This year was the first year in a while I did not have private access and I hunted the Forest a good bit; learning the ropes. Thinking about Florence brewing out there got me curious about Hugo's affect on the purest strain of Easterns. I had forgotten about this article and would have loved to have known either of these two men. I

This articles is by Bo Peterson with Post & Courier.

MCCLELLANVILLE — A generation ago, you were lucky to see a wild turkey. The birds were all but wiped out, and the few wary survivors kept deep in the woods. Today it’s not unusual to find small flocks along a busy roadside, plucking away at insects.

That’s the wily work of Duff and Buggy Bill, the two men who saved the wild turkey.

Wild turkey hunting season has opened on private land in South Carolina and will soon open on public land. More than 100,000 of the birds are out there, inhabiting every one of the 46 counties in the state. The population is now leveling off, and it might be that it’s fully restored.


The elegant gobblers have retaken the land and people’s imagination. Birds from South Carolina have been transported to adjoining states and as far as Texas to help repopulate there. The recovery is considered a conservation milestone comparable to the bald eagle.

The turkey was all but wiped out from overhunting in the 1940s when Herman “Duff” Holbrook trapped a few hundred in the primeval swamps near McClellanville and put them behind a hog wire fence to breed and reintroduce. He and William “Bill” Baldwin threaded their way through a thorn thicket of obstacles to make it happen.

Gayer Dominick wanted the biggest of everything, that’s how a stablehand described what happened to Baldwin’s fledgling effort to bring the wild turkey to Bulls Island, said his son, McClellanville author Billy Baldwin.

“The biggest cow, the biggest sheep, the biggest turkey. He had this thing about having the biggest of everything,” Billy Baldwin said.

Dominick was a New York banker and broker who kept a vacation home on Bulls Island, the largest barrier island in the remote Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. An outdoorsman and hunter, he had been given a clutch of native wild turkey eggs from the swampland near McClellanville, and Baldwin set about establishing a flock.

Bill Baldwin, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist working in the refuge. “Buggy Bill” was a born naturalist who won his nickname crawling in with insects or snakes to do educational programs.

Baldwin raised and released more than 100 birds. Then Dominick heard about the biggest turkey in the world.

He had his workers buy the thing and bring it over to the island, a turkey so large that a photo was made of it next to a mule it had killed. But it was a domestic turkey, and before long interbreeding had diluted the native stock. Meanwhile, the flock fell inexplicably to about one-third the number.

Baldwin and others had to remove the stock to try again, and found it so infested with ticks that one hen had 290 engorged ticks in its neck. All the livestock was removed from the island and a prescribed burn program launched to kill off the ticks.

Duff Holbrook, too, was a born naturalist. He developed maybe the keenest sense of wild turkey in the country after he was hired by the S.C. Department of Natural Resources in 1950 to work with U.S. Fish and Wildlife on a joint project to restore hunted-out turkey and deer to the South Carolina mountains and Piedmont.

“He was an incredible woodsman, the only man known to call a (wild) turkey close enough to be caught by hand,” Billy Baldwin said. The astonishing feat won him a reprimand from superiors.

Holbrook and Bill Baldwin were cut from the same cloth, canny in the wild, hunters who realized there was more to it than just game.

The Francis Marion wetlands bottom, primeval and barely penetrable, was the only known place left in the state where the turkeys had a viable population — a strain as pure or purer than anywhere else in the world. One of the first prickly problems was how to catch them.

“The turkeys were so spooky Duff could never get a mature gobbler,” Billy Baldwin said.

Holbrook and Baldwin invented a cannon-netting method, a gun that would fire out netting like you would cast it for shrimp, without much success. The net cord, they realized, was just too heavy to fling fast or far enough. So between them, they worked out a lighter twine.

Within two or three years, Holbrook had a sustainable population behind the hog wire. Within a decade, he had moved hundreds of them to enough locations in the state that the recovery was underway. Bill Baldwin would say later, “From the Midlands up, if you see a wild turkey, Duff put it there.”

The turkeys and their saviors, though, weren’t out of the woods.

As Billy Baldwin heard it, a prominent state senator decided to come hunting Holbrook’s turkeys with a few of his friends. Holbrook told him that wasn’t going to happen and the next thing he knew he was working for the U.S. Forest Service out of Kentucky, coordinating timber and wildlife management across the Southeastern states.

Holbrook returned to the Lowcountry in 1983 to head up White Oak Forestry. White Oak is an affiliate of Evening Post Industries, the owner of The Post and Courier. He died last year.

Baldwin did groundbreaking work with loggerhead turtles, but quit the wildlife service after he was told to do a study on Bulls Island showing that DDT — the insecticide later shown to destroy bald eagle eggs — didn’t harm songbirds, even though the file included a notation that it did impact their reproduction, Billy Baldwin said. He went to work for Medway Plantation.

Until the turn of this century, the turkeys thrived to the point where dozens at a time could be found in a single spring cornfield. But the population now appears to be in slow decline, said Charles Ruth, a DNR wildlife biologist who runs the deer and turkey program.

“We don’t really have a good grasp of it yet and it is occurring in much of the Southeast. It may just be the new normal,” Ruth said. Coyotes have joined a long list of turkey predators, and there’s loss of habitat. But something else is going on. Overall productivity just isn’t what it once was, he said.