The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency’s statistics from the recently completed 2025 spring wild turkey hunting season reveals the harvest is 29,037.
That’s an 8% decrease, or 2,610 fewer in the harvest, from 2024. It’s a 13% decrease over the previous five-year average of 33,304.
“Going into the spring, I thought harvest this year might be down a bit due to the poor reproduction that occurred back in 2023,” said Roger Shields, TWRA Wild Turkey program coordinator. “The low productivity meant we would have fewer 2-year-old birds on the landscape than in years past.”
On top of that, this year was a very wet spring, which Shields said likely impacted the harvest, both for its effect on turkey behavior as well as hunter behavior.
“We heard from a number of sources that birds were not as vocal this year and as hunters, if we’re not hearing birds, we’re often less inclined to keep heading to the woods, especially if it’s raining all the time,” he said. “We’ll have a better idea of how hunter effort changed and how that might have affected total harvest after we get results from our post-season hunter survey.”
A total of 23,785 hunters reported harvesting at least one turkey, 1% lower than the five-year average of 23,996 successful hunters. One turkey was harvested by 78% of the successful hunters, and two birds were harvested by 22% of the successful hunters.
There were 25,797 gobblers and 3,066 jakes harvested from the five new turkey management units. The Central unit had a total reported harvest of 13,775, followed by the Northeast with 5,839, Midwest with 4,607, Southeast with 3,860, and West with 956.
The 2026 spring turkey season will be April 11-May 24. The 2026 Young Sportsman Hunt is the weekend of April 4-5.