The Abridged version:
- Wild turkey hunting has become an increasingly popular recreational activity in the Sacramento region.
- The fall turkey hunt coincides with Thanksgiving, giving hunters the opportunity to serve wild game at their holiday dinners.
- If you’re digging into a wild bird, don’t expect it to taste like a Butterball.
There’s a Thanksgiving story that Peter Tira hears year after year.
Local turkey hunters often describe their dinner tables at the end of the holiday meal to Tira, who lives in the Sacramento region and works with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. As they survey the aftermath, taking stock of which dishes were popular and which went untouched, one thing usually stands out.
“By the end of the night, the wild turkey is gone,” he said.
Tira said that’s because the game birds, which can be harvested from Yolo County’s rolling oak woodlands or El Dorado’s upland pine forests this month, live different lives and have different flavors than their farmed counterparts.
“They’ve lived life wild and free, not in a cage,” Tira said.
Wild turkeys eat acorns, insects and grasses, run from predators, fly and develop muscles that make the meat lean and dark. When prepared correctly, they can be incredibly flavorful, Tira said.
That’s part of the reason why, despite being a relative newcomer to California, wild turkey has become a fixture at some Thanksgiving tables in the region.
Successful introduction
Turkeys are a common sight in places like Davis and Sacramento, but they haven’t always lived here. According to the department’s wild turkey hunting guide, native California turkeys likely went extinct 10,000 years ago, and modern flocks are descended from planned introductions of the bird over the last century or so.
At first, officials tried releasing farmed turkeys into the wild, a practice that was eventually discontinued when the domesticated birds proved unable to adapt.
Then, around 1959, a device called the cannon-net trap was invented, which used small explosives to send a net over a large area. With the new technology, officials were able to capture whole flocks of wild turkeys in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains and relocate them to California.
Between 1959 and 1999, almost 4,000 trapped wild turkeys were released statewide specifically for hunting purposes.
Since then, flocks have flourished and become self-sustaining in the Sacramento region.
“They’ve done incredibly well,” said Garrett Spaan, Fish and Wildlife’s manager of the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area and avid turkey hunter.
One of their main advantages is their adaptability, Spaan said. Wild turkeys can survive in urban and agricultural settings, as long as there are trees for them to roost in. That’s compared to other wild birds like pheasants, which have struggled with habitat change.
“Where we’ve built houses in areas that used to have a lot of wild birds, the pheasants are gone,” he said. “They can’t adapt.”
But turkeys seem to be able to survive and thrive.
Spaan said he has noticed more wild turkeys around now than 10 or 20 years ago.
“They seem to keep growing, and more people are hunting them,” he said.
Tira — who is also a hunter — agreed with that observation. State officials didn’t have numbers available for how many turkeys have been harvested in past years, but he has also noticed a surge in popularity of hunting the game bird.
“When I was growing up, you never heard of a turkey hunter in California,” he said. Now, he hears of them all the time.
Tactics for hunting turkey
California has two distinct turkey hunting seasons, one that’s open now and another that starts later in the spring. Because of turkey behavior and different rules in effect during each season, tactics are entirely different, Spaan said.
In the fall, hunters can shoot a bird of either sex, and turkeys often congregate in flocks. As a result, hunting is much more opportunistic, and success depends on a hunter’s ability to be in the right place at the right time.
“It’s more about finding turkeys in the fall and then trying to pattern them a little bit,” Spaan said. “Figuring out where they’re coming from, where they’re going to and where they want to be based on habitat.”
In the spring, hunters can only take a bearded bird. During this season, male turkeys, also called toms or jakes, are looking for mates.
“You can really locate birds by calling and then you can actually get the birds to come to you,” he said. “You get toms and jakes, and they come running into your call.”
Regardless of the season, turkeys have keen eyesight, so camouflage, decoys and turkey calls are important tools of the trade.
Because game birds can move between private and public land, hunters need to be aware of places where shooting turkey is allowed. Some nearby options are the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, Cache Creek Wildlife Area and Putah Creek Wildlife Area.
New hunters should visit the Fish and Wildlife website to make sure they are following regulations. Some areas may require a special draw (think lottery system) for the right to hunt there, and all turkey hunters need a license and an upland game bird validation.
Cooking the bird
If a hunter is skilled enough to take a bird and decides to prepare it for the holiday, they shouldn’t expect it to taste like a Butterball.
“It’s really good meat, but it’s definitely going to be very different than buying one from a store,” Spaan said. “It really just depends on how you want to cook it.”
Spaan likes to brine and put his turkey meat on the grill or in the oven. It has a lot less fat, so it’s crucial to make sure it doesn’t overcook and dry out.
“If it’s brined and cooked right — especially the breast meat — it can be fantastic,” he said.
If a hunter can manage that, wild turkey may just be the most popular dish on the Thanksgiving table.
Daniel Hennessy joins Abridged from the California Local News Fellowship. He’s a reporter covering Yolo County.