The author (left) and wife, Jill Easton, usually manage to bag a bird or two, no matter how the season is running. They say scouting and persistence pay off. Photo by Jim Spencer.

I have no way of proving it, but I'm pretty sure the second Arkansas gobbler I killed last spring was one of a gang of seven I'd seen several times the previous winter along the shoreline of the East Pigeon Creek arm of Lake Norfork. They were a long way from my home, so when turkey season came, I didn't go back up there at first. But halfway through a season that had contained little action and lots of hunter interference, I got to thinking about that gang of seven longbeards. One morning I launched my boat at Cranfield and ran around to East Pigeon to see if I could find any of them.

As it happened, I did find one, pretty close to where I'd seen the flock back during the winter. He was henny and beat me the first morning, but then I went back to him in the middle hours of the following day and caught him by himself. Stop by my office and I'll show you his spurs.

That bird and the other one I'd tagged the second day of the season added up to a much better season for me than the seasons enjoyed by most of my fellow home-state hunters. Most folks had pretty unsatisfying seasons, which isn't too surprising. When you combine a too-lengthy spring season with a long string of substandard turkey hatches, the inevitable result is a downturn in both hunter success and hunter satisfaction. Translated into numbers, what Arkansas hunters have gotten from that combination is a total spring kill that's dwindled 44 percent in the past six years, since we set an all-time record of 19,823 birds in 2003.

The free-fall seems to have slowed, though, and possibly stopped. After a series of declining harvests (16,969 in 2004, 14,576 in 2005, and 13,598 in 2006), for the past three seasons the Arkansas spring tally has been remarkably consistent: 11,069 in 2007, 11,461 in 2008, and 11,121 in 2009. That's a change of less than 5 percent over the three years.

Of course, there are other adjectives besides "consistent" that could be used to describe this remarkably level three-year harvest. One of them is "flat-lined." And many hunters, accustomed to seeing record harvests almost every year until 2004, are calling the recent harvest statistics exactly that. No matter what you call it, there's no getting around the fact that the Arkansas turkey population is down substantially from the glory days of just a few years ago.

The thing is, though, this drastically reduced spring harvest over the past three years has been an intentional and desirable thing. Part of the reason for the reduced kill is the decreased turkey population, but also the much more conservative spring season structure that's been in effect since 2007 had a lot to do with it. It's not a desirable thing in the sense that Arkansas hunters want to harvest fewer turkeys, you understand, but it is desirable in the sense that a reduced gobbler harvest is the correct course of action in the face of this recent population downturn.

That's why we've had a short season and a later opening date for the past three years than we had during those high-harvest years at the beginning of the century. Wildlife managers realized we were hitting our turkeys too hard, too early and too long, and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission finally did something about it. When we were shooting those high numbers of gobblers, the spring season was from 30 to 39 days long, counting the two-day youth hunt. Since 2007, the season has been 23 days counting the youth hunt, a reduction of 16 days, and the opening date is a week later.

Both those things have helped. The shorter season obviously lowers the harvest by decreasing hunter opportunity, and the delayed opening allows more hens to be bred by gobblers before the season opens, thereby leading to a higher percentage of fertile, nesting hens. As a result, even though the overall harvest was 340 fewer gobblers than the 2008 figure, 34 counties tallied higher totals than in 2008.