In terms of the number of mature gobblers killed, the 2026 spring turkey season was one of the best on record in Arkansas.

On Wednesday, Luke Naylor, chief of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s wildlife management division, briefed the members of the commission about the results of the spring turkey season, which ended May 10 in northern Arkansas. Hunters checked 13,591 turkeys during a unique season that encompassed significant changes to the traditional Arkansas turkey season framework.

For starters, the state was divided into five management zones which encompassed three different starting dates and five different closing dates. As has been the case since 2011, adult hunters were prohibited from killing juvenile gobblers, or jakes. Youth hunters were allowed to kill no more than one jake, Naylor said, but relatively few did so. An ethic has taken root among Arkansas turkey hunters that emphasizes harvesting only mature gobblers, Naylor said. Youth hunters appear to have adopted that attitude, as well, Naylor said, and that is the balancing factor that makes the 2026 turkey harvest comparable to 2006, when hunters checked 13,588 gobblers.

For turkey hunters, 2003 is the gold standard. Hunters killed a record 19,947 gobblers that year. Naylor said that harvest is an outlier that should have no bearing on future expectations.

Game and Fish Commissioner Bill Jones of Little Rock asked Naylor to explain why.

“Twenty thousand turkeys will never happen again,” Naylor said. “Almost 5,000 of those were jakes. The 2003 harvest is irrelevant. A small percentage of youth hunters killed jakes even though they could have. This year, our harvest of adult gobblers was the highest since 1982. That’s almost as good as it has ever been.”

Because of the disparity in jake harvest, the 2026 season surpassed the 2006 season.

If the number of turkeys checked is the lone metric for success, Naylor said that the 2026 tally represents an 85% increase over the past five to six years. That is despite an early spring that might have depressed hunter success. Turkey hunting is easier at the cusp of spring, Naylor said, when trees don’t have many leaves.

“Early turkeys are easy turkeys,” Naylor said. “The whole experiences changes in leaf-out. You can’t see as far. You can’t hear as far. Your ability to hear a turkey gobbling on a ridge a mile away is gone. When leaves are out, you can hear half a mile. You hear fewer birds.”

The commission set the 2026 seasons expecting to coincide opening days with better hunting conditions, but nature had other plans.

“This year, in March, we had the earliest spring on record,” Naylor said. “Through February and the first week of March, we were well ahead of the historical record.”

Missouri is the gold standard for turkey hunting, Naylor said, adding that some hunters expect unrealistically that Arkansas can be as good. That is not possible, Naylor said, because Arkansas has a fraction of suitable turkey habitat that Missouri has. Except for our turkey hunting hot spots in Sharp, Izard and Fulton counties, the quality of our turkey habitat is largely inferior.

“On a landscape scale, Arkansas is not great turkey habitat,” Naylor said. “We’re not going to have phenomenal turkey populations year after year.”

In terms of turkey carrying capacity, Arkansas is probably most comparable to east Texas and Louisiana, Naylor said. The term he used was “turkey occupancy probability.”

“If ‘very suitable’ turkey habitat has an 80% probability of (turkey) occupancy, then 90% of Missouri is suitable habitat,” Naylor said. “Only 20% of Arkansas is suitable turkey habitat.”

Some hunters on social media complained about the multiple zones and their variable opening dates. They said they feared that hunters from south Arkansas would overcrowd the northern zone after bagging their first gobbler down south. If large numbers of hunters did migrate between zones, Naylor said, it didn’t show up in the harvest data.

“1,593 hunters checked two turkeys, but only 298 of them checked turkeys from different zones,” Naylor said.

Different opening dates might have affected harvest in a different way, though. Naylor said hunters always kill the highest number of turkeys on opening day. In 2026, there were three opening days among the zones. The number of turkeys checked spiked all three days.

“A huge amount of birds were harvested opening day,” Naylor said. “You see a tick-up seven days from the opener when people killed a second bird.

Several commissioners said that constituents expressed willingness to have a shorter season and even reduce the season limit to one gobbler in exchange for an earlier opener. Naylor said that statistically, that would not make a difference.

“It’s not like ducks, where birds keep on coming throughout the season,” Naylor said. “Where you have a species where the harvest is so front loaded like it is with turkeys, season length will have very limited impact. An earlier date would probably increase harvest greater than the 15% you would save going to one bird.”

While some states experience dramatic turkey population spikes, Naylor noted that much of the nation is experiencing a significant turkey decline. One reason for that goes back to “turkey occupancy probability.” In the recent past, many states, including Arkansas, were re-establishing turkeys in areas where they were largely absent. In many cases, state agencies overstocked turkeys to the extent that there was a surplus.

Kansas is a sterling example, Naylor said. It was common in the fairly recent past to see winter flocks numbering in the hundreds. I noted the same thing in the late 1990s in western Oklahoma, where I shot multiple slides showing fall flocks numbering in the hundreds between Cheyenne, Okla., and Wheeler, Texas. I haven’t seen that in decades. Naylor said the habitat could not support those numbers in the long term. Hunter mortality and natural mortality balanced flock numbers with the habitat’s actual carrying capacity.