Florida hunters enjoy some of the best turkey hunting in the nation. In the northwestern part of the state, they can go for the eastern subspecies of wild turkey. Down south, they can challenge wary Osceolas.

Either way, if you think you'll need to look hard to find a gobbler this spring, you may be pleasantly surprised. Like last year's, this 2009 spring turkey season promises to be another good one. Florida biologists are continuing to see substantial numbers of the birds statewide.

Whether you're hunting on private land or on one of the state's wildlife management areas, you stand a good chance of bringing home a gobbler from any part of the state.

David Nicholson is the state turkey program coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Though no statewide assessment of turkey stocks are done in Florida, he feels that prospects are good for the 2009 spring season.

"The last two or three years, our springs have been dry," he said, "so we've pulled off good hatches. That should result in a lot of 2- and 3-year-old gobblers."

In fact, spring 2007 was just about ideal for hatching. Many of the state's biologists reported a lot of hens with poults. And the nesting season was longer than usual: There were reports of hens with poults as early as the first part of March, and as late as the end of summer. So the population of 2-year-olds coming into the spring should be one of the best on record.

LOOKING AHEAD
Those good prospects also should carry over into 2010.

"This year, we had a dry spring during the nesting and brooding period," Nicholson noted. "Typically, a dry spring results in good reproduction. Those will be jakes this year."

Next year, however, they'll be two years old -- and gobbling.

That said, however, some areas of the state may have been just too dry for young birds to find enough water.

"In North Florida, most reports I've gotten indicated that poults were seen everywhere, and they were getting up close to the size of the hens," said Nicholson. "Down in South Florida, we got some mixed reports. There were a fair number of poults in most areas, but some biologists just didn't see that many. It appears that those areas were just a little too dry."

So based on initial reports, the spring of 2010 may be a little better in North Florida than southward.

THE BURNING QUESTION
With the Sunshine State's recent record of wildfires, those disasters have become regular concerns. But Nicholson doesn't think the fires of last spring and early summer caused much direct mortality for turkeys.

"We had a pretty active season in some areas of the state, but there weren't any large wildfires like we've had at some times in the past. So I don't see that affecting turkey populations a lot," he said.

"In fact, some of those fires in altering the habitat may actually have done more good than harm."

Typically, he said, a lot of the areas where wildfires occur have heavy fuel loads and are very thick because they haven't had routine prescribed burns.

"Turkeys prefer more open habitat rather than the layers of thick, heavy shrub that tend to accumulate in Florida if an area isn't burned routinely," Nicholson pointed out.

"Though wildfires can have immediate impacts on wildlife populations, opening that understory can have benefits in the long term."

Besides, turkeys are mobile and can normally get into swamps or wet areas and survive.