The 2023 spring turkey season started out with a challenge – tagging three toms in order to reach a lifetime total of 50 birds. That string started with a 22-pound bird way back in 1981 in Missouri.
Some of the intervening years were marked with unfilled tags or blanked seasons from not drawing one in the state’s lottery. My first Wisconsin gobbler hit the ground in 1983, the year of the state’s inaugural season, thanks to a stocking program started in the 1970s with birds from Missouri.
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