We were hiking fast in the minutes just before daylight. Blue, my trail running companion and man’s best friend, was huffing up the steep hillside and stopped at my side to catch his breath.
As the sun began to peek over the mountain, providing warmth to my cold fingers and face, its soft, sleepy rays lit up the top of the river gorge far below us.
The songbirds were so excited to see the birth of a new morning that they began to sing in celebration for the entire world to hear. “Cheer, cheer, cheer,†sang a cardinal from his perch in an oak tree high enough to catch the first rays of sun over the mountain.
Blue twisted his head and perked up his ears toward the loud bird.
As we stood motionless and silent on the spine ridge of a hillside overlooking the steep, rugged valley below us, a wonderful feeling and deep emotion came flooding through my veins — it will soon be spring gobbler season and I will get the privilege of spending many mornings doing just this — climbing a hill to a great listening spot at daylight.
This season will be my 34th consecutive spring gobbler season here at home and, to be honest, I am as excited this season as I was my first.
There is something about the spring woods and the gobble of a male wild turkey that has me hooked deep — mind, body, spirit. I plan on making it another 34 years if my body and mind will allow me.
In grand preparation for the season, let’s look at last year’s data from the WVDNR’s Big Game Bulletin. There is always a story in the data, and I always find it worth a conversation.
From the bulletin:
“The Spring gobbler season began in 1966 on wildlife management areas and went statewide in 1968.
“West Virginia hunters harvested 12,217 bearded turkeys during the 2023 spring turkey season.
“This is 30.4% above last year’s harvest (9,366), 12.6% above the five-year average (10,850), and 14.6% above the 10-year average (10,661). It is also the largest harvest since 2018 when 12,287 birds were taken.
“With 52.6% of the total harvest occurring the first week of the five-week season, the first week remained the primary week to harvest a bird followed by the second week (17.4%), the third week (10.4%), and the fourth and fifth weeks at 6.7% and 6.5%, respectively.
“Bearded hens remained a small portion of birds harvested, making up only 0.28% of the total harvest.
“This was the fourth-year youth season included two days (i.e., the Saturday and Sunday prior to the opening day). Youth hunters harvested 781 birds, 490 on Saturday and 291 on Sunday. The youth season harvest made up 6.4% of the entire 2023 spring turkey harvest and was 65.8% above last year’s youth harvest of 471 birds.â€
Here is some information about this year’s season (remember to always consult the hunting regulations booklet for more information on the season dates, regulations, licensing requirements, limits and shooting hours).
A special two-day youth spring gobbler season will be held on Saturday and Sunday, April 13 and 14, 2024.
The spring gobbler season will be open statewide from April 15 to May 19, 2024.
I hope this season finds you well and you are as excited as I am to start another season chasing the famed game bird and king of the spring woods — the wild turkey gobbler.
