The Wild Turkey Doc: Chamberlain Translates Innovative Research to Impactful Conservation
Mike Chamberlain grew up hunting turkey in Virginia. Wandering the woods, he was accustomed to hearing their distinct gobble. As years passed, though, he heard fewer birds cry out.
At the time, he wasn’t certain why. But when the opportunity came to study wild turkeys for his doctoral research, those days in the Virginia woods moved him to take it.
Now the National Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, Chamberlain is on a mission to uncover causes for the wild turkey population decline. He hopes his research and communication efforts will raise awareness about what landowners, managers and hunters can do to conserve wild turkeys around the country.
“I want to collect the most rigorous scientific information about turkeys and the threats they face so I can be a real steward for the birds and the landscapes they inhabit,” said Chamberlain, who’s become a world-renowned turkey expert over the past 30 years, known to millions of podcast listeners as the “Wild Turkey Doc.”
Chamberlain didn’t expect to devote his entire career to these feathered forest foragers, but once he began to study them, he was fascinated. As technology advanced and researchers could capture better data using more sophisticated tracking devices, he became hooked.
“The data confirmed that the turkey population is declining in many areas, but we weren’t sure why,” Chamberlain said. “I’ve really accelerated my research to try and understand what’s been driving that shift.”
Identifying the problem
There’s no singular reason the turkey population is dwindling in many regions.
“Like many species, turkeys are dealing with a loss and degradation of habitat,” Chamberlain said. “They’re also suffering from incredibly high predation rates and emerging disease issues.”
Ideal turkey habitats have stable roosting locations, along with shrubs or clumps of grass to help conceal their nests from predators. But turkeys also need reliable sightlines to see those predators—coyotes, bobcats and more.
Many forested areas have become fragmented or converted into pine trees accompanied by thick undergrowth. Others have been overtaken by urbanization and development. As prime turkey habitat disappears, predation rates have increased, holding implications for other ecological issues.
“Turkeys thrive in habitats that a suite of other species also thrives in,” Chamberlain said. “If turkeys are declining, it’s indicative of problems that are going to extend to many other species.”
Turkeys prefer early successional vegetative communities, like areas dominated by grasses and native flowering plants. But they also require a diverse array of habitats to meet their seasonal needs throughout the year. So, to have a healthy turkey population, a region needs to offer a diverse selection of habitats.
“If you have diverse habitats,” he said, “you have diverse wildlife species.”
A dwindling turkey population also threatens the very thing that got Chamberlain into the field—turkey hunting, a popular form of outdoor recreation. While Georgia hunters harvested over 40,000 birds in 2005, by 2023 that total was down to 11,909, reflecting the declining populations.
“The money hunters spend to purchase licenses and other equipment is a huge part of what runs the conservation engine in North America,” he said. “Without that funding, many conservation efforts can be limited and wildlife populations negatively impacted.”
Chamberlain is trying to determine more precise population numbers so he can arm agencies and conservation groups with better data. These numbers have never existed because it’s so hard to find and count the birds. He’s is recording turkey calls in states across the Southeast and beyond—from Georgia and South Carolina to Texas and Nebraska—using machine learning tools to develop more reliable and comprehensive data.
A Fine Line Between Work and Play
Chamberlain has a hard time separating business from pleasure when it comes to hunting and research, which undeniably benefits his scholarly work.
“There’s only so much you can learn about an animal by putting a transmitter on it and looking at data,” he said. “Getting out there and being in their environment lets you see things with your own eyes that you’re not going to find in the data.”
He remembers a trip in Mississippi 20 years ago when he was hunting a specific bird by staking out its roost before dawn. Hunters will listen for a turkey’s sunrise gobbling so they can find the tree it slept in and lure it through their own calls.
He couldn’t get close enough, so he kept going back to the roost each day. As he did this, however, he started to observe behavioral changes that made him question whether he was even hunting the same bird.
“Every hunter in the world thought turkeys sleep in the same tree every night,” Chamberlain said.
He started interrogating that assumption, however, and ended up integrating roosting data into all his future studies. He’s obtained tens of thousands of roost locations for both male and female turkeys and published the most comprehensive dataset ever collected on roosting behavior. Through this work, Chamberlain found that birds will routinely switch roosts, use roosts other birds have used, and sleep in the same roosts across generations.
“Turkey roosts hold huge ecological importance because they can tell us a lot about what characteristics of a landscape a turkey needs,” he said. “If we can predict where these places are, we can focus conservation efforts on the locations that will best support a healthy turkey population.”
The Call of the Wild Turkey Doc
While it’s harder to hear a turkey these days, it’s easy to find Chamberlain spreading the word about them, driving conversations around conservation and management.
He launched an online project called “The Wild Turkey Lab” to act as a one-stop shop for turkey science, where people can access engaging, digestible information about wild turkeys and their habitats. He’s active across social media platforms and popular podcasts, has conducted several webinars, seminars and media events, and has met with state agencies about how they can improve their regulations to support a more sustainable turkey population.
Chamberlain’s outreach efforts have resulted in numerous states making changes in how they manage turkeys. In Georgia, the state Department of Natural Resources used his work to justify regulatory changes, which moved back the opening of wild turkey season and reduced the number of birds a hunter can harvest. The changes help ensure sustainable wild turkey populations.
In 2024, he earned the Research Communications Award at UGA’s annual Research Awards for his impactful outreach and communications efforts.
Chamberlain wants to empower people to put science into practice, and he’s realized some of the most influential groups aren’t affiliated with research institutions. In many states, he points out, over 90% of turkey habitats are on private land, so reaching landowners is a critical piece of any conservation effort. When he shares GPS data from a turkey’s movement on social media, he sees “lightbulbs go off” when landowners realize they could better manage their property through prescribed burning or harvesting timber so turkeys aren’t inhibited by overgrowth or thick trees.
“I want to bring research to the real world instead of keeping it in academic circles,” he said. “The most important people to reach are the stakeholders, hunters and landowners who are interested in turkeys and other wildlife so they can actually do something with the science.”
This article was first published at research.uga.edu/news, courtesy of University of Georgia Research Communications.