Maine fall turkey season opens Monday

By Susan Bard, Bangor Daily News Outdoors Editor

Fall turkey season kicked off on Monday. Depending on the zone, hunters are able to shoot up to five birds for the season.

Wildlife management zones 1, 2, 4, 5 and 9 are closed to the taking of turkeys. 

Maine’s fields and forests weren’t always filled with these entertaining game birds. 

In the early 1800s a combination of intense farming and unregulated hunting eliminated turkeys from the state. 

Decades of failed reintroduction attempts followed, including the release of 24 birds on Swan Island in Sagadahoc County in 1942 and the introduction of both wild and game-farm stocks in the 1960s. 

It wasn’t until 1977, when 41 wild birds from Vermont were released into York and Eliot, that the population began to grow. Additional releases in Waldo and Hancock counties helped further rebuild the population.

In the late 1980s, birds obtained from Connecticut’s wild turkey population helped augment the increasing one in Maine. 

Turkeys are now found in all of Maine’s 16 counties. Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife generated population estimates from harvest data and a recent banding study, placing the current spring population at 70,000 birds — this does not include poults hatched during the current year. 

Unlike spring turkey hunting where the focus is on shooting toms, fall hunting allows for either sex. These regulations allow for more flexibility, but also possibly more challenges. Without the opportunity to call birds into range like you can during the breeding season, hunters must rely more on group behavior and movement patterns. 

Hunting turkeys helps control numbers in wildlife management zones where populations are strong, preventing issues such as agriculture damage, competition with other ground-nesting birds and rising conflicts with landowners.