A Look Back at “Original” Wild Turkeys

They would not tolerate, or go anywhere near any civilizations. Twelve years ago, I also wrote a book about those same wild turkeys, and I titled the book Native Turkeys and a Georgia Mountain Turkey Hunter.

Since then, I have been asked how different were the wild turkeys I first hunted from wild turkeys we encounter today? Very different is my answer.

First, I am just a turkey hunter, and not a schooled authority about wild turkeys. However, I realize there are very few hunters left living today, if at all, who hunted those original Eastern wild turkeys. Because I was just only a teenager when I started, all turkey hunters back then were much older than I. Boys did not hunt wild turkeys!

For those that have not read my book, or know the unique history of those original wild turkeys where I hunted, I would like to share their backgrounds, and how I was fortunate to have hunted and studied those extremely wild, and different, wild turkeys.

The original wild turkeys I first hunted were living within the Blue Ridge Wildlife Management Area (BR WMA.) This area is located in North Georgia’s highest and remotest mountains. The late, Arthur Woody, who was a US forest ranger, was in charge there, and he wanted to rebuild the deer population in the North Georgia mountains. He took his own money and purchased a small herd of deer.

To have a place to put them, he created 38,000 acres of wild government land and designated it to be a wildlife preserve, which was located within a vast wilderness area. This preserve later became the first wildlife area in Georgia. Thus, he created the Blue Ridge WMA in 1928.

Woody’s main purpose for creating the BR WMA was for stocking those deer. However, original wild turkeys were well established in this wild area, having moved there to get away from civilizations. The turkeys living there were pure original Eastern wild turkeys, and they had been hunted vigorously since removal by substance hunters.

To protect his deer, Woody went about closing all roads going into that 20 square miles with locking bars across all roads. There was no hunting allowed there for deer until 10 years later in 1940. There was no hunting allowed there for the wild turkeys until 25 years later in 1955. Therefore, those original wild turkeys were protected and not overharvested like wild turkeys were in the 1930s and 40s.

In 1955 Georgia chose the BR WMA to begin its first spring gobbler hunts, because the BR WMA had a sustainable wild turkey population. In 1956, I was fortunate to have been taken on the second BR spring turkey hunt by a great outdoorsman friend. He taught me much about BR the land, and the wild turkeys there. Then in 1958 I killed my first BR gobbler hunting there by myself. Though, in later years, I killed many other BR gobblers.

The BR gobblers I hunted and (watched), were so nervous they could hardly eat for looking about. They would scratch one or two times and look all about, before picking up food. They were not that hard to call, if you knew where to call from. But, if a BR gobbler knew you were in his woods, he was out of there on wings, and gone for days. In the beginning of my hunting, I had not learned to call too well. So I hunted the way the wildcats there hunted. Watching and waiting, learning patience.

In the early 1960s I was employed by the Georgia Game and Fish Commission. I spent lots of time working at Clarks Hill Lake. When working there, I witnessed wild turkeys feeding in open pastures, in plain sight of houses. This was very different from the wild turkeys I was accustomed to at the BR WMA.

I was accustomed to seeing the BR wild turkeys fly to nearby mountains, at their first glimpses of me, and sometimes be gone for days from the flush site. They would have nothing to do with man’s civilizations. Their nature was very wild.

This is what a wildlife biologist for North Georgia’s DNR had to say about BR’s turkeys. The late Kent Kammermeyer said: “Their survival was entrenched into their genes, and they could possibly be the purest strain of Eastern wild turkeys left in the country.” I would like to repeat Kent’s first comment. “Their survival was entrenched in their gene.”

Today some BR wild turkeys living near the north and east boundaries have become exposed to man’s civilizations, like modern day wild turkeys (thanks to game feeders on private land). However, BR’s wild turkeys near the south and west boundaries, which join other remote and wild government lands, are retaining their original dark coloring, and as of today, they still don’t know anything about what modern civilization is about, with the exceptions of small wildlife openings here and there.

During the 2013 turkey season, I hoped to kill a BR gobbler near the place where I killed my first. Low and behold, I killed three BR gobblers near where I killed my first gobbler.

On that generous day, I told my Lord, I had killed enough gobblers, and I would never shoot another. I thanked God for all my years in his wonderful turkey woods. Then, I made a commitment. I would do whatever I could to help the wild turkeys and other wildlife living there. Since then, I have been planting pure American chestnut seedlings, not hybrids. This is my way of giving back to those high mountains I loved to hunt and the wildlife there.

I could have hunted in places where the terrain would have been less difficult to hunt. I could have hunted where the weather was less extreme, mainly the winds. I could have hunted where there were more wild turkeys to hunt.

However, with all those challenges, my choice of places to hunt gobblers has always been the Blue Ridge’s gobblers.

Why? Because, whenever I killed a Blue Ridge gobbler, and met the challenges to do so, I felt like I had taken a gobbler worthy of being called, a real wild turkey, if for nothing else, just having lived in such a truly wild place!