West Virginia Wildlife from Eyewitness News

Spring Gobbler Season

We're talking turkey! Spring Gobbler Season is here.

April 22, 2009
Reporter: Patrick McMurtry
Videographer: Brad Rice

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Paul Johanseon/DRN Biologist says:
"When you hear that bird, that gobbler responds to you and begins towards you. There's nothing quite like it."

That's music to the ears of the thousands of people who will be hitting the woods next week for the start of the spring gobbler season. Paul Johansen knows his birds and he says hunters will have plenty of tom turkeys to call in again this year.

Paul Johanseon/DRN Biologist says:
"We're looking for a really good Spring season. We estimate somewhere around 125,00 birds in the woods this time of year. We are expecting a harvest between twelve and fourteen thousand birds.

Unlike the fall turkey season, hunters can only take birds with beards. Gobblers. That preserves the hen population that is spending time on the nest getting ready to raise a brood of chicks.

Paul Johansen/DNR Wildlife Management
"Our season bag limit for the Spring season is two bearded turkeys. The gobblers, the male turkeys, are generally the birds that have the beards. Occasionally a hen will have a beard and that is a legal turkey. As long as the turkey has a visible beard, it is legal."

Managing the wild turkeys in the state is one of the big success stories for the dnr. It wasn't too long ago that you really had to hunt hard just to hear a gobbler. Now they're everywhere in state.

Paul Johansen/DNR Wildlife Management
"We baited the birds in. Fired rockets and nets over these birds. Live trapped them and moved them to suitable sites. We moved well over 2,000 birds reintroduced turkeys to 37 counties."

Hunters you can use turkey calls, but electronic calls and bait are illegal. You can go into the woods half an hour before sunrise, but you have to be out by one o'clock. Don't forget to check in your bird after you harvest it.

Paul Johanseon/DRN Biologist says:
"Checking provides very important biological data for us. We look particularly at the gobbler kill per square mile in terms of setting our seasons, including the fall turkey season."

"Whether or not you kill a turkey is almost immaterial. Just enjoying the West Virginia hills in the springtime, for me, is what it is all about."