In the early afternoon of 28 February 1969, Bill Drake and John Hall ventured out in the snow. They were near Pawlet, Vermont, walking among nut-bearing oaks and hickory trees, clad in lumberjack shirts, thick woollen socks and heavy boots. The men, both in their early twenties at the time, were also carrying two wild male gobblers from New York. The turkeys may not have known it, but their mission was to help repopulate Vermont.

In the mid-1800s, though, land was cleared up to make space for farming, while timber was used for railroads and construction. According to Merril, in a particularly dark note in his History, forests were also cut down because trees were seen as an "impediment to settlement", and could offer a sheltering place for the Native American Abenaki people who lived in Vermont for over 12,900 years.

Then, in the 1960s, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department asked New York State for help and were granted permission to catch few New York wild birds and bring them home, hoping that they would like it there, since it was the same native species: the Eastern Wild Turkey, Meleagris gallopavo silvestris .

"He literally had to sit out in the winter in a little blind shelter and then coax these turkeys into an area where he would send a trap net out over them by putting out some corn," explains Hall, who was then an information assistant at the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. "He spent the winter of 1968 alone in New York live trapping turkeys."

More were to follow: throughout 1969, they released a total of 17 turkeys in West Pawlet (four adult gobblers, one juvenile gobbler, eight adult hens and four juvenile hens). In 1970, they released a total of 14 turkeys near Castleton (two adult gobblers, one juvenile gobbler, two adult hens, nine juvenile hens).

"By the spring of 1973, the population of Vermont's wild turkeys had grown to an estimated 500 to 600 birds," Hall says. That year, the department issued the first 579 hunting permits for a 12-day season. But according to Hall, there were few skilled hunters and only 23 succeeded in catching a gobbler.

Mike Chamberlain, the Terrell distinguished professor of wildlife ecology and management at the University of Georgia and director of the Wild Turkey Lab , says efforts such as these in other states led to something of a wild turkey renaissance in the 1960s and 1970s. "It's one of the greatest conservation success stories in North America," he says, adding this was largely due to the invention of the rocket net, which made it possible to live trap wild turkeys, and rapidly transport them to areas that needed to be repopulated.

"In the early 2000s, though, not long after restoration ended, population started to decline in many areas, particularly in the south-east United States, and those declines were very gradual," he says. "It really wasn't until 2010 and 2011 that we realised that populations had been declining for some time, at least in the south-east. Now, fast forward to 2024, those same declines have befallen many of the states in the Midwest United States. Conversely, in some places, particularly in the north-east United States, turkey populations appear to be doing quite well."

According to Chamberlain, who has been studying turkeys for 30 years, the decline in the south-eastern states and Midwest is mostly due to loss of habitat, industrial farming and rapid growth of cities in the south-east. "You don't have extremely large cities in Vermont," he says. "You're not seeing widescale forest loss in Vermont. Meanwhile the Midwest looks very different than it did 20 years ago."

Disease is another factor that may be affecting the turkeys, though Chamberlain says it's still unclear how much. "We're also trying to better understand how hunting and harvest affect turkey populations, because hunting pressure is very high in the south-east and in parts of the Midwest, it may be lower in other areas. So that's some of the things we're trying to better understand."