Dawn peeks its way through the thick fog, illuminating the oak tree-laden hills bordering the Santa Ynez River and the communities of deer, wild boar, and quail that call it home.
Ducked low behind sage and underbrush, I watch quietly as Marco Valdivia, my guide on this hunting foray, motions me to stay put and remain silent. And now, we wait.
As a licensed guide, Marco has taken countless hunters out on the 30,000-acre private ranch on which he makes his living. During the fall season, visitors will pay him $250 for the opportunity to bag their own turkeys.
On this day, with the Thanksgiving holiday fast approaching, wild turkey is the name of the game. The expansive ranch, wild and mostly untamed, boasts several hundred of them, Marco estimates.
“We don’t overhunt them,” he says. “We tend to manage them. Depending on how many are out there, we’ll just take a few and that’s it.”
Immediately upon entering the ranch, as Sun photographer Steve E. Miller and I tell him, we were met with a cacophony of gobbling from several hundred yards away. Marco says shooting them from this point wouldn’t be much of a challenge, so he instead drives us deep into the grassy brown hills, passing by several large groups of the wild birds.
Not to worry though, he says. By virtue of his daily chores and patterns, Marco knows exactly where to find the biggest flocks.
“They tend to use the same path over and over,” he says. “In the morning they go one way, and in the afternoon they’ll turn around and go back to their roosting trees.
“With the turkeys,” he points out, “it’s more of a waiting game.”
A rare bird indeed
As wild turkeys aren’t indigenous to California, a state with strict regulations on introducing non-native species into the environment, finding one to hunt on public land can be an exercise in futility.
The California Department of Fish and Game first transplanted the birds locally beginning in the 1940s, but due to the stock used and the small numbers transplanted at the time, the turkeys failed to thrive.
The agency has had better luck recently with the Rio Grande subspecies and transplants conducted in the Los Padres National Forest’s Santa Lucia Ranger District, which stretches from Highway 58 north to Figueroa Mountain.
According to department officials, turkeys in the public regions of Santa Barbara County currently average around 300 to 500 birds strong, mostly in Colson Canyon and Pine Canyon. Countless others live on private property.
Bill Decker, a volunteer ranger at the Santa Lucia Ranger District in Santa Maria, has been an outdoorsman in the area for nearly 40 years. He drives the country back roads weekly and regularly spots flocks east of the city in Rattlesnake Canyon, which is currently closed to road traffic.
A turkey hunter himself, Decker said the birds tend to gravitate toward private property, where they’re more likely to be protected from predators and the harsh conditions of the forest.
“Generally turkeys are either protected by their private land owners and aren’t killed, or they’re killed only for family consumption,” Decker explained. “Sometimes they’ll have a hunting operation where they’ll charge to hunt turkeys on private land. That’s your best source.”
Likewise, the Department of Fish and Game advises that if you want to bag one for a Thanksgiving meal, you’ve got to know somebody.
Typically, the best way is to hire a guide, but they’re not easy to find, and you never know where or when they might be available. To complicate matters, hunters are generally loathe to revealing their favorite spots, and most won’t take you out, even if you ask.
Getting a hunting invitation is akin to getting invited to a private club, or, as Decker puts it, “You can borrow their car, but good luck asking them to go out hunting on their land.”
In anticipation of this reporter’s hunting trip, calls around to various local hunting supply stores proved fruitless, until a tip from a Buellton area shop led me to Marco’s ranch.
Arrows and feathers
At the ranch, the first large flock of turkeys we come upon numbers about 30 strong, feeding several hundred yards off the road. Marco parks the truck and quickly assembles his high-powered compound bow. He tramps through a washed-out gully and determinedly eyes the group.
Our cover is thick and the flock heads toward us slowly, oblivious to our presence. A kill seems inevitable at this range, but it’s Marco’s first time bowhunting for turkey. He claims he’s been practicing. The goal, he says, is to aim for the heart.
“It’s not like target shooting. Once you have the animal in front of you, it’s a lot harder,” Marco explains. “You get that adrenaline rush and you start shaking.”
Sure enough, Marco’s first shot misses and the flock scatters. On the second shot, there’s an audible thunk, but the birds sprint away, leaving only feathers behind. The entire flock, about 30 in all, makes a mad dash for the hills, gliding impressively off the ridge and out of sight.
Marco thinks he may have hit one with a glancing blow. Sure enough, there’s evidence on the ground: a single sheared-off feather. We never find the arrow.
“I just winged him,” Marco says. “If I would’ve had the shotgun, I would’ve got him.”
Strike one.
Rules and regs
According to California Department of Fish and Game lieutenant Jim Solis, who supervises wildlife in Santa Barbara County, turkeys are hunted in two seasons each year, and each requires a different approach.
The fall hunting season is short, running from Nov. 12 to 27. Hunters are allowed by law to bag one bird of each sex, but because the animals aren’t breeding, they don’t respond to calls. A hunter needs to know where the food and water sources are, and, when the birds are distracted, ambush them.
Spring brings the more traditional season, when hunters dress in camouflage and use decoys and hand calls. They’re allowed to kill two males in the spring. The toms, as they’re called, are distinguished by their beards.
“In the fall here, you’re actually going around, spotting and stalking them, whereas in the springtime, to me it’s much more fun,” Solis said. “That’s where sportsmen really get hooked on turkey hunting. In the springtime, you call them in.”
To lure toms, hunters use traditional box and slate calls that imitate a hen available for breeding. At times, Solis said, hunters will even use decoys, setting them up in an open meadow and calling for the males.
“You get out there and sit quietly, you’ll call for them a little bit and you’ll have long periods where you just listen,” Solis described. “You’ll hear them calling back occasionally and every once in a while give them a little scratch on the call, or a chirp, which also takes practice to do. It’s a skill; it’s not easy to do.”
These days, Solis said, most turkey hunters learn calls from videos on the Internet, and many pride themselves on their ability to mimic the hens.
For such a staid looking bird, turkeys are actually quite intelligent, have excellent vision, and, contrary to the layman’s perception, they do fly, jumping not so gracefully from the ground to roost in trees and sometimes gliding.
Most hunters try to shoot them on the ground. Decker’s weapon of choice is a shotgun.
“It’s an experience that can be enjoyed,” Decker said. “It wasn’t available in California way back when, and now it is. For some people, it’s great. Sometimes they just walk out the back door and they’ve got a flock of turkeys, they take their pick and away they go.”
Even if you know where turkeys congregate, it’s not like you can just go out for the kill. If you want to bag one for your table next Thanksgiving, it takes effort and planning.
First, you have to take a hunting safety class, usually free of charge, but only offered a few times each year. Then, you’ve got to buy a hunting license from the state, which costs $43.46 for residents or $151.20 for non-residents. Finally, you need an Upland Bird Stamp, which allows hunting for turkey, as well as quail and pheasant, for about $9.
Then of course, there’s the hardware and the gear.
As far as weapons go, hunters can use shotguns with up to a No. 2 shot on turkeys, but the guns can only hold three rounds at a time, a law to give the birds a “sporting chance,” Solis said. Bowhunting and use of 20-caliber or higher air rifles is also permitted—and much more challenging.
While uncommon in fall, turkey hunting is quite popular in the county in spring, Solis said. On Figueroa Mountain he might check on 20 to 30 hunters in a day.
One common misconception, Solis said, is that Fish and Game doesn’t enforce hunting rules on private lands. The agency has the right to randomly patrol ranches without a warrant, if there’s hunting and fishing going on or in response to violations.
“You own the property, but you don’t own the wildlife that’s on the property,” Solis said. “We hold the wildlife in the public trust for the people of California, so even on your own private property, you still have to go by all the Fish and Game regulations.”
The hunt continues
As we drive along the ranch’s dirt roads, Marco explains how he’s sometimes had to confront poachers on the land, even detaining them until wardens or Sheriff’s Department deputies arrive.
“Sometimes they’ll try to run,” he says. “Usually we’ll just scare them off.”
After searching the roads and scanning the hills for about a half-hour with no sign of turkeys, we catch up to another sizable flock positioned at the bottom of a dry wash, feeding into the Santa Ynez River. Unfortunately, the ground cover is poor and Marco is unable to sneak up on them; they spook and take off for their roosts in the tall trees.
Strike two.
Flustered after his attempts with the bow produced no results, Marco grabs the 12-gauge shotgun he’s brought along as a backup, loading three rounds in the chamber.
“OK, I’m done playing with them,” he says confidently.
There’s still one more large group he knows of back near the entrance of the ranch, where about 25 birds are gathered under an oak tree, presumably feeding on acorns.
Because it’s an open meadow with nowhere to hide, our goal is to force them across the road, where Marco thinks we can catch up to them in the truck and surprise them from behind.
Marco drives through the open gate and we walk the rest of the way toward the site where two flocks have converged. He walks ahead and motions for us to stay put. This is it.
Suddenly, the sharp report of the shotgun breaks the calm. There’s a chaotic flurry of feathers and panicked squawking. I think I see a turkey fall to the ground, but from my vantage point, I can’t be certain.
I hear Marco yelling and see what looks to be flapping wings on the ground. We come upon a young hen, with Marco standing over it. He’s tagged it in the head. There’s remarkably little blood.
Picking the hen up by her feet and holding her at his side, Marco walks back to the truck, then lays the bird down and begins plucking the feathers from its torso, a time-consuming process. After the carcass is smooth, it’s time to gut it. Marco cuts down the middle of the chest to open the cavity, and yours truly gets the honor of scooping the entrails out the bottom. When we’re finished, the ground is a blanket of deep brown and pearly white feathers.
The bird is fairly young, and isn’t as large as one you might find in a supermarket—maybe 10 pounds, Marco estimates. As food, he says, wild turkeys are leaner than their domestic cousins, with more dark meat and smaller breasts. He describes the leg meat as akin to “chewing on a rubber tire.”
Even so, Marco says the bird will be plenty enough to feed his family at the Thanksgiving table.
“It would’ve been a lot easier to just go get a Butterball,” he says, as we walk back to the truck. “But it wouldn’t have been as fun.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 23-30, 2011.