MONROE COUNTY, Ga. — You may not hunt, but this story still affects you as a taxpayer.
Between retail sales and taxes, hunters bring in over $1 billion to the state's economy.
One segment of the hunting community is consistently going on empty-handed.
Red Stone opened Juliette Bait and Tackle three years ago.
A year in, he added a hunting section.
The problem is the numbers have run "a-fowl."
"Used to ride anywhere in the county, you see a hayfield or an oat field, you'd see turkeys. Not now," he reminisced. "I used to have them in my backyard. No more."
Emily Rushton is in the same boat as a majority of hunters.
She is also the state's turkey biologist.
"Either I'm hunting the smartest birds in the world or I'm not that great of a hunter," she joked.
The fact is, these days, folks rarely got to set their sights on the birds.
"Numbers are down about 75 percent from the early '80s and 2000s," she calculated. "The vast number of turkey hunters don't harvest birds. I'd say about 80 percent, or zero turkeys per year, and then we've got about 15 percent that harvest one bird."
In other words, it's slim pickings.
Rushton says it's a perfect storm.
Disease may play a part, and then there's urban sprawl.
"We've created a lot of good raccoon habitat, a lot of possum habitat," Rushton said.
Those critters, like humans, love turkey on the table.
This season, the state pushed back opening day so the hens and gobblers can be more romantic.
"We want to give them more time for that," she said, speaking about the turkeys' mating habits.
Rushton says hunters have to adjust to a new normal, and this year, that means fewer kills in the woods.
"The bag limit has gone from a three-season gobbler limit down to a two-gobbler limit," Rushton said, "And we've also put in a daily limit of one gobbler, so you can only harvest one bird each day."
"You kill one one day and one the next, your season's over," Red calculated, which gobbles up his profits and gets him an earful with his customers.
"They ain't happy about the turkey season being short," he chuckled.
Rushton says about 40,000 to 50,000 folks go turkey hunting in the state, but through GPS and site counts, the state estimates there are a quarter-million turkeys in Georgia.
The season starts April 2 this year on private lands, but if you hunt on a state-run wildlife management area, you can go out on April 9.