Wild Turkeys

Despite being a founding father of our great country, Benjamin Franklin has often been ridiculed for his stated belief that the wild turkey, not the bald eagle, was a better choice as our national bird, indeed our national symbol.

Franklin’s reasoning was that despite the eagle’s attractiveness and power, it often obtained its food by stealing from other predators and scavenging on the already dead. Scrounging and theft certainly are not attributes to which America should be associated, he posited. Me? I’m with Ben!

Franklin was correct with his assessment of the bald eagle. While they will often hunt down and capture prey on their own, they are also content with joining a group of vultures on a road-killed deer or stealing a fish from the talons of an osprey.

While wild turkeys are incapable of attacking and eating the larger prey species that eagles may take, they are known to slurp down lizards and small snakes, even venomous species, with reckless abandon. True, most of their diet consists of seeds, grasses, and insects, but at least they obtain it on their own without relying on other critters to occasionally do their dirty work.

Wild turkey meat was a staple for the Pilgrims and Native Americans, the latter also used their feathers in ritual head dresses and for arrow fletching. Look closely at the colors on the head of an excited male wild turkey, or “gobbler,” and you will see yet another reason to identify our country with this great bird—they’re red, white, and blue!

However, for the subject of this edition of my column I chose the wild turkey not because I was feeling particularly patriotic at the moment, but because spring is only weeks away and I am a certifiably addicted turkey hunter that cannot wait for opening day.

The wild turkey is the largest upland game bird in America and I would argue it is also the most challenging (and often most frustrating) game animal to hunt. March 23 marks the start of the turkey season in Georgia and it’s hard to find a better place in the state than Jasper County for hunting this magnificent bird.

(Hey Adam M., when does the ”Turkey Capital” campaign start?)

I don’t use the word “magnificent” lightly when describing this bird. I truly believe it is America’s “bird-of-paradise.”

The true birds-of-paradise are a group of birds from tropical areas of Indonesia and Australia that have elaborate feathers they display in mating rituals. Well, watch a strutting gobbler try to impress a hen this spring and you’ll see elaborate feathers displayed in hopes of landing her affection.

Gobblers, which can weigh 30 pounds and stand four feet in height, puff-out their body feathers, fan-out their tail feathers, bow-up their chest to display their hair-like beard, and drive their black and white-barred wing feather tips into the ground. No other bird in this country displays in a manner even close to this. Top that off with the thunderous gobble call that will spread goose bumps across the skin of hunters pursuing them this spring and you have the definition of a magnificent bird, me thinks.

You may ask why I believe wild turkeys are arguably the most challenging game species. It all starts with how you pursue them, or better phrased how they pursue you.

Many game species are hunted by finding likely habitat and waiting there quietly and motionless in hopes that the quarry will walk or fly by you. Being quiet and motionless certainly comes into play on the turkey hunt, but so does being talkative, often quite loud, and very active.

The basis for spring turkey hunting centers on trying to imitate a love-struck hen that desperately wants a big ole gobbler to come her way. A wide variety of calling devices, many very difficult to master, are used to make the yelps, cutts, cackles, and clucks hens use to advertise their horniness. Adding to the difficulty of sounding just like a hen turkey is the fact that getting a gobbler coming to you is the exact reverse of the way it supposed to be in turkey romance.

In fact, hens vocalize for the purpose of getting gobblers to identify their presence, by gobbling, so that they can go to and search for the gobbler. Getting gobblers to do the leg work and come to the “hen” requires the hunter to act hard-to-get sometimes, desperate other times, or even both, and for older, wiser trophy gobblers, you can often forget it altogether – they ain’t coming no how!

The normal routine for a long-in-the-spur gobbler is to gobble over and over from its roost at dawn until a hen walks right below its limb, then fly down to her and mate. “It is then “game-over” for the hunter pursuing the source of those gobbles.”

As such, these smart, mature gobblers can be exceedingly difficult to bring your way, and thus most harvested gobblers tend to be the more reckless two, and to a lesser degree three, year-old males.

Nevertheless, it’s this great challenge along with the magnificence of watching a strutting gobbler displaying for you and rattling every bone in your body with its jarring gobbles that makes turkey hunting the fastest growing game pursuit, in terms of popularity, in the country. It is also why my wife will not see much of me between March 23 and May 15.

Oh, and if any of you farmers out there are having any problems with wild turkeys eating your crops, give me a call. I’d be more than happy to help you out.

The turkey photo above was taken by Buddy Dixon Olive