The Smoke-Phase Turkey Of East Texas

“You’ve got to check this out.”

That text from my friend Nolan Haney was accompanied with a screen shot from an East Texas hunting group on Facebook.

It included a photo of a smoke-phase turkey, a rare color morph but one that is encountered by numerous hunters around the nation annually.

Turkeys are native to East Texas, with the Eastern subspecies present and growing thanks to reintroduction efforts by the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department and the National Wild Turkey Federation-Texas.

I thought a smoke-phase bird in East Texas would be pretty cool to write about.

Holy Smoke!

Then I read the post.

The photo was taken in Orange County where I live, an area supposedly devoid of turkey for the last 40 years.

I have been researching turkeys in Orange County for the last couple of years when I got a reliable report passed on to me from my good friend and wildlife photographer Gerald Burliegh.

But this was concrete evidence and it was a color-phase jake (inmature gobbler) at that.

James Broderick who captured the photos of this bird on his trail camera was kind enough to share them with us and the information on where the pictures were taken.

They were 3-4 miles from the other solid Orange County report and in a zone that has marginal to good turkey habitat.

Not Domestic

Broderick was interested in knowing if this was a wild bird or a domestic strain of turkey.

It’s a good question because there are domestic birds with similar patterns.

My answer to this is “No, this is a wild bird.”

Reader Corey Anderson sent in this photo of a smoke phase Eastern turkey he bagged in Minnessotta. You can see it has a very similar pattern to the smoke-phase bird in Orange County. Nearly all smoke-phase birds I have seen have the standard tail color.

Origins

My Turkey Revolution project that began in 2019 has the goal of using photojournalism to raise awareness to wild turkeys and habitat issues. In year two my goal was to photograph an Eastern turkey in the Pineywoods of East Texas.

After much work, the result was photographing this big gobbler that was still on roost at 8:30 a.m.

The bird I photographed did not have a leg band so it was at least a second-generation wild bird or so I thought.

“You will not likely see any banded wild turkeys in Newton County. The area has not received a stocking in 20 years. My records show four release sites scattered north to south across Newton County,” Hardin said.

“Restocking efforts began slowly in the late 1970s and concluded in 2000. There may have been some earlier restocking efforts, but those would have consisted of Rio Grande wild turkeys and pen-reared turkeys (illegal to release today in Texas for the purpose of establishing a wild turkey population).”

There were no stockings on record in Orange County.

“Newton County birds are part of a larger population that expands west out of Louisiana. Once you get to Sabine County, Toledo Bend reservoir serves as a fragmenting feature on the landscape,” Hardin said.

“Turkey numbers begin to decline rapidly as you move north to Shelby County due to the connectivity with the larger metapopulation in Louisiana.”

Hardin said Louisiana wild turkey genetics flow into Newton County.

“They make their way here naturally through regular population expansion. The lake reduces that potential for ingress to those areas north of the Toledo Bend lake dam,” he said.

And that would most likely be the source of a few birds in Orange County.

To learn more about strange-colored turkeys click here.

In my opinion the recently photographed bird is a wild one and shows us that wildlife can and often does appear in places we don’t expect to see it.

If you have any photos of color phase turkeys like albinos, smoke or cinnamon email to chester@chestermoore.com. We would love to share them.