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Happy Thanksgiving. In honor of the holiday, I’ve plucked out some stories about wild turkeys from the Almanack archive.
Found in all 50 states and hunted in every state but Hawaii, American sportsmen and women harvest roughly 700,000 turkeys annually. That makes turkeys the most sought after gamebird on the continent, according to Richard Gast in this 2018 article.
In Wild Turkeys Were Once Rare, Ellen Rathbone wrote about her encounters with them. Wild turkeys are an Almanack favorite, and you can read more stories about them here.
In our sister site the Adirondack Explorer, a recent column from the Nov/Dec 2020 issue of the magazine is posted here.
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Nice article but the numbers of Pheasants and or Ducks that are harvested yearly would dwarf the Wild Turkey numbers.
There is a healthy turkey population and hunt in Hawaii. There are none in Alaska.
So would the numbers of the Number 1 game bird in the U.S……the mourning dove.
https://bangordailynews.com/2013/03/15/living/mourning-doves-a-top-game-bird-in-much-of-the-u-s/#:~:text=Forty%2Dtwo%20states%20allow%20the,and%20the%20range%20is%20expanding.
That surprises me. I would have guessed duck.
Sportsmen, especially the older set, have been advocating for a dove season for decades in NY, but it has fallen on deaf ears.
Turkeys, meanwhile, are holding their own in the Adirondacks. I have a fond appreciation for hunting them in the mountains compared to the foothills farm country. It’s a real challenge and there are no posted signs on Forest Preserve lands.