Born and raised in Louisiana, I grew up following in the footsteps of my father, a career employee of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Since Dad’s work put him in close proximity to wildlife, it was always a thrill when he invited my brother and me to tag along on his ventures.

A natural byproduct of Dad’s being in the outdoors on his job was his opportunity to scout out potential hotspots for hunting. My brother and I were the beneficiaries, since we were privileged to hunt some prime woods and waters that other kids our age would never have heard about.

Our hunting efforts were concentrated on two species of game — squirrels and ducks. We owned neither beagles nor bird dogs, so neither quail nor rabbits were our passion. We didn’t hunt deer, because there were none to hunt in Louisiana back in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The prospect of hunting wild turkeys was an even more remote option. While the whitetail deer population reached huntable levels by the early 1960s, the state’s complement of turkeys was much slower in developing. In fact, my dad, who died in 1976, never hunted turkeys. As much as I enjoyed sharing the woods and sloughs on squirrel and duck hunts with my dad, I regret never getting to stand with him on a hilltop early on a spring morning, listening to a roosted gobbler sound off from a bull pine across the bottom.

A lot has changed with Louisiana’s wildlife populations since my dad died. Probably the most significant change involves the proliferation of wild turkey populations across the state, which has in turn resulted in most areas of Louisiana having had spring turkey seasons for the past decade and a half. Many hunters have discovered the excitement and passion of hunting these crafty and wary creatures here in our home state.

Now that Louisiana has had spring turkey hunting seasons across most of the state for more than a decade, perhaps it’s time to take stock of the turkey hunting situation in the Bayou State. To understand where we are now, it’s important both to consider where we’ve come from and to glance toward the future in order to see where we’re headed with our wild turkeys.

In terms of seeing wild turkey populations increase over the birds’ historical range in Louisiana, we’ve come a long way. From the first part of last century, when unregulated hunting devastated Louisiana’s wild turkeys, to the 1950s and early 1960s, Louisiana basically had no turkey population except for an isolated few in the big woods along the Mississippi Delta, some in the Florida parishes and an occasional straggler slipping in from Arkansas into Union and Morehouse parishes. Commensurately few Louisiana hunters had ever heard or seen a wild turkey, much less hunted them.

A series of early attempts to introduce turkeys into suitable habitat around the state failed miserably. Hatched in captivity, pen-raised birds were released into the wild only to become easy pickings for foxes, bobcats, hawks and other predators. The pen-raised birds weren’t imprinted with the instincts necessary for survival in undomesticated habitat, which meant that wild birds would have to be used.

Trapping was attempted, but initial methods proved unsuccessful. Then, around 1963, the cannon net was introduced in Louisiana. Allowing birds to be trapped and then transported to and released into various sites around the state, it turned out to be the magic bullet. Later, the National Wild Turkey Federation instituted programs that allowed for the trapping and transporting of turkeys from other states into Louisiana. As a result, most of the Bayou State now offers some turkey hunting opportunities.

In preparation for this article, we tossed Fred Kimmel, upland game program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the question that serves as the premise for the story: What’s the state of the state when it comes to Louisiana’s wild turkeys?

“I’d say that, overall, Louisiana’s wild turkey population is very good right now,” said Kimmel. “We have had successive years of good production over much of the state with no disastrous weather events to hamper poult production. In fact, we may be in the ‘good old days’ of turkey hunting in Louisiana right now.

“Over the past few decades we have gone from very few wild turkeys in remote areas to somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 birds scattered around the state today. Determining the population of any game species, such as turkeys, is an inexact science, but our best estimates — based on data we’re able to use, we believe — put our wild turkey population somewhere in that range.