of this public land has huntable turkey populations, although some of it is heavily hunted.

The Gulf Coastal Plain, that triangle of rolling piney woods stretching south from Little Rock to the Louisiana line, has a spotty but regionally dense turkey population and offers excellent hunting in places. The problem here is one of access: Most of this region is carved up into hunting club leases, and the land is posted. Deer club members and their guests can find some excellent opportunity here. There are also decent turkey populations on the relatively few public areas in the region, including Cut-Off Creek, Beryl Anthony and Poison Springs WMAs and Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge.

The east Arkansas Delta has possibly the best turkey hunting in the state -- and, paradoxically, maybe the worst as well. Most of the land has been cleared and farmed for decades, and there's very little turkey hunting opportunity on a soybean or rice farm. But most of the land that's left in timber is privately owned or leased, and some of it, particularly inside the levee along the Mississippi River, offers some of the best turkey hunting in the South for those who have access to it. There's a little more public land in the Delta than in the Gulf Coastal Plain, and some of these areas have decent if crowded turkey hunting -- Bayou Meto WMA and White River NWR, for example.