When turkey season closed last May, a number of Arkansas hunters were still looking for that first opportunity to tag a gobbler -- and quite a number of others had already quit in disgust. In itself, that's not too unusual; across the spectrum of spring turkey hunters nationwide, many more are unsuccessful than otherwise, and the percentage of those sticking it out to the bitter end -- regardless of the outcome -- is small indeed.

But Arkansas, unlike many other states, has seen its percentage of unsuccessful hunters getting larger over the past two seasons, along with its complement of hunters who give up and walk away from the whole business a week or two into the season. And there's a reason for the increasing levels of failure and defeatism: Turkey populations across the state are on a downward trend.

This downturn is a recent development for Arkansas. In the spring of 2003, Natural State hunters capped an almost continuous string of record annual turkey harvests stretching back to the 1950s by hitting what has turned out to be the current high-water mark -- 19,947 bearded turkeys. Then, in 2004, the reported spring kill dropped to 16,969, or a decline of about 15 percent, and in 2005, the spring kill dropped to 14,576, another 12 percent off the 2003 record and 15 percent below the 2004 mark. When you consider that the number of turkey hunters is growing each year and express the falling-off in terms of success rates, the reduction is even steeper than it appears from the raw totals.

All of this sounds like a prelude to a doom-and-gloom forecast for this spring -- but it's not. Turkey hunting in Arkansas has lost some momentum during the last couple of springs, true, but this is still a pretty good place to be if you're a turkey hunter. For one thing, only 20 percent of last spring's total harvest figure consisted of jakes. That's below the 25 percent average of the past five years, during which the relatively new one-jake rule was in force, and significantly below the 35 percent average for the years before the one-jake rule was initiated. Biologists with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission say that last year's reduction in jake harvest is due in part to the poor hatches of the past couple of years -- in other words, fewer jakes in the spring population translates into fewer jakes in the hunter harvest. However, part of the decrease in jake harvest is also due to the increasing selectivity of the hunters themselves in passing up jakes and waiting for longbeards.

Remember: The harvest last year was down only 15 percent from the year before, but the jake harvest was down 20 percent. Even with a smaller overall turkey population out there, that translates into a better carryover of jakes -- and more longbeards for us to hunt.

Looking at it from a regional perspective, the harvest in the Ouachitas suffered the least last year; with 3,360 birds reported, it was down only 3.7 percent from 2004's take. Next was the Gulf Coastal Plain, down 17.4 percent to 3,181. The Ozark Region showed a 20.6 percent decrease, to 6,591 birds, and the Delta had the dubious honor of posting the largest decline -- 24.1 percent, with 1,051 turkeys tallied on the checksheets.