Hunting for connection

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

I shot a turkey the other day — the first one I’ve ever shot, and really the first bird I’ve ever bagged. Unlike a lot of my country-kid pals back in late-20th century Sagle, I could never bring myself to draw a bead on a bird with my BB gun (though I had no qualms shooting my friends). 

Next to trees, birds are my favorite living things, followed by fish and most bugs. That said, I love to cut, process and burn wood; and catch, clean and eat fish. I’ve killed more bugs than birds, but I’m still one to capture and release spiders, moths, beetles, and even hornets and earwigs if they get inside the house.

That said, shooting a turkey — especially around Thanksgiving — has been a goal of mine since returning home in 2019. I bought a 20-gauge shotgun and a few boxes of birdshot during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, and have purchased a turkey tag every year since. In that time, I’d never seen a turkey in the woods when I had a gun, but saw hundreds in people’s driveways and yards. 

Many people have told me that wild turkey meat doesn’t taste good, to say the least. My own research, which made its way into a Reader article a few years ago, further informed me that turkeys are not only transplants to the area, but their presence among us dates only to the early 1960s. What’s more, their local population didn’t even stabilize until the 1980s and quickly exploded to problematic levels.

Based on all that, they taste bad, they’re not “from here” and they’re a nuisance. If I was going to shoot a bird and feel OK about it, I suppose it would be a turkey; though, I have never and will never relish the act of killing something for the sake of it. Rather, I like the idea of eating something that I interact with in a shared environment.

Finally, on a recent Saturday, one of my closest friends organized what ended up basically as a guided hunt on his dad’s acreage outside of town. My friend is a mensch of mensches, and had already scouted the property to note when and where the turkeys moved. I’d already spoken with his dad to get permission, and invited my 13-year-old son to come along. 

After cleaning our guns, going over gun safety practices and donning our blaze orange, it took us about 20 minutes of stalking to find the birds — just where my friend said they’d be — and one shot at medium distance dropped the tom whose meat is now resting in my freezer. 

That was a success, but doing so with my son turned out to be my favorite part.

We’re both at the age where a solid 40% of what either of us say or do annoys one or the other. But as most all parents know, despite the friction of the teenage years, these are the times when we most crave connection. There is no loneliness quite as cutting as the want for your little one to want to be with you as much as you want to be with them — especially when they’re not so little anymore. This is natural, of course; the process of growing up is also a process of release.

I was thrilled, then, when my son was so enthusiastic about our turkey hunting excursion. He wanted to listen and talk, help and be helped. He wanted to learn and just be a part of it all. 

We bagged the turkey and thanked it for what it would provide us, then hung around and shot tin cans with a pellet gun, did a little archery and — when my brother and his partner showed up — spent some time firing a CO2-powered arrow rifle that we got Uncle Jake as a birthday present. It was a good old-fashioned country-kid Saturday afternoon.

To say I was proud of my son — of whom I’m always proud — would be an understatement. Once we got home, he jumped right into the butchering. Having never taken a bird, especially such a big one, I didn’t know what I was doing much more than he did. We figured it out together, though, with the help of YouTube. Realizing we didn’t have some crucial supplies, he rode his bike through the lowering dark to the store and returned with the perfect selections. We plucked feathers, carved and chopped, cleaned and packaged, talked about responsible hunting and worked side by side with 0% annoyance. 

At the end of the night, he thanked me and I thanked him, and he hugged me three times before going to bed. I can say, without qualification, that the turkey we took on that Saturday did not die in vain.