Quebec has record turkey hunting season.
Quebec’s annual wild turkey hunt continues to grow in popularity with this season’s version breaking all the old records.
Not only were there eight times more hunters licensed to partake in the spring ritual — 16,565 in all — they bagged 29 per cent more compared with the 2016 season.
The total hunt for the 2017 season was 7,565 wild turkeys compared with 5,882 in 2016.
“The game is more abundant and the hunters have refined their techniques,” said François Lebel, the biologist at Quebec’s Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs, who oversees the event.
“It has been a very big hunting season.” Quebec created the hunt of the wild turkey — Meleagris gallopavo silvestris — in 2008 after re-introducing the species to southern Quebec in 2000.
Quebec’s unusually mild winters have helped boost the population to the point there are plenty of birds and today the hunt represents about $5 million to the provincial economy.
In 2016, their success rate was about 30 per cent.
But 2017 was a record breaker in other ways, Lebel said.
Not only did more than one-third (34 per cent) of hunters bag a bird, 12 per cent managed to hunt a second in the same season, which is allowed in the regions where they are most plentiful.
Quebec’s annual wild turkey hunt continues to grow in popularity with this season’s version breaking all the old records.
Not only were there eight times more hunters licensed to partake in the spring ritual — 16,565 in all — they bagged 29 per cent more compared with the 2016 season.
The total hunt for the 2017 season was 7,565 wild turkeys compared with 5,882 in 2016.
“The game is more abundant and the hunters have refined their techniques,” said François Lebel, the biologist at Quebec’s Ministère des Forêts, de…
