Best Spring Turkey Counties in Tennessee: Maury Leads by a Wide Margin

The best spring turkey county in Tennessee in 2026 was Maury County, with 1,441 birds reported, about 1.7 times the 843 from second-place Hickman County. Maury also finished first in nine of the last ten springs, so its lead has held for a decade. Statewide, reported harvest fell from 40,129 in 2020 to 29,060 in 2025, then rebounded to 35,061 in 2026. These are birds hunters reported, so the counts follow hunter numbers and access as well as turkeys.

Hunters in Maury County reported 1,441 turkeys in spring 2026. Hickman County came second with 843, followed by Dickson (802), Greene (750) and Wilson (700). The table runs to 15th place and adds each county's 2025 count and its 2021 to 2025 average.

Maury's 1,441 is 360 above its five-year average of 1,081 and 458 above its 983 in 2025, so the county had a big spring even by its own standards. Below it the list packs tightly. From Hickman in second to Bedford in 15th, the whole spread is 280 birds (843 against 563), and the ten leading counties together account for 22.4% of the state's reported birds.

The bars show why we treat Maury as a category of its own. No other county reached 850 birds, and the counties from Wilson down to Rutherford sit in a band only 69 birds wide (700 against 631).

One good spring can flatter a county, so we also added up each county's reported birds from 2017 through 2026. Maury tops that list with 11,194 birds, which is 2,807 more than Greene in second place (8,387). Dickson took the one spring Maury did not.

Maury alone holds 3.4% of the ten-season statewide total (11,194 of 324,760 birds) from one of 95 counties. An even split would give each county about 1.1%.

The two lists disagree in a few places. Greene, second over ten springs, reported 750 in 2026, under its 2021 to 2025 average of 820, and Montgomery (636 against 664) and Rutherford (631 against 638) also finished below their averages. Hickman runs the other way. It ranks ninth over ten springs with 6,100 birds but second in 2026, with 260 more birds than its five-year average of 583. A county that leaps in one year with no long record behind it is a maybe, whatever its rank says.

The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) sorts counties into five turkey management units: West, Midwest, Central, Northeast and Southeast. Its 2023 status report lists every county with its unit, and 13 of the 15 counties in our 2026 table are in the Central unit. The exceptions are Greene, in the Northeast unit, and Weakley, in the Midwest unit. Nine of the ten counties in the ten-season table are Central too. The agency's 2026 release puts the Central unit's harvest at 17,197 birds out of 34,990 statewide, just under half, and says all five units finished above their five-year averages.

So Maury stands apart in count, yet the unit around it supplies most of the list. If a Maury trip is out of reach, the other Central-unit counties in the 2026 top ten are Hickman, Dickson, Wilson, Sumner, Robertson, Lincoln and Humphreys.

From 2008 through 2019, statewide reported harvest stayed between 28,321 and 37,092. Then 2020 jumped to 40,129, the high in our series, and no spring since has reached it (2026 is 5,068 short). The five springs from 2021 to 2025 ranged from 29,060 to 32,755, and 2025 was the lowest since 2018.

TWRA's June 2026 release ranks 2026 as the fourth-highest reported harvest on record, behind 2006, 2010 and 2020, and calls 2020 the COVID record season. Our series starts in 2008, so in it 2026's 35,061 ranks third, behind 2020 and 2010 (37,092).

Two rule changes matter here. TWRA's 2024 status report says hunters had to tag a big-game animal before moving it and then report it starting in spring 2020, and that beginning in spring 2023 the bag limit fell from three bearded turkeys to two and the general season opened two weeks later than it traditionally had. A harvest table cannot separate what those changes did to reported counts from what happened to the flock, and we did not check whether both rules still applied in 2026.

For the rebound, the agency's turkey program coordinator credited good hatches over the past few years and favorable weather through the season. The release also counts 28,266 hunters who took at least one bird, against a five-year average of 23,703, or 4,563 more. Part of the rebound therefore reflects more hunters scoring, which a county table cannot tell apart from a bigger flock. It was the largest one-year rise among the seven Southeast states in our regional comparison.

Each county figure is the number of turkeys hunters reported for the spring season, summed across all weapons from TWRA's Hunter's Toolbox report. The agency's status reports describe reporting as mandatory and, since about 2010, mostly done online or on a phone app. Because the count is birds reported, it follows hunter numbers, road access and county size as well as turkeys, and we did not adjust for any of them. Land area alone can put a large county on top.

We compared our state totals with the agency's. For 2026 TWRA reports 34,990 birds against our 35,061, a gap of 71 or 0.2%. The gap is 81 for 2024 (31,647 against 31,728) and 42 for 2023 (31,802 against 31,844). We did not rebuild county rows from the agency's tables, other than reading the 2023 county and unit table to place each county in its unit. That table also puts Maury first among counties that spring, at 1,040 birds.

Use Maury as your benchmark and the band below it as your shortlist. Four checks turn that into a plan. Find the county in the ten-season table, because a long record is safer than one big spring. Compare its 2026 count with its 2021 to 2025 average, and be slow to trust a jump like Hickman's. Start in the Central unit, where 13 of the 15 leaders sit. Then ask who owns the ground, since a reported-bird count says nothing about how many acres are open to you.

Kentucky has a tighter top of the table: in our Kentucky county paper, first place is only 240 birds ahead of tenth (778 against 538).