Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters White wild turkeys

Its way more fun to jump deer and Javelinas out of canyons. Shooting them on the run is fun if the place is open enough. We hunted in Ozona like that a lot.

Jumping them would be fun. Done that a few times.

My two favorites though have been still hunting and killing bedded bucks within 30 yards.

Shot a white jake several years back. He did have a black beard though. Took him to a local guy to mount, but never saw it again. Got an old print around here somewhere.

Not everyone sits in deer blinds waiting.... though I"m forced to at our deer lease, I am not at home or other places and tend to drift away from blinds if its allowed.... FWIW.

I love hunting ducks. Don't care for turkeys' anymore.

Hope to do a lot more sitka stuff in coming years for sure.

And hope to get the time to devote to bowhunting again. There is a time consuming challenge to that for sure. Much more so than lift a gun and kill something. But like some things its very time consuming.

Never have seen a white one in the wild. Be interesting to learn if it is a domestic or a natural mutation. Maybe the wildlife biologists can comment.

Turkeys are very common on my lease, but not easy to hunt. There was only one guy on our lease that actively hunts them in the spring, trying to call them into shotgun range. The rest of the time they're a target of opportunity. They seem to do most of their struttin in the middle of the farm to market road, where you can't shoot them.

Occasionally one wanders past the deer stand and runs off the deer. Then we cheerfully shoot them.



They sure make good eating, cooked in a slow cooker

Hanco: Over the years I have seen several white "Wild Turkey's" in eastern Montana.
One of my Hunting partners killed a large one with his English side by side shotgun.
I am not sure what causes them but in a conversation with a Montana Game Warden in that area he advocated we shoot them.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

It can be either an albino wild turkey or domestic genes Where they have free range domestic Turkeys it can happen more frequently.

If there is a choice I agree it is good advice to shoot the white ones. Especially if it is suspected that it is because of domestic genes. They are not as hardy as the wild birds.

I have only seen hens which aren't legal except in certain counties. I also suspect the Tom's may kill the white Tom's but have not witnessed this.

I think the .25-20 is about ideal.

I've seen the "white turkeys" quite a bit on the property where I deer hunt. The ones I see aren't completely white as you'd expect with an albino critter and don't look like domestic turkeys. They are predominantly light gray with dark brown/black tipped feathers, but look just like any other wild turkey otherwise. So far, the ones I've seen have all been hens, though the condition is found in toms as well.

The gray/white turkeys I'm referring to are known as "smoke phase" turkeys and occur naturally from recessive genes. They are not the result of interbreeding with domestic turkeys as is commonly believed. They look just like the one in the photo in this article:
http://www.turkeyandturkeyhunting.c...e-phase-turkeys-are-not-domestic-hybrids

Although these smoke phase turkeys are fairly rare as a percentage of the whole population, they aren't all that uncommon. According to everything I've read, it's more common in Easterns than the other wild turkey varieties.

Some leases don't allow a hunter to hunt on foot. I like going during the week. You don't have to worry about being shot.

I almost agree. Never hunted from a blind except for ducks.

We had white turkeys among three different flocks around here a few years ago. Ol boy that owns the property behind ours put a modest bounty on the one in his flock. My kids adopted it as "their turkey" so I couldn't shoot it.

I've seen a couple white ones in flocks of normal colored wild turkeys in the foothills of the Blue Mountains in Washington state near Dayton.

Thread got me Goggling and ran across this from MI DNR.



Smokey-gray (white) turkeys

Smokey-gray wild turkeys are rare but not uncommon in Michigan. This color variation in wild turkeys is a recessive trait, more common in females than in males, present in Michigan due to the wild turkey restoration program using birds that were acquired from Iowa in the 1980s. Some of the birds from Iowa carried this trait. Through our restoration activities, the smokey-gray trait was passed through the southern Michigan population of wild turkeys. This smokey-gray color aberration in wild turkeys is not an indicator of birds with domestic turkey genetics. It is a trait similar to melinism or albinism and is found in wild turkeys. On average, hen (female) turkeys weigh about 9.4 pounds and tom (male) turkeys weigh 19.2 pounds.

Only seen two. Took two seasons for my buddy to close the deal on the white one in the picture below.

I saw a purple turkey after a ZZ Top concert in November 1975. It was on the road going from Galveston to Jamaica Beach.

Dude - did you see that?!

I was at that concert. At the Coliseum downtown. I was a bit younger then. Didnt see any purple turkey. You must had better weed than we did!!

We had more than weed. I thought it was at the Summit but it might have been the coliseum. We left straight from the concert and drove to a friends beach house for the weekend. Everyone in the van was passed out except for the driver - me. I saw a lot of weird stuff. I was 16. The cowboy surfer culture I grew up in was cool.

The one I saw was 100% purple like it was illuminated by a black light.