Turkeys Were Extinct in Michigan, But Now They're Everywhere
By 1900, there were none left, but the release of 50 wild birds has now grown to a flock of more than 200,000
You see turkeys everywhere in Michigan now. A dozen hens picking through a cut cornfield off the highway. A tom strutting along a fence with his tail fanned out like he owns the place. Maybe you've seen a few standing around in your own yard early in the morning.
Somewhere around 200,000 wild turkeys now live in Michigan, but it wasn't always like this. It wasn't even close.
By 1897, there were zero wild turkeys left in the state.
Not a reduced population. Not a struggling flock hanging on in some remote corner of the U.P. Zero.
Between market hunting and the wholesale clearing of Michigan's forests, we had wiped them out completely.
What followed was half a century of trying and failing to bring them back. In 1905, birds were released on Grand Island in Lake Superior. They didn't last. Through the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, the state tried again with game-farm turkeys, birds hatched in captivity and raised like livestock.
Every attempt ended the same way. The farm birds didn't know how to find food on their own, they couldn't read predators, and they behaved like domesticated animals dropped into a world that required wild instincts, which is what they were. They all died off to disease, weather, and coyotes.
For decades, the answer to "Will Michigan ever have turkeys again?" was “No.”
The Department of Conservation, what we now call the DNR, decided to try something new. They bought 50 wild-trapped birds from Pennsylvania and released them in Allegan County. These weren't farm birds, these were wild animals with wild instincts. They were caught from established flocks that knew how to survive and brought in to Michigan on a hope that they would fair better than the farm raised turkey.
It was a gamble on 50 birds in one county in Southwest Michigan. It worked.
Those 50 turkeys did what wild turkeys do. They found food, they found each other, they nested. By 1965, the population had grown enough to hold the first modern turkey hunt in the state. From nothing to a regulated hunting season in roughly 15 years, all from just 50 birds in Allegan County.
The 1980s pushed the comeback statewide. The DNR brought in more wild-trapped birds from Iowa and Missouri and released them across the state, north and south. The turkeys took to Michigan like they'd never left. Oak ridges, ag fields, river bottoms, cedar swamps. They figured it out everywhere.
This has changed even in my lifetime. I can hardly recall seeing many turkeys as a child in the woods, where they are now abundant.
Michigan is now home to around 200,000 wild turkeys. The state ranks seventh nationally in turkey harvest. Spring season is open in every county, and fall hunts run where populations support them. Around 100,000 spring licenses sell every year, with a success rate above 40 percent.
None of this happened by accident, and it is related to a huge misconception with wildlife: Wild turkeys exist in Michigan because of hunters, not despite them.
The funding loop is direct. Every license fee, every turkey tag, every dollar of federal excise tax on firearms and ammunition collected flows back into conservation.
That money paid for the trap-and-transfer programs that moved wild birds into empty habitat. It paid for the biologists who figured out which counties could support flocks and which couldn't. It paid for the habitat work that gave those birds a place to nest, feed, and winter.
The National Wild Turkey Federation played a major role, too, funding projects across the country, Michigan included. But the engine underneath all of it runs on hunter participation. It feels strange that hunting an animal = helping an animal, but that's exactly what's happened.
Around 200,000 healthy, wild birds now live in a state that had none. That's what this hunting and conservation pipeline built.
And that pipeline matters more than most people realize. Michigan's deer hunter numbers have been declining for over a decade, dropping from over 700,000 to around 527,000 in 2023.
Every lost license is lost conservation revenue. Turkey hunting has become one of the bright spots in the state's funding model, with 100,000 spring licenses generating revenue that flows directly into habitat management, wildlife surveys, and land acquisition. As the deer hunting base shrinks, turkey hunters are helping keep the conservation system funded.
The DNR biologists who ran the trap-and-transfer programs, the National Wild Turkey Federation volunteers who funded habitat work, and every hunter who bought a tag and put money back into the system are the reasons that bird exists in this state.
They brought back one of the staples of Michigan's outdoors, and the woods are better for it.
