(Area) Friday, April 9th marks the start of Iowa’s Turkey Hunting Season.
Last year interest was sharply higher from previous seasons and the Iowa DNR is hopeful to retain many of those hunters. “We are coming off of a record year last year. Just like with our fishing license sales, we sold a lot of turkey tags last year and had a lot more participation in turkey hunting.” Bryan Hayes with the DNR says, “We saw a big jump last year, now whether that will carry over to this year we don’t know. We anticipate maybe some of that will carry over with people that had good experiences last year in the woods will come back for another season.”
14,600 turkey were harvested in the state last spring. “That’s about 3,000 more than past seasons. Typically our harvest is around 11,000, but last year that harvest jumped to over 14,000. The success rate remained the same. Basically we see about one in five turkey tags get filled. It’s still a challenging hunt and you don’t always get to tag that turkey.”
Heavily wooded areas provide good habitat for turkey, but last year there were turkey harvested in all of Iowa’s 99 counties.
