CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency is asking folks to count turkeys this summer and share what you see. It is the Agency’s 2025 wild turkey summer observational survey. The survey is open to the public through Aug 31.
Biologists especially want to know how many young turkeys (poults) you see. They have always done their own poult counts, but they just started asking for the public’s help in reporting wild turkey sightings in 2022.
You can report your sightings at this website. It will provide an explanation of why TWRA conducts the survey, an ID tutorial with a quiz to test one’s knowledge of turkey ID, and links to the actual forms to submit observations.
In the 2024 summer survey, data from all 95 counties showed 152 different TWRA staff and 1,418 unique public participants combined for 3,785 observations. The 2024 statewide results, which estimated an average of 2.4 poults per hen, were on par with the 5-year average (2.4 poults per hen). Productivity was similar across the state in 2024, except for the Southeast part of the state where production was much lower than the rest of the state.
“This summer survey has been very beneficial to help monitor our turkey population and gauge its annual productivity,” said Roger Shields, TWRA Wild Turkey Program Coordinator. “Results of the annual survey feed directly into our new adaptive management process, which helps us determine the optimal management decisions for meeting our objectives for wild turkeys. Without help from the public – the citizen scientists, as they’re often referred to as – our productivity estimates would be much less complete and our understanding of the population dynamics incomplete.”…