Management efforts now focus on maintaining and improving habitat. The WRD employs a myriad of activities to enhance turkey habitat, but, according to Baumann, the best thing that the state does for turkeys is to thin and burn pine stands. Controlled burning opens up the understory of vegetation and provides insects and nesting habitat for turkeys in all of their life stages.

"We've been able to get on schedule with thinning and burning in the last two years and this makes a huge difference for the birds," he said. "There's a lot more vegetation that they need on the burned areas, and the turkey populations definitely respond."

Wild turkeys need a variety of habitat types to survive and to thrive. They migrate to areas in which openings and areas of some type appropriate for nesting, such as upland pines or hardwood stands, are present. Hens favor these areas; gobblers follow. If you're looking for a good place to hunt, start with a pine stand that was burned the previous winter, as lots of the fresh growth that produces the shrubs and bugs essential to wild turkeys' diet will be found in such a place.

Turkeys rely heavily on hard and soft mast such as acorns, beechnuts, dogwood berries and other seeds, but bugs constitute the largest part of a turkey's food intake. "Turkeys have an extremely varied diet," Baumann pointed out. "If they can catch it and put it in their mouths, they'll probably eat it."

Turkey management activities are largely funded by money received by the WRD from a federal excise tax on sporting arms and ammunition. The National Wild Turkey Federation also underwrites a substantial portion of Georgia's management efforts, having since 1985 spent more than $3 million on a variety of projects including habitat enhancement, the purchase of equipment, land acquisition and education. "NWTF has donated lots of money over the years for planters and other equipment that is difficult for the state to buy," offered Baumann.

We now have plenty of turkeys in the Peach State today -- so what's next? How about hunting them? When figuring out where to go hunting in 2009, it helps to look at numbers from the 2008 turkey season.

The statewide harvest survey reveals that 49,327 license hunters killed 24,297 turkeys statewide last year. This averages out to 0.49 turkeys per hunter, which is similar to harvest rates the past several years.

These numbers only account for resident hunters, though; the WRD estimates that as many as 32,000 lifetime license holders, non-residents and honorary license holders may hunt for turkeys. It's estimated that these "other license holders" may harvest as many as 20,000 additional birds.

The majority of sportsmen -- 68.6 percent, to be exact -- will hunt exclusively on private lands. But if you don't have access to private hunting lands, the state's WMA system offers some great hunting opportunities. In last year's survey, 31 percent of hunters reported chasing birds on both public and private land; about 8 percent hunt exclusively on public land. That so many hunt private lands is unsurprising, Baumann said, given that wildlife management areas comprise only 7 to 8 percent of Georgia hunting grounds.

In 2008, 15,229 hunters signed in at the 82 WMAs requiring sign-in/sign-out -- a 5 percent increase over the 2007 season. The WMA hunter success rate for 2008 was 5.9 percent, while the WMA harvest averaged 0.64 turkeys per square mile statewide, down a bit from 2007's numbers.