Carner and his fellow biologists have been careful not to assign specific blame for the downturn -- but that downturn is a cold, hard fact, and the logic is as simple as it is inescapable: Removing gobblers from the picture before most of the hens are ready to breed has a negative impact on the turkey population.

AT THE CROSSROADS
"We are at a crossroads in terms of turkey management in Arkansas with respect to conservative versus liberal spring seasons," the seven commissioners were told by staff biologists at last year's September meeting. "There is not necessarily a right or wrong answer. The AGFC and the public must realize there are benefits and consequences with each type of framework."

The liberal season framework's advantage is obvious: increased hunting opportunity. But two years of declining harvests would pointedly suggest that increased opportunity comes at a cost.

"Turkey hunters not only want to have lots of opportunity, but they also want quality hunting," opined Mike Cartwright, a veteran biologist for the AGFC, and an avid and effective turkey hunter. "Quality hunting, to most of us, means lots of gobblers, and lots of gobbling."

Cartwright and other staffers believe the recent season troubles stem from too heavy a gobbler harvest and too early a season. One biologist put it this way: "Many hunters have been saying for the past few seasons that there are too many hens, and the gobblers have hens with them throughout the entire season. It's true that the gobblers are increasingly henny all season long. But thinking that there are too many hens is looking at it backwards: The problem isn't that there are too many hens -- it's that there are too few gobblers."

KEEPING IT IN PERSPECTIVE
Either way, conservative or liberal, we're not going to run out of turkeys in Arkansas. This spring, and the next and the one after that, hunters are going to go forth in all regions of the state, and call up gobblers, and shoot them.

Overall, things are far better than they were when the graybeards among the turkey hunting fraternity took up the game. In 1960, the statewide turkey harvest was 566 gobblers, almost all of which came from the Delta; today, some counties have harvests almost that large, despite the recent decline.

The bottom line is a question not of how bad turkey hunting in Arkansas will become but, rather, of how good can we make it. Liberal seasons will keep us in the field longer but, it seems, at the cost of hunting quality. A return to more conservative seasons may or may not reverse that trend -- but many Arkansas hunters are ready to give it a try.