Hunting Archery Duck Deer

Agricultural damage caused by wild turkeys is nothing new in parts of Middle and West Tennessee. Now crop depredation via the big birds has made its way to Powell.I know. It’s my crop that has been depredated.

In the grand scheme of the state’s farming industry my losses aren’t that big, but then neither is the “flock” of turkeys doing the depredating. The tally: Four rows of corn in my garden were all but pecked away by the single hen turkey that’s been living near my house the past three years.

The hen appears to be the last survivor of six turkeys which showed up in 2004. Although all six were hens, I figured there had to be a gobbler out there somewhere and it wouldn’t be long before turkey hunting was no farther away than the woods behind the house.

Three years later there’s only the one lonely hen that makes her living getting handouts, scratching around bird feeders and eating my corn.

While my flock is struggling to grow, Tennessee’s turkey hunters struggled through a tougher-than-expected season.

But keep in mind, struggle is a relative term.

Tennessee hunters killed 31,061 turkeys during the season that ended three weeks ago, short of the record 35,807 bagged in 2006. The culprit is most likely the cold snap that during April all but wiped out everything from mast crops to turkeys wanting to gobble.

But turkey-hunting success isn’t always a numbers game.

For Ernie Connor a big year was had with his first bird of the season: An albino turkey that was all pink and white except for a jet-black beard.

As turkey flocks continue to grow, oddball birds - bearded hens, turkeys with lots of white, etc. - have become more common. But true albinos usually don’t last long once they leave the egg and biologists say the odds are heavily against an albino turkey living to be an adult.

Numbers definitely weren’t foremost in the mind of Daniel Overbey, grandson of former state representative and state champion archer H.E. Bittle.

Following in his grandfather’s footsteps the freshman-to-be at Webb spent all his time in the turkey woods with a bow in his hand. With his granddad doing the calling he had a couple of almost-but-not-quite hunts, finally getting his gobbler a few days before the season ended.

“It was his eighth turkey, but his first with a bow,” Bittle said. Daniel is good enough to have already earned a place on the pro staffs of Mothwing Camo and Matthews.

But sometimes numbers do matter, and Benny Collins of Middlesboro, Ky., continues to set the pace when it comes to bagging turkeys.

For the seventh year in a row Collins completed the “Hillbilly Slam” by taking his limit in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Collins, who is on the Primos pro staff, got his nine birds, then spent the majority of the spring helping other hunters get a bird.

The number that matters now is 293.

It’s 293 days until the youth turkey hunt next spring. I know there are an ever-increasing number of fall-hunting opportunities in Tennessee, but to me hunting turkeys in the fall is like playing football in the spring: It don’t feel right.

So I’ll occupy myself practicing turkey calls, buying turkey-hunting stuff and figuring how to keep that hen out of my garden.

Bob Hodge covers outdoors. He may be reached at hodge@knews.com or 865-342-6314

Trackback URI | Comments RSS