Photo by Kraig Haske

The first close-up look I ever had of a living wild turkey gobbler was when I was a freshman at the University of Arkansas, in the fall of 1965. Three of us country boys come to town were making a weekend escape from the rigors of academia, country-boy-style -- camping and squirrel hunting in the Wedington Unit of the Ozark National Forest a few miles west of Fayetteville, not far from Lake Wedington itself.

Potatoes and bread were our only store-boughten provisions. We escaped the campus and got camp set up on Friday afternoon with an hour of daylight to spare, enough time to collect a few bushytails for supper if we were lucky.

I was sitting along an old logging road near several big hickories, waiting for something to happen, when I heard deliberate footsteps in the leaves. Thinking one of my buddies had walked in on me, I turned my head that way and was about to speak when what looked like a black ostrich came into view.

Walking steadily and with purpose, but not in any hurry, he marched down the left rut of the woodland two-track and passed within 2 yards of my outstretched feet. Even with my lack of experience with turkeys, I knew this bird was exceptional. His beard was a rope, and his spurs were long, sharp, and had a definite upward sweep. He came by me so close I could see the late sunlight glinting in his eye.

He never saw me, and though I didn’t think that was remarkable at the time, I find it slightly amazing today. When he was out of sight, I noticed my heart was beating faster and heavier than normal, and there was a film of sweat on my brow that hadn’t been there moments before. I didn’t know it then, but it was a feeling I was to have many, many times in the years to come. I don’t remember whether I killed any squirrels that afternoon or not. But I remember that gobbler, and I can summon him back to thrill me again by just closing my eyes.

Another thing I didn’t know at the time was that seeing a turkey in that part of the Ozarks in those days was a rare occurrence. The habitat was there, but the birds mostly weren’t. Today, that’s changed and northwest Arkansas has come into its own as a turkey-hunting region. While the overall turkey population and the spring harvest has been down the past few years, as it has been elsewhere in the state, there’s still some fine turkey hunting to be had in northwest Arkansas. Here’s a run-down.

WHITE ROCK WMA
At slightly more than 280,000 acres, White Rock Wildlife Management Area is the largest WMA in the state, and it contains some of the most remote and hard-to-reach country in northwest Arkansas. The land is owned by the U.S. Forest Service and is managed cooperatively by the Forest Service and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. White Rock has land in five counties: Crawford, Franklin, Johnson, Madison, and Washington. It is bisected north-to-south by Highway 23 -- The Pig Trail -- and gravel Forest Service roads branch off the highway in both directions, giving access to the interior. There’s also a fairly good network of 4WD and ATV roads branching off the Forest Service roads.

Current regulations allow vehicles to use many of these rough secondary trails, and many hunters take advantage of them to penetrate farther from the main roads. But still, a turkey hunter must go to where his bird is gobbling, and White Rock turkeys, like their kinfolk elsewhere, are mostly found away from the roads. And the going can get tough in a hurry. Most of White Rock WMA is not the kind of terrain to be tackled by the seriously out-of-shape.

Which, of course, is one of the reasons it has a good turkey population. Hunters willing and able to invest the energy to get off the beaten path will usually find the effort worthwhile. Hunting pressure in some of the deep valleys and steep mountain slopes is as light as you’ll find on any public land this side of the Rockies.