“I find where the birds are located, and if I don’t get one with my bow, I can go after them during the firearm season to get our Thanksgiving turkey,” said Oliver, who also hunts with a shotgun. Jack Oliver of Springfield is one of those hunters who saw turkey, but never got off a shot. The archers’ fall season for deer and turkey had a Sept. He called one of the other officers who knew something about turkey hunting and verified the birds were legal and also young toms. We quickly pointed out that not only were they legal, these three birds were young toms. When we checked them in at the Ray County sheriff’s office (the Ray County check station at the time), the officer who checked them said, “You guys have three nice hens, but I thought they were illegal.” You have a much better chance of running into a flock of hens and young toms in the fall.Ī case in point happened several years ago when, along with Paul Hoffman and his son, Steve, we bagged three young toms in Ray County. “If a hunter get a bird without a beard, they think its a hen,” the biologist said.Īdult toms are far less vulnerable in the fall than they are in the spring and much less vulnerable than hens and young toms. There were several other hunters at the check station who had brought in birds they thought were hens, but a biologist there pointed out that at least two-thirds of the hunters who have a young tom didn’t know it. Knowing that there were many toms in the flock, it reminded me of several years when a hunter had to check his bird at a check station. Jim Davis of Independence said, “Look at all those hens.” Last week, while fishing, we saw a flock of turkeys close to the shoreline. However, the wild turkey population has grown enough that a month-long season in October won’t hurt the state’s turkey flock that numbers around 400,000 according to the Missouri Department of Conservation estimates. The 2008 fall firearms turkey season opened Wednesday for the entire month, a far cry from that first fall firearms season that lasted only 14 days.
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