Mark & Sue Werner

If you're one of the thousands of Arkansans who take to the woods this spring to hunt gobblers, you're no doubt suffering a raging case of turkey fever by now. You've probably been out to prowl around your hunting area a little, and you'll spend at least a few March mornings listening for gobbling activity.

But Arkansas is large, and things vary widely among the four physiographic regions. No matter how much pre-season scouting a hunter does, it's impossible to get a very accurate handle on turkey hunting prospects and conditions outside his immediate area. There's just not enough time to get the job done.

There's not enough time -- even if you're Brad Carner and it's your full-time job. His responsibility as the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's turkey program coordinator is to monitor turkey populations and habitat conditions throughout the state and to use that information to make recommendations for future turkey seasons.

GATHERING THE FACTS
But since there's only one Brad Carner, and since much of his job keeps him in his office and out of the field, the AGFC tackles the problem by assigning the information-gathering chores to its little army of biologists and wildlife officers. From June through August, these field personnel keep records of the turkeys they see during the normal course of their duties. They tally gobblers and hens alike, as the gobbler:hen ratio is an important indicator for estimating gobbler carryover from the previous spring's hunting season.

But the most valuable sightings during this three-month survey period are of hens both with and without broods. It's hen sightings and average brood size and age that indicate the relative success or failure of the current year's hatch.

"When a biologist sees a hen with young birds, the biologist makes every effort to count the number of poults and estimate their age in weeks, using a chart printed on the brood survey form," Carner explained. "Sometimes that's not possible, but over the three-month period we'll gather enough sightings, poult counts and age estimates to work with."

For example, this year's sightings totaled 715 gobblers and 1,480 hens -- a decent sample size as wildlife management surveys go. It would be nice to have more, sure. However, with that many to work with, the margin of error is acceptably narrow.

All these data are funneled to Carner, who compiles them and then crunches the numbers on both a statewide and a regional basis. Through this process, he comes up with a set of indicators that can tell him the relative strength or weakness of the current year's hatch, the average hatch date, the ratio of jakes to longbeards in the current population, the proportion of gobblers in the total turkey population, and several other things. This information combines with mast surveys and other data to constitute the foundation on which Carner and his committee of fellow wildlife biologists build the turkey management and hunting season recommendations that they submit to the commissioners.

WE'VE COME A LONG WAY
It doesn't take a genius to realize that wildlife biologists and other conservationists in Arkansas and elsewhere have done a good job of managing wild turkeys over the past 50 to 60 years. Without going into detail (the details come in next month's issue in an article about the fall and rise of modern-day Arkansas turkey hunting), this grand spring sport is a born-again thing.

A look at the harvest figures proves the point: In 1940, the statewide turkey harvest was 153. In 1950 it was even lower, at 145, and things weren't a whole lot better in 1960, when the total was 566. But take a peek at the figures after that: 1970 -- 1,164; 1980 -- 6,704; 1990 -- 7,146; 2000 -- 17,603.