As of Monday, with six days left in the season, hunters checked 12,666 wild turkeys in Arkansas.
That’s a increase of 1,334 gobblers, approximately 12%, checked during the 2025 spring season. The 2025 official tally of 11,332 gobblers was a 24% increase over 2024.
These stats are noteworthy because they illustrate a consistent uptick in hunter success, which should represent corresponding growth in the statewide turkey population. The growth trend also rebuts complaints that Arkansas intentionally suppresses hunter success by opening its spring turkey season too late, after gobblers are reputably less vocal.
Anecdotal observations are situational and specific to a particular time and location. They are not scientific, but field reports are all we have to evaluate turkey behavior in the field. Two hunters in northern Grant County told us on Tuesday that they worked vocal gobblers on the last week of the season in turkey management zone 2. One of the hunters, Alan Thomas of Conway, said that a strutting gobbler, with a subordinate in tow, hung up about 75 yards away.
“I had my gun up for 27 minutes,” Thomas said. “I needed him to come about 12 or 15 more steps, but he wouldn’t do it, and I wasn’t going to shoot that far.”
Thomas said he might have considered taking the shot with tungsten super shot loads. Nevertheless, he said he was satisfied with the experience because he gets more satisfaction from working a bird in close than merely tagging a bird.
Thomas said he hunted in a small section of hardwoods where the open ground story created very long sight lines.
“Turkeys love it,” Thomas said. “That kind of habitat is great for turkeys, but it’s not great for hunting. They can see a long way.”
Thomas’s hunting companion worked a different gobbler that bellowed for a very long time. The companion abandoned the effort after the bird went silent. He gathered his gear and found the gobbler strutting in the middle of a nearby road.
Our point is that for every hunter who is disgruntled over what they believe to be unfair season dates, there are at least 12,666 other hunters who are happy. Others, like Thomas, worked birds that they didn’t kill.
Still, it’s easy to see why some hunters resent our spring turkey season structure. Before our season opens, many Arkansans hunt in states that have more liberal seasons. They hire guides and kill three gobblers in Texas in March. They have success in Mississippi and Alabama in March. March is the peak of breeding season, when it is easiest to work a gobbler.
Then they come home and get humbled.
The spring season in south Arkansas opens April 13. It opens April 20 in north Arkansas. That is after the peak of the breeding season. Arkansas doesn’t have as many turkeys as other southern states. That combination makes Arkansas a harder place to kill turkeys. Many hunters are proud of that because killing a turkey here is quite an achievement.
Missouri, the gold standard for turkey hunting, opened its spring season April 20, on a Monday. That is the standard to which Arkansas aspires. It is achievable on a smaller scale because we are a smaller state with a fraction of the turkey habitat that Missouri has.
I wish I could make sense of turkey gobbling behavior. I have had some epic hunts with very vocal gobblers late in the season, including on the closing day. I’ve had them slip in silently on opening day, and I’ve had them walk up so loudly crunching sticks and leaves that I was initially alarmed that another hunter was stalking my calls.
Once, at a camp in southeast Arkansas, Sheffield Nelson and I watched a gobbler stroll through the middle of camp gobbling non-stop in the middle of a hot day. Mostly, my experience in Arkansas involved one or two gobblers traveling apart from hens. They are generally not loquacious birds, and they only gobbled after I provoked them with aggressive calling.
That frustrates hunters who are accustomed to working multiple gobblers in other states. Some feel entitled to that degree of activity.
For turkey hunting, Arkansas is the big leagues. The birds themselves are a big reason for that, but our late season structure contributes to the difficulty level.
I haven’t killed a gobbler this season, but I tip my cap to the many others that did.
