Amidst the hubbub of Columbus, Blendon Woods Metro Park stands as a reminder of what Ohio looked like hundreds of years ago. A canopy of trees stretch overhead, dropping the last of their leaves before winter fully sets in.
“The landscape in Ohio was so different from what it is today, namely more heavily forested,” said Mark Wiley, the forest game bird biologist for the Ohio Division of Wildlife.
Wild turkeys thrived in that environment and back then, they covered the state en masse.
“In the range of a few hundred thousand birds, 200,000 to 300,000, but maybe more,” Wiley said.
But then, European settlers entered the picture.
“They started carving out farms, chipping away at the mature forests within the state for various land use purposes: mining, iron ore furnaces and, of course, agriculture.”
Coupled with unregulated hunting, and little by little, wild turkeys began to disappear. By the early 1900s, there were only a handful of confirmed sightings of the bird in Ohio, and by 1910, they were gone from the state entirely.
Reintroduction efforts
“There were a lot of efforts after that to restore wild turkey to the state,” Wiley said. “In the earliest decades of the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, those efforts used captive reared turkeys.”
But those birds didn’t have the instincts to survive on their own, so the reintroduction efforts never panned out. Then, in the ‘50s, neighboring states trapped 150 wild turkeys and released them into Ohio.
“That was the spark that lit the fire of wild turkeys,” Wiley said. “They were successful in southeast Ohio and then actually expanded even farther than we thought they would.”
It turns out, wild turkeys were more adaptable than scientists originally guessed. So as Ohio reforested during the 20th century, the bird didn’t stick to the state’s back woods: they moved into the cities too.
Maybe you remember the viral moment from March when turkeys interrupted a traffic stop in the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village? Body camera footage shows the birds chasing a pair of laughing officers back to their cars.
“They're really adaptable birds,” Wiley said. “All they need is a little bit of forest cover and they'll do well in an urban area, developed area, an agricultural area.”
Wild turkeys in Ohio today
These days, wild turkeys populate every one of Ohio’s 88 counties. After a few years of lower than average hatches around 2017, data from a citizen science survey indicate their numbers are on the rise again.
"To go from zero wild turkeys to now a population of likely several hundred thousand, and to have them in all 88 counties, it's hard to imagine that there's a better success story out there."Mark Wiley, Ohio Division of Wildlife
“We saw better production beginning around 2020 and into ‘21,” Wiley said. “And we're back up to levels that I would consider normal for the state.”
Now, Ohio’s Division of Wildlife is conducting deeper research into the birds’ population. They’ve placed dozens of microphones in the woods to capture recordings of turkey gobbles, yelps and purrs.
“We take those recordings and we can analyze them using a software program that does a really good job of identifying all the bird calls. And so we can use that to detect the number of gobbles on each recording,” Wiley explained.
That number helps biologists better estimate how many turkeys live in Ohio — information that advises wildlife management decisions and hunting regulations put in place so wild turkeys can continue to roam Ohio’s landscape long into the future.
