The first wild turkeys I ever saw were a longbeard and a jake lying dead in the bed of a muddy, well-used pickup truck brought to town by two proud, rough-hewn rivermen who’d called the birds in and killed them on that long-ago April morning.

The year, near as I can figure, was 1951. And if I’m right about the date, I was not quite 5 years old. And if that date is correct, then those of us gathered around the truck gawking at those two turkeys were looking at roughly 1 percent of the reported Arkansas harvest for that year -- which came to exactly 201 turkeys.

Fast-forward three decades. The first wild turkey I ever killed came within range on a sparkling April morning in 1981 on the rocky south slope of Mauldin Mountain in Montgomery County, northwest of Mt. Ida. He was the twin of the gobbler a friend of mine had killed that same morning. My friend and I were justifiably proud of those two birds. But nobody gathered around the truck to rubberneck at the birds when we took them to the check station. By then the sight of two dead turkeys in the bed of pickup trucks was old hat, at least in the Ouachitas.

The 30-year span between the days I first looked at a wild turkey and the day I first killed one almost precisely coincides with the recovery of this wonderful big-game bird in Arkansas. While the statewide harvest in 1951 was 201, the total had swelled to 4,096 by 1981. But even this figure paled in comparison to the 6,704 turkeys taken in 1980. The decline resulted from a severe drought that briefly set back Arkansas’ turkey population expansion during the early 1980s.

FIRST THERE WERE MANY
During pre-settlement days, wild turkeys were unbelievably abundant in the vast hardwood forest that dominated the eastern United States. The early European explorers who came to Arkansas -- De Soto in 1540, La Salle in 1678, LaHarpe in 1722 -- all reported seeing multitudes of turkeys, often in flocks numbering 100 or more. The abundance was exploited throroughly, and gunpowder began to take a toll. But as only a few explorers, and even fewer settlers from east and north, inhabited the region then, the turkey population could withstand some overindulgence.

In the early 1800s, though, settlers began to enter the state in significant numbers. This influx, along with Arkansas splitting with Missouri and becoming a separate territory in 1819, led to increasing encroachment on what had been a healthy turkey population. The impact was particularly harsh near towns and along the navigable rivers.

However, due to the state’s sheer size, turkeys continued to thrive. As late as 1852, the unwary multitudes observed by the first European visitors apparently persisted, at least in portions of the state. In February of that year, Arkansas’ first outdoor writer, Charles Fenton Mercer ("Fent") Noland, boasted in a newspaper story of killing 54 turkeys in the first few days of a hunt near Batesville.

AND THEN THERE WERE FEW
The second onslaught on Arkansas’ turkey population came in the early 1900s, with the completion of a network of railroads connecting Arkansas with the rest of the world. The railroads provided a way to get timber to market, resulting in a 15-year explosion of logging along Arkansas’ still mostly virgin forests.

The railroads also provided a way to move wild game to market quickly and economically, and the birds became staples in large population centers like Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago.

This one-two punch of habitat destruction and the hunting of animals for market drastically reduced Arkansas’ turkey population. In fact, by 1930, habitat loss and overhunting combined with the destruction from the onset of the Dust Bowl nearly finished them off.

Turkey populations languished for the next two decades, their totals going as low as perhaps 2,000 birds. The spring season was closed in 1946, 1947 and 1948.

SAVED BY HAPPY COINCIDENCE
It was about this time that several things began happening that acted to halt the dwindling turkey numbers. First, people started moving away from rural areas and into cities and towns as the post-World War II industrial boom created more and more jobs. This large-scale exodus to the cities resulted in a substantial and immediate decrease in year-round subsistence hunting.