Why Do We Still Shoot Hen Turkeys?

Harvest reports from the 2025 spring turkey seasons are rolling in, and in many states, like Ohio, the numbers are still behind long-term averages. Although the Ohio Wildlife Council has already approved an either-sex turkey season for the coming fall, The Columbus Dispatch reports that concerns around bird populations have re-opened debates about whether hunters should be shooting any hens in the fall.

The Buckeye State isn’t the first to grapple with questions around hunter harvest. Hunter harvest isn’t the only factor impacting turkey populations, but is the only one that wildlife agencies can fully control. Over the last 10 to 20 years, many state agencies (including the ODWR) have lowered bag limits, pushed back spring season dates, or tweaked other regulations (like the ban on reaping that was just enacted in South Carolina) in the name of turkey numbers. Others have taken the more drastic steps of restricting or eliminating their fall turkey seasons altogether, which have traditionally allowed hunters to take birds of either sex. The reasoning shared by some managers is that if we’re trying to stem or reverse population declines, we should keep as many egg-laying females on the landscape as possible

“There really is no biological justification for taking a hen out of a population. It either doesn’t matter, or it does, or it’s somewhere in between,” says Dr. Mike Chamberlain, a professor of wildlife ecology and researcher at the University of Georgia, and one of the foremost experts on wild turkeys today. “But we know there is no benefit.”

This uncertainty is because biologists are still trying to understand the correlation between hunter harvest and turkey populations as they continue to research how populations ebb and flow. Biologists know, Chamberlain says, that the number of poults per hen is a main indicator of future bird numbers, and that a small minority of hens are responsible for most of the reproductive success in a given population. State harvest data also shows that in many cases, the low number of hens being taken each fall is negligible at the population level. But that hasn’t kept hunters from arguing about whether it’s ethical.

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“You could probably survey a hundred different turkey hunters and you’re likely to get a hundred different opinions,” the National Wild Turkey Federation’s national director of science and planning Mark Hatfield tells Outdoor Life. “It’s just a very difficult thing to tease apart.”

Hunters Aren’t Killing Enough Fall Hens to Drive Statewide Populations

The true impact that U.S. hunters have on wild turkey populations is hard to calculate, and it’s the subject of multiple ongoing studies, Hatfield says. At the same time, we don’t even have exact turkey population figures for states.

“To quote my good friend [and biologist] Brett Collier, ‘It’s a scientific wild-ass guess,’” Turkeys for Tomorrow CEO Jason Lupardus tells Outdoor Life. 

The two main drivers of turkey recruitment, according to biologists, are weather and habitat. Natural predation is another important factor — Hatfield and Lupardus are both proponents of trapping — but predation rates of turkeys are also affected by weather, habitat, and other variables.

“When we have cicada events, for example, the populations of birds and predators grow. And next year, in those states that had a big cicada hatch in 2024, I’ll bet you whatever you want to bet that they’ll have a higher turkey harvest,” Lupardus says. “Because the turkeys had plenty of food. But also, all your raptors, your foxes and coyotes, everything else was filling up on cicadas, too. And with that shift in the predator-prey dynamic we tend to have very high recruitment.”

In scenarios like these, where conditions are beneficial to breeding and nesting, and habitat is plentiful, hunters can take a relatively large number of birds without impacting populations. This is known as compensatory mortality: the idea that those birds would have died of natural causes, and hunters are simply replacing those causes through harvest. And looking at the harvest data from states that still hold fall seasons, it doesn’t seem like hunters there are killing enough turkeys in the fall to have a noticeable impact on their overall numbers. (There are 41 states with fall turkey seasons, but only two of them explicitly prohibit hen harvest during the fall: Alabama and Tennessee. For a complete list of fall hunting opportunities across North America, visit the NWTF’s 2024 Fall Hunt Guide.)

A nationwide study that was put together for the 12th annual NWTF Symposium in 2022 compared population estimates and harvest data from the 2013 to 2014 fall and spring seasons with the 2018 to 2019 seasons. Based on the data collected from 29 state agencies, the study showed a roughly 28 percent decline in the number of fall turkey hunters, and a similar 31 percent decline in the number of turkeys harvested in the fall.

Kansas, for example, reported a fall harvest of 3,600 either-sex birds in 2013-2014, compared to just 1,275 in 2018-2019. Kansas has 105 counties, and if you spread that harvest across the state, it’s negligible — even if we imagine that all those birds were females.

“So hunters there killed 12 birds per county [that fall],” Hatfield says. “Looking at the data, you can see how this does not drive a biological or population-level response.”

The Reasoning for Limiting Statewide Harvest

Statewide, Kansas’ turkey population dropped by roughly 60 percent between 2008 and 2021, triggering big reductions in bag limits in 2017. But as bird numbers kept sliding, some wanted the agency to take more action by further limiting harvest. So in 2023, the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks suspended its fall turkey seasons for the foreseeable future.  

“Changing regulations, or adjusting the structure and/or timing of seasons, is the only lever states have to pull. And in many cases I think these agencies are reducing or eliminating their fall harvest to show they are listening to hunters, who can then say, ‘Well, at least my agency is doing something,’” Hatfield says. “I don’t think this change [alone] is going to solve what we’re seeing in terms of population instability and declines … but I do understand their need to pull that lever.”

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Lupardus cautions, however, against looking too broadly at bird populations, and he says that as we try to learn more about population dynamics, we should be studying them at a more localized level rather than just at the state level. He says this is where private landowners and private-land hunters can also play a bigger role in determining what a conservative harvest might look like for their area.

“There are a couple counties in northwest Alabama, where I grew up, and they have some of the lowest populations in the U.S. and no one really knows what’s going on. Well, if we decide to go up there and do some fall harvest: Number one, it’s going to be hard, and number two, if we do find success, we will probably severely impact the population,” he says. “But you may go down to the Black Belt of Alabama where the turkey population is a little bit stronger, and guess what? The population is robust enough that it can handle some fall harvest.”  

To explain this nuance further, Lupardus points to where he now lives in Kentucky, which allows for the harvest of bearded hens during the spring season. (Shooting bearded hens in the spring is also controversial, but it does simplify regulations and enforcement since some newer hunters can mistake bearded hens for males.) Citing the data that just came out for 2025, he says hunters in Kentucky harvested a little over 30,000 birds this spring. Around 400 to 500 of those were bearded hens, which he accounted for roughly .5 percent of the overall estimated statewide population.   

“That averages out to maybe three hens per county. And is that impactful? Maybe not,” he says. “But at a localized level, if those two hens were in an area where overall hen numbers are low, then, hell yeah, it could be important.”

Many Fall Hunters Pass on Hens, But Few Hunters Want Less Opportunity

For his part, Hatfield says he would not choose to shoot a hen in the fall, even where it’s still allowed. Neither would Dr. Chamberlain.

Chamberlain points out that trying to correlate hunter harvest with changing populations is more difficult with wild turkeys than other game species, like deer. Whitetail does breed and reproduce pretty evenly across the board, and each doe will typically give birth to one or two fawns each spring. But Chamberlain says his research has shown unequivocally that a small percentage of hens produce most of the poults in a population, and it’s these same hens that find success year after year.

“It’s because of their dominance hierarchies. We know that dominant hens typically breed earlier, they nest earlier, and they’re more successful,” Chamberlain explains. “So, it gets complicated when you start taking hens out of a population and you don’t know who you’re taking.”

Which means, if we were to manage turkey populations as conservatively as possible, it would be easy to simply stop harvesting hens. Tennessee took this approach beginning in 2018 by restricting (but not eliminating) its fall season to male turkeys only, as opposed to either-sex birds as before. 

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In many other cases, hunters are already self-limiting to an extent. When Mississippi wildlife managers announced in 2022 that they were considering eliminating fall seasons, the state’s Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks opened the proposal to public comment, and 83 percent of respondents supported the change, according to NWTF.

Part of this shift is related to a change in values among turkey hunters. Chamberlain is a case in point. 

“Turkey hunting started out as a fall enterprise, and so the fall seasons we have today are, in many ways, relics,” says Chamberlain, who witnessed the shift toward hunting gobblers in the spring as North American turkey populations grew in the 80s and 90s, and as state wildlife managers found ways to increase hunting opportunities. “When I was growing up in Virginia and hunting turkeys in the fall, it didn’t matter what bird we called up — we shot it if it was a hen, or a tom, or a jake.”

While Southern hunting culture has mostly moved away from fall seasons, it’s still entrenched in places like Illinois and Ohio, and the Northeast. Chamberlain and Hatfield say that as long as either-sex fall turkey seasons remain supported by science, they still support them.

“Many states are trying to keep their fall seasons, because what they don’t want to do is remove that opportunity — that tradition — out of the state,” Hatfield says. “When you remove a tradition, it is very hard to get it back. And if we’re not harvesting enough hens in the fall to impact population levels, then why don’t we keep these traditions alive and going?”

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Ultimately, changes to bag limits, fall seasons, and harvest methods will remain the key levers state agencies can pull to influence bird numbers — even while knowing hunter harvest isn’t the main driver of turkey numbers.

“It gets contentious anytime you start talking about changing or taking away opportunities because we all want the same thing. I’m a turkey hunter, and I want to do this forever. I want sustainable populations, and I want as many turkeys out there as possible,” Chamberlain says. “I don’t think any of us [hunters] would say anything different. But there are a lot of viewpoints on how to make that happen, and that’s something we constantly grapple with.”