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  • Game & Fish West

    TROUBLE IN TURKEY COUNTRY

    Mar 16, 2021 4 minutes
    By Andrew McKean

    It started with localized grumbling. Turkey hunters weren’t hearing as many gobbles—the benchmark for a successful morning in the spring woods—as normal. Then the harvest reports confirmed that hunters were killing fewer toms. With that came troubling observations from biologists, who were seeing fewer poults with hens during annual summer turkey brood counts.

    Scattered reports from disgruntled hunters are nothing new for state-agency biologists, and the first accounts of downturns in turkey numbers were dismissed as gripes from the unsuccessful minority. But biologists trust nothing more than confirmed trends, and soon these sporadic observations started to merge.

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