BEND, Ore. – Sure, Thanksgiving is open season on turkeys – the Butterball kind, bought frozen at the store and gussied up with all the trimmings for the holiday meal.
But hunters know that the real turkey season runs from April and May on the east side of the Cascades and from mid-October to mid-November on the west side.
Turkey hunters are quick to sing the praises of the wild turkey over its domesticated cousin. They say the game bird is lean, wily and quick, with the ability to run as fast as 25 miles per hour.
“It’s a lot like elk hunting,” said Don Lantz of Bend, the Oregon treasurer for the National Wild Turkey Federation. “Chasing these gobblers is a lot like chasing a bull elk. You get hooked on it.”
Lantz speaks of the wild turkey in an almost reverential tone.
“A turkey can see like an eagle, hear like a deer and run like a dog through the woods,” he told The Bulletin newspaper of Bend.
He’s not the first to hold the gobbler in high esteem.
Benjamin Franklin once argued that the wild turkey would be more fitting as our national symbol than the bald eagle.
Jonathan Harling of the turkey federation respects their canny instincts.
“They are more alert about their environment,” he said. “If it’s raining, they may go out into an open field so they can see better. They’ll puff up in a flock so they can watch out for each other. They’re a very wily bird.”
Once abundant throughout most of the United States, wild turkeys were nearly wiped out in the early 1900s due to habitat destruction and commercial hunting.
Thanks to an excise tax placed on firearms, ammunition and other hunting equipment beginning in 1937, and conservation groups such as the turkey federation, millions of dollars have been directed to the restoration of turkey habitat.
The turkey federation estimates there are now more than 6 million wild turkeys across North America. And, Bauerle said, there are an estimated 40,000 wild turkeys in Oregon, all of them introduced, or reintroduced.
There’s controversy over whether the birds are an indigenous species.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife considers the wild turkey a legally introduced species. But the late Stephen Bedwell, a University of Oregon doctoral student during the late 1960s, included a recently discovered footnote as part of his research that wild turkey lovers hope will put an end to the questioning.
According to an article published in Turkey Call, the official turkey federation publication, Bedwell wrote that turkey bones were found in several layers of earth under the ash of the 7,000-year-old eruption of Mount Mazama, which formed Crater Lake. Proponents are waiting for Bedwell’s research conclusions to be formally accepted.
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