Turkeys On The Golf Course

Turkeys On The Golf Course

While playing Otsego Classic this past summer, I encountered an enormous flock of turkeys (pictured above). While I saw flocks at other courses this past summer, the Otsego turkey trot was the biggest I have ever seen.

There also were several “neighborhood turkeys” around the lake this summer. The brazen birds would walk right across your doorstep and ignore efforts to shoo them

As it turns out, the current prevalence of wild turkeys in Michigan is the result of more than a half century of restoration efforts.

According to a recent article in the Detroit Free Press, an article in the Great Lakes Audubon site, and an older blog post from the Northern Michigan Conservation Network, Michigan’s native wild turkey population had been largely wiped out by 1900 by unregulated hunting. In the 1950s, however, fifty birds were transplanted from Pennsylvania. They thrived and their descendants were moved to other areas of Michigan.

By 1965, the population had rebounded to the point where a fall turkey season was held.

In 2023, the Audubon Society said that Michigan had some 200,000 turkeys. That’s estimated to be more than twice that of pre-settlement populations. Indeed, the modern wild turkey range extends much further north than it did several hundred years ago.

In the 1980s, turkeys were at the center of a series of trades by the DNR that were worthy of a baseball team in contention looking for that last key to the championship: Michigan traded otters it acquired from Louisiana and prairie chickens from Kansas to Iowa in exchange for more wild turkeys.

Then, in what has to be the best trade ever made in Michigan, the state acquired sixty moose — MOOSE — from Ontario at a rate of one moose for four turkeys.

Michigan’s moose population was thus revived, and so too was Ontario’s turkey population.

To credit my turkey hunting friends, I’ll note that the restoration work could not have happened without them. The costs of such restoration and conservation efforts are largely borne by the sale of licenses and taxes on equipment (thanks for the Federal Aid In Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937).

Go read the articles referenced above. There’s much more about this and it’s all fascinating.