New York’s month-long turkey season ended at noon on the last day of May.
Unload the gun. Put the arrow or bolt in its quiver.
Springtime gobbler hunting is unique in this way, compared to other outdoor sports, in that we must stop at a specific, unchangeable time. Deer hunters here in New York end one half hour past sunset, so the actual time changes each day. With earlier sunsets, we have to be out of the woods earlier each day, ditto with small game hunting.
Here in New York, gobbler hunting ends each day at exactly noon and there is a reason for this. Other states have different times for turkey hunters to quit, each arbitrarily set by their game departments.
Quitting times are important for hunters to keep track of as they are strictly enforced. And to be legal in the springtime turkey woods, a hunter cannot pull the trigger on a bow or gun past noon. But West Virginia turkey hunters have to be out of the woods at 1 p.m. And Pennsylvania hunters have a bit more complicated ending-time scenario. For the first half of the Pa. season (this year, 2025) from May 3 to May 17, hunters had to quit at noon. But for the final two weeks, until May 31, gobbler hunters had until a half hour after sunset. (Their April 26 Youth Hunt had an ending time at noon.)
Hunters need to pay careful attention to sunrise and sunset times … those moving, everyday targets, so that we can be legal, all depending on our longitude. And if we travel out of state to hunt, we must carefully check online or read printed timetables because locations differ in time.
Take here in Western NY, for instance. If sunrise in mid-May is 5:45 a.m., it’s 15 minutes later in Pittsburgh, Pa. at 6 am. And further south in Beckley, West Va. sunrise is 6:15, and further south in Knoxville, Tenn. sunrise is 6:30. So our start times or when we can legally hunt change every day, as sunrise gets earlier every day.
But not the daily end time. That’s set in stone and in NY, noon. Here, when the clock strikes 12, we are done. Unload the gun. Game over. Of course there is a biological, game-behavior reason for us not being able to hunt past noon, according to time-honored turkey research.
Turkey hens are on their nests in the afternoon and turkey hunters could bump, or scare incubating or nesting hens off, threatening the entire clutch of eggs and therefore the turkey population. So, the rule is, and gobbler hunting started in a few counties in NY about a half century ago, in the late 1960s … no shooting past noon.
I don’t know how much truth is still in that old rule. Some states, still with good turkey populations, let turkey hunters hunt all day. But personally, I’m OK with the noontime deadline. Fine by me. No problem.
But, I have to admit, now, I have a selfish reason for not challenging the quitting of turkey hunting at noon. I’m older now and beat, tuckered by noon … ready for a nap after chasing gobbles since dawn. And actually, glad for the break. If we could hunt gobblers all day long, I’d be nodding off under a big maple or hemlock tree even more than I do.
Heck, the noontime whistle gives the birds a break, but the pressure is off us turkey hunters, too. And the bell at 12 has saved the life of more than one tom. A gobbler on a ridge here just outside of town had a peculiar trait. He did not sound off until around 11 a.m. each morning. Hunt him all morning and nothing … just gobbles off the roost. But just after flydown he’d shut up through the rest of the morning … until just about an hour to go.
I think that more than one old tom, in the latter part of the season, calls to the last of his girlfriends, the wallflowers who are still not incubating eggs. And once in a while the hens do show up. I had no problem calling them in. Besides, by the middle and especially late in the month, most turkey hunters have given up that full roaming vapor, the class 5 seeming entity … their best shot to kill a longbeard.
When I got to the top of the maple ridge, it was 11 a.m. on the dot. Leaves had been torn up, fresh scratchings. Great! Start calling … less than an hour left. Like clockwork, the old tom was answering my yelps, cuts, and cackles and slowly working his way in. But you guessed it. I was running out of time. My phone said I had just nine minutes and ticking down to get the tom into shooting range.
But he gobbled, floating just outside range, not hanging up. Sure as heck taking his sweet time closing the gap. Time flew. I looked with a combination of horror and resignation … it said noon! I snapped the safety on the shotgun. Game over … but the bird kept gobbling, absolutely sold that I was a hen. When the tom dropped into a low spot over the knoll, I bailed and hustled away … still hearing a faint gobble and wearing a fainter smile saying … ”I’ll get you tomorrow.”
Well … long story short, tomorrow came all right, and so did the rain, as was so typical this spring. A drenching, soaking blankety-blank that washed away everything, including my hopes for getting that bird by noon.
Oak Duke writes a New York-based Outdoors column.
This article originally appeared on The Evening Tribune: Why it’s important for turkey hunters to know when it’s ‘quitting time’: Outdoors column
Reporting by Oak Duke / The Evening Tribune
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