I've recently gotten multiple reports of people seeing turkeys in Houston and Trinity counties in East Texas. The last one included a homeowner who noticed a large flock of turkeys that came to her stock pond east of Crockett. It seems the restocking efforts from several years past may be finally paying off. Just another reason to hammer the feral hogs who are sure to destroy nests.

Sure is, we have them on our place in Navarro county now due to the recent stocking at RCWMA.

Good to see them coming back around. We used to have loads of turkey on our place in NW Texas, years ago they just kinda up and disappeared. We still have a few around but not the numbers we used to have.
Figured the hogs had decimated the nests and they just couldn't reproduce enough.

Good luck y’all

Awesome, seems to be holding its own up here.

That’s great news! They are spreading out on private properties around the Athens, Cayuga, Malakoff, Bradford areas as well. Fingers crossed for a good nesting season!

That's fantastic news

That is very good news. Hopefully this time they will make it to a viable breeding population.

That’s pretty much where my place is. I have seen them twice there over a span of about 15 years.

I am east of Crockett by about 25 miles so maybe they will eventually get there.

I was blessed to get a super stocking on my place at Brushy Creek in 2017. Burnt 2600 acres about 3 weeks ago. 2nd burn on most of it in attempt to open understory, Hopefully we will have a sustainable, huntable population in couple more years. I was at the release in Trinity County few years back.

Dismal failure in my County. TPWD has tried several times.

I think the Turkeys they bring in take one look around and say "Oh Hell NO...."

COS I’m not far from you. Just North of Gus Engeling WMA. We have been part of the same super stockings you are referring to since 2014.

More people need to trap varmints and send them on
that one way trip. East Texas is eat up with coons and
skunks and possums and coyotes and stink hogs.
We can either kill them, or leave them be and let them
eat the turkeys and fawns and squirrels and rabbits and
bobwhite. Just me- I'd rather have the animals that I
like to hunt and eat flourish than something that has to
be hauled off to the back for the buzzards.

They were actually spotted in your area. I later spoke with someone at the TPWD who told me they recently "super stocked" about 80 turkeys near Kennard. It seems earlier restocking efforts with fewer birds did not yield good results. I've always felt restocking efforts have to include some large threshold of birds to ensure at least some of them make it. He also said money for restocking is not what's holding them back but the availability of birds. Not sure but that could be that those in other states simply don't want to lose any.

It's the abundance of feral hogs in East Texas that in my opinion, has been their greatest obstacle to a come back. We all know what kind of nose hogs have and their ability to use it to detect food sources. As they do with grubs, I would bet you could bury a single turkey egg several feet underground and a hog could easily smell it.

not only hogs, certain class of people shooting them off their roost