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RALEIGH, N.C. (April 8, 2005) — North Carolina’s spring wild turkey season begins April 9 and ends on May 7. Harvest is limited to bearded turkeys only. Hunting is open in all 100 counties. Opening of the spring wild turkey season comes on the heels of the successful culmination of North Carolina’s wild turkey restoration effort, which spanned more than half a century before concluding in January earlier this year. The Wildlife Commission began work to restore wild turkey populations in 1953. Over the next 52 years, the Commission released 6,031 wild turkeys at 358 different restoration sites across the state. “We estimated the population bottomed out in 1970 around 2,000 birds, but we now estimate North Carolina has more than 130,000 wild turkeys today,” said Mike Seamster, the Commission’s upland game bird biologist. Wild turkeys now exist in all 100 counties of the state, and turkey hunters in North Carolina annually harvest about 10,000 birds. See North Carolina wild turkey facts and a distribution map here. |