The gobble was so close that it seemed to shake the ground and the tiny little green leaves just starting to bud out from the trees. The gun was up on my knee, trained in the direction of the turkey. My pal Dan Myrick -- a longtime veteran of turkey hunting Alabama's wildlife management areas -- was 65 yards behind me, making soft talk with a Tom Gaskin scratch box.

The author's best-ever gobbler was taken just a stone's throw from Coosa WMA. Photo courtesy of Anthony Campbell.

The turkey was no more than 45 yards away, but he was just under the lip of a hill. He was close enough to hear his footfalls in the dry leaves. I had already eased the safety off, expecting to see the tom's red and white noggin any second -- but it was not to be: Some real hens fired up in the hollow and lured the old boy away.

Even though it didn't end with a dead turkey, it was still a fantastic hunt, considering that it was my first visit ever to the Choccolocco WMA near Anniston. Myrick lived for years in Jacksonville and has killed turkeys all over the WMA, so it wasn't like we'd gone in cold.

It turns out that just having an exciting hunt like that one was something of a feat last year. Turkey populations are cyclical, and Alabama was on a downward trend last year.

The state's turkey biologists conduct brood surveys in late summer every year to determine how turkeys are faring in Alabama's woodlands. Three years ago, they tallied 1.2 poults per hen, which is classified as poor, said Steve Barnett, one of the state's two lead turkey biologists. That meant there wasn't a strong class of 2-year-old gobblers last year. As nearly every dyed-in-the-wool turkey hunter will tell you, those 2-year-olds are the vocal ones, and they make up a big part of the bag in spring gobbler hunting.

The lower-than-normal trend was quite evident in the number of turkeys harvested on the state's WMAs. Hunters took 1,076 turkeys from those public lands in 2007. That number dropped to 771 in 2008, down nearly 30 percent. There was a little less hunting pressure in 2008, but that just goes with the season being off. Hunters who go a few times and don't hear much gobbling aren't going to waste the time and gas to go back. "The harvest wasn't just off from the year before," said Barnett. "It was the lowest it has been in 10 years."

Barnett looks for the situation to improve somewhat this spring, but it's still not expected to be a banner year. We're on the upswing from the bottom of the cycle, but we still haven't peaked out.

Still, it's a great time to be a turkey hunter in Alabama. Turkeys roam virtually every corner of the state now, and you can't really complain even if you don't have private woodlands to hunt. While the hunting is definitely better on private ground, chances are good that a WMA with a huntable population of turkeys lies within driving distance of home no matter where you live in the Cotton State.