MILWAUKEE — If you were a wild turkey in Wisconsin in the mid-19th century, chances are you were not having a good time.
Your favorite habitats were disappearing as settlers chopped down trees to make way for agriculture. You were on the run from hunters who were harvesting turkeys left and right. And, in the harsh winter of 1842, the snow piled so high and hardened so thoroughly that you couldn’t scratch your way to the ground — leaving you hungry and vulnerable to predators.
It was a rapid fall from grace. “Wild Turkeys and other game were so abundant in the market in the ‘village’ of Milwaukee in January, 1839, as not to be considered a luxury,” Wisconsin conservationist Arlie W. Schorger writes about the birds. But by 1860, “the species was nearly exterminated.”
And the recovery wasn’t nearly as quick: Wisconsin was pretty much wild turkey-less as recently as the 1970s, according to the Department of Natural Resources. But these days, the turkeys are back in full force. All it took was a few decades of conservation efforts from a wide range of dedicated Wisconsinites — and some failed attempts along the way.
“We have seen turkeys just really flourish so well in our state,” says Alaina Gerrits, assistant upland wildlife ecologist with the DNR. “They're one of our best conservation success stories.”
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According to a 1942 research article by Schorger, the first recorded mention of turkeys along Lake Michigan came from none other than Father Jacques Marquette, the noted Jesuit missionary and explorer. In 1674, while his canoe was beached at the Milwaukee River, Marquette wrote: “Pierre shot a deer, three bustards” — or other big land-running birds — “and three turkeys."
Back in those days, before Europeans really started settling in Wisconsin in the 1700s and 1800s, Gerrits says “quite a few” wild turkeys roamed. They especially thrived in the southern part of the state, with its stretches of natural prairie and open grassy areas.
Though they’re pretty adaptable, turkeys prefer a mix of landscapes to accommodate different parts of their life cycle, Gerrits explains — from grassy areas where they mate and raise their chicks, to thicker forests where they can roost and eat acorns.
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“If they could choose anything in the world to live in, it would be a mixture of probably 50% agricultural lands and 50% hardwood forests,” Gerrits says.
When more settlers started showing up in Wisconsin, though, they cleared huge swaths of land for farming, throwing off this balance and leaving wild turkeys without the forest cover they needed to survive.
To make matters worse, Gerrits says, hunting was still unregulated in those days. Without any limits on their harvest, hunters nabbed enough wild turkeys to nearly wipe the birds out — a problem that showed up not only in Wisconsin, but across the whole country.
“By about the early 1900s, we realized that turkeys were nearly extinct from the state, and that we needed to do something if we wanted to try and get them back,” Gerrits says.
Some early attempts to get wild turkeys back in action didn’t catch. Between 1929 and 1938, the state of Wisconsin released nearly 3,000 pen-raised turkeys into the wild, but the flock soon disappeared, according to the DNR. In the 1950s, another batch of turkeys from Pennsylvania was released and did well enough to hold some limited hunting seasons, but still didn’t restore the species across the state.
One problem appeared to be the lack of “wildness” in the flocks they released, the DNR reports. The birds raised in captivity didn’t have the same survival instincts as wild turkeys, Gerrits says, and couldn’t seem to grow their flocks on their own.
Schorger himself had little hope that reintroduction could work: “It is doubtful if a planting will ever become successful in Wisconsin,” he wrote.
But in the 1970s, some new developments really turned things around for Wisconsin’s turkeys. The invention of a device called the rocket net made it easier to capture birds live and relocate them, Gerrits says. And Wisconsin was able to strike up a deal with Missouri for a bit of a bird swap: Wisconsin would send over some ruffed grouse, a bird whose population was struggling in Missouri, in exchange for wild turkeys.
The DNR released its first batch of Missouri turkeys in 1976, along the Bad Axe River in the southwest part of the state. From there, Wisconsin’s turkeys were off to the races, Gerrits says.
Since that initial group of 39 turkeys was set loose — with hundreds more added in the following years — the population has grown to more than 350,000, according to DNR estimates. Gerrits says it's been a major collaborative effort, with support from nationwide groups like the National Wild Turkey Federation as well as local hunters and landowners who have donated their money, volunteered their time, and opened up their land to help bring the birds back.
“We've seen turkeys rebound, not only in their native range of Wisconsin, but actually they've expanded the range all the way up into the northernmost parts of the state,” she says. “They pretty much inhabit every single county now.”
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Growing up in Green Bay, Gerrits says she spent a lot of time outdoors, fascinated by wildlife. She and her dad were two of the more than 130,000 hunters who harvest the state’s now-thriving wild turkeys — so she understands firsthand the important role these birds play in many Wisconsinites’ lives.
“When you get to hear turkeys gobble and respond to calls,” Gerrits says, “it's something that you're just not going to be able to get enough of.”
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These days, wild turkeys make up the second most popular big game species for hunters in Wisconsin, right behind deer, she says. They’re also one of the only species that keeps getting more popular while others are on the decline: In the spring 2020 season, more than 44,000 turkeys were harvested across the state, one of the largest totals on record, Gerrits says.
Though turkey populations are in good shape, the DNR still actively works to manage the species across the state. Profits from hunting licenses and turkey stamps get reinvested into creating quality habitat areas for wild turkeys. Plus, unlike other states that have more open seasons, Wisconsin’s turkey hunt is strictly structured into different time periods and geographic zones to make sure population levels stay up.
Another challenge: Keeping the peace between the flocks and their featherless neighbors. Now that the wild turkeys have become so abundant, Gerrits says the DNR is fielding some complaints of “nuisance turkeys” — from farmers worrying the turkeys are picking off their crops (though Gerrits says this is unlikely), to some bold birds making their way into residential neighborhoods.
The work is all worth it, though, for a species that’s become “hugely important” to Wisconsin, Gerrits says. The wild turkey’s central role is all the more impressive when you consider how recently it was all but extinct in the state, as the DNR points out in its 2015 turkey plan.
“It is awe-inspiring to consider just how enmeshed turkeys have become both in our wild landscapes and in our sporting traditions since they were reintroduced to the state in 1976,” the report states. “Indeed, it is now difficult to conceive of a spring morning in Wisconsin without the echo of a tom gobbling from a distant ridge.”