Well, my fellow brethren turkey hunters, our infamous viking opera singer has sung her last note. In true diva fashion, she has left the stage, and with the last report, she has left the building. With that, it’s a wrap for the 2026 New York State spring turkey season. By many accounts, including my own, it was a damn hard season.
From my own anecdotal observations, I can say without reservation that 100% of my known honey holes, the places I monitor throughout the year, failed to produce any evidence of gobblers willing to reveal their location or loudly voice an opinion. Not at first light, not on the roost, and not at any point during the day.
In contrast, social media is full of fortunate hunters who still have access to places where gobblers behave like the gobblers we all remember: birds that talk, commit, and play the game the way it’s meant to be played. As always, it comes down to location, location, location. Being in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing, only matters if you’re hunting where the gobblers are willing participants in our annual chess match.
In my own very subjective and patently unscientific observation, I hunted 14 mornings here in New York and heard a total of 19 gobbles. Fifteen of those were so faint that, had there been even the slightest breeze, or had I not been fully focused during that period of predawn light, I doubt I would’ve heard them at all. I can say with absolute confidence that those birds were at least within the same ZIP code, and most likely three parcels over at the very least. Half a mile with one or two gobbles is not the action-packed mornings I might have hoped for.
Even so, I did manage to fill both tags under somewhat strange circumstances. And, as always, each bird comes with a matching story far too long to cram into a single blog post. I’m certainly grateful to have made good on those opportunities without doing the one thing that would’ve convinced a gobbler to change his mind.
Without any official reporting yet from the state’s biologists, I do have a concern. My impression is that we had a very cool, if not outright cold and wet May. That’s never good. The worry, of course, is the likelihood of a poor or largely unsuccessful first nesting attempt.
This past week, I saw more hens out in the fields between 6:30 and 7:00 AM than I had seen during the entire season up to that point. That alone raised an eyebrow. And when I go back to the Roberts weather model, my first thought is that we may be looking at a generally poor breeding season. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when we could really benefit from the kind of warm, dry springs we had decades ago, conditions that helped boost productivity and rebuild numbers. That’s what we need now to bring the population back up toward what biologists might consider the carrying capacity for the available habitat here in New York. As data rolls out from the NYSDEC, I’ll be sure to share when it becomes available.
I have taken notice of a few record-book gobblers that really push the numbers upward, and would like to invite those so fortunate to tag these birds with exceptional attributes to contact me for possible inclusion in the Empire State Turkey Records Project. Click on the link for more information.
© 2026 Mike Joyner- Joyner Outdoor Media
#2026springseason #turkeyhunting #nywildturkeyrecords #wildturkey #nyturkeyrecords #recordbookgobblers
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