Kenneth Pitman has gone to great lengths to shoo wild turkeys from his Strafford blueberry farm. He's tied red metallic ribbons around tree branches, installed sound detectors that shriek and driven by them in his blue Ford pickup while blaring pop music. Nothing has worked.

"They're crazy," said Pitman, who owns more fields in Barnstead. "The turkeys would come right up to me and say, 'What are you doing on my land?' "

As Pitman could attest, New Hampshire's wild turkey population has grown - from 25 in 1975 to 33,000 today, according to the state Fish and Game Department. And though Pitman and a few others have complained about the turkeys, the program to reintroduce them to the state is considered a success, said Mark Ellingwood, a state wildlife biologist. So successful, in fact, that for the first time in the fall, hunters in some areas will get to go after the turkeys with shotguns.

This week, from today to Friday, in areas where there's a registered bird for every two square miles, hunters will be allowed to use shotguns. The state had restricted shotgun hunting of wild turkeys to May. Hunters have been able to shoot them with bows in May and from September to December.

The state has mostly benefited from the burgeoning turkey population, said Ellingwood, who owns 16 blueberry bushes that have been undisturbed. Most blueberry fields in the state don't have turkey problems, he said. (A Gilmanton blueberry farmer, David Geddes, said the sonar device - the one that shrieks when it detects turkeys -- has worked for him.) The Fish and Game Department also received complaints about turkeys spreading salmonella at dairy farms, but two years of testing has shown that the turkeys haven't contaminated anything, Ellingworth said.

Turkeys disappeared from New Hampshire in the mid-19th century, the Fish and Game Department said. The department released turkeys back into the wild, as many Northeastern states had done, in 1975 to return them to a place where "they'd been over-exploited and driven to absence by human activity abuse and changes in landscape," Ellingwood said. He said that the Northeast is tough for turkeys because of the harsh winters and hard soil.

Pitman said he didn't notice turkeys on his farm until four years ago. In 2001, he picked enough blueberries to fill 321 containers, which each carry 12 pints of fruit. The next year, his harvest fell to 166 containers. It bottomed out at 30 containers in 2005. He's filled 130 containers this year.

Pitman, who laughs easily at his plight, acknowledges that he'll continue growing the berries, even if he's not making much money off them anymore. He jokes that he's loath to shoot anything, even a turkey.

"I used to hunt all the time, but once I get in the harvest, my whole market is to do the harvest, not to stop and do something else," he said.

The gobblers may be persisting at Pitman's place because they're creatures of habit, biologists say. They ignore efforts to shoo them away when they don't have other places to eat, said John McConnell, a U.S. Department of Agriculture biologist. They're more known for going after cattle feed or insects, he said. When it's not hunting season, a farmer is legally allowed to shoot a turkey ravaging his crop after he has tried less drastic measures, McConnell said.

Pitman said liberalizing the hunting laws is the right move, and he praised Fish and Game's efforts to help him, even if they haven't worked so far. He said that a state biologist recommended the devices aimed at keeping the turkeys away, including the fluttery red ribbons and the sonar detectors.

"I had a balloon you would fill up that had a face in it," he said. "It would flop around in the wind. I'd say that moderately helped."

He tried scaring them by shooting flares and sticking a windmill in his field. He said the turkeys have adapted, traversing areas between the sonar devices and the windmills and ignoring Pitman when he's there.

"The turkeys just looked around and they kept eating," he said. "They see me as being Mr. Nice Guy."

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