Spring's in the air, and as days lengthen, a gobbler's fancy turns to thoughts of hens -- and a hunter's mind focuses on wild turkey on the table. The challenge lies in bagging the gobbler so you can baste him!

Wildlife managers introduced a serious restocking program in 1973. At this point, suitable turkey habitat existed in many areas of the state, so biologists began trapping turkeys from the Piedmont region and relocating them. Since 1973, more than 4,800 birds have been transplanted to 400 locations around the state. Deemed a success, the stocking program was wrapped up in 1996, and today, wild turkeys can be found in all 159 Georgia counties.

Just shy of 50,000 hunters bagged a bit under 25,000 gobblers in the Peach State last season. Photo courtesy of the NWTF.

Fortunately for Georgia hunters, wild turkeys roam the Peach State's woods in abundance, so with a bit of planning, some skill with shotgun and turkey call, and just a little bit of luck, you can be frying, roasting or stewing that tom in time for Easter.

Turkey season opens on Saturday, March 21 and runs through May 15, 2009. The limit is three gobblers per hunter per season.

According to Chris Baumann, regional supervisor and turkey committee chairman with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources' Wildlife Resources Division, the current turkey population is estimated at around 300,000 birds. "We have seen consistent declines in reproduction over the past three to four years because of the drought and habitat changes," he stated.

Things may be picking up, however. While the WRD has no final numbers on 2008 reproduction, Baumann has a good feeling about the 2009 season. Spring and summer weather patterns make a major impact on the turkey population, and rainfall in 2008 was closer to normal than has been the case for recent prior years.

"Generally what we find is that any deviation from the average rainfall is bad for turkeys," he said. "If there's too much rain, there is a higher mortality of hens on the nest, and more poults die from moisture exposure.

"When poults are small, they grow quickly and need a lot of insects. A week of heavy rain is bad news at hatching time. On the other hand, if there is not enough rain, then the numbers of insects and brood range are negatively affected. Everything is driven by rain!"

Some areas of Georgia are improving because of habitat enhancements; in others the population is declining because of changes in land-use patterns. "No one is in real bad shape, but compared to the early 1970s we're in our heyday," Baumann pointed out.

Until the 1900s, wild turkeys were abundant in the Peach State. Then, habitat changes, along with subsistence and market hunting, took their toll on the wild birds, and by the mid-1900s, wild turkeys had essentially disappeared from Georgia's landscape. As recently as 1973, fewer than 17,000 of the birds haunted Georgia's turkey woods.

In the 1950s, the state began releasing pen-reared birds in hopes of restoring the turkey population -- and it was a total flop: The pen-reared specimens lacked both the skills and the instincts necessary to survive in the wild and were eaten by predators quickly or starved to death slowly.