Annual turkey report offers insight into 2026 hunting season 

LITTLE ROCK — With the opening days of Arkansas’s turkey hunting season only a few weeks away, hunters may want to check out the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s recently released 2025 Annual Turkey Program Report to gain a little insight into trends in Arkansas’s flock.

Last year, hunters checked 11,332 turkeys throughout the state during the spring hunting season. This is a 22 percent increase over 2024’s harvest of 9,296 turkeys, and it reflects a continued increase in turkey production during the last four years. 2025 was the first season to break the 10,000-turkey mark since 2017. According to the report, increased reproduction from 2021-2023, combined with many days of favorable hunting conditions, led to the increase.

David Moscicki, AGFC Turkey Program Coordinator, explained that any given year’s harvest is highly influenced by reproduction two years prior.

“Except for youth hunters, turkey hunters are chasing 2-year-old and older gobblers,” Moscicki said. “Youths are allowed one jake in their seasonal limit of two birds, but we see very low jake harvest within that subgroup of hunters as well.”

Hunters only checked 440 immature gobblers in 2025 (4 percent of the total harvest), leaving many on the landscape for the coming hunting season. This is a vast improvement over the 4,610 jakes checked in 2003, the highest jake harvest on record, which accounted for nearly a quarter of all turkeys harvested that year.

“The ‘No Jakes’ rule has had an excellent effect on our gobbler carryover, and we may be seeing the ethical standards of taking these immature birds shift, even within that segment of the hunting population who can legally do so,” Moscicki said. “The science of conservation is more available to our hunters today than 20 years ago, and as we learn, our hunters are eager to follow suit.”

The most significant increases in last year’s harvest came from the Ouachita and Ozark ecoregions of Arkansas (34 and 37 percent increases from 2024, respectively). The Gulf Coastal Plain saw a small increase, and the Delta actually saw a slight decrease.

Moscicki points out that reproduction indices from brood surveys play a large part in the coming year’s harvest, and hunters should be happy with the number of gobblers available compared to recent years, as the 2024 and 2025 brood surveys were the highest observed since 2013.

“Barring any unforeseen events, the spring 2026 hunting season looks even brighter yet,” Moscicki said. “I encourage everyone to help the AGFC’s management efforts by reporting their hunting experiences through the online Turkey Hunters’ Survey. We use information such as the number of hunting days, gobbles heard, gobblers and hens seen to help complete the picture of turkey populations in Arkansas and direct critical habitat work to best benefit the state’s turkey flock.”

Visit www.agfc.com/education/turkey-harvest-and-scientific-reports to read the 2025 Annual Turkey Program Report. The 2026 Turkey Hunter Survey is available at www.agfc.com/turkeysurvey.

2026 Regular Turkey Season Dates

• Zone 1: April 20-May 10, 2026

• Zone 1A: April 20-28, 2026

• Zone 2: April 13-May 3, 2026

• Zone 2A: April 13-21, 2026

• Zone 3: April 6-26, 2026

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CUTLINES:

TWO TOMS
Turkey hunters should experience good hunting in 2026, thanks to increased reproduction in 2024 and good gobbler carryover at the end of the 2025 hunting season. AGFC image.

YOUNG HUNTER
Even youth hunters like Reese Welch are selectively harvesting mature gobblers over jakes. Last year’s immature gobblers comprised only 4 percent of the total checked harvest. 

MAP
The 2026 spring turkey hunting season will feature new turkey zones with slightly different opening days. AGFC image.