Last week my good friend Steve Buoy and I journeyed out to western Oklahoma and enjoyed a fall turkey and quail hunt.
While the quail season that began Nov. 9 continues to Feb. 15, 2025, the fall gun turkey season’s last day is Friday. Nov. 22.
A few years back, the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation changed the rules, we are now allowed to hunt only gobblers. If I recall correctly, ever since I’ve hunted out there with Steve, we’d always been able to shoot a turkey of either sex during the fall hunt.
We found some gobblers, but we harvested only one between us.
He told me he’d give me the first shot at it, and I downed the big gobbler and he backed me up also hitting it on his shot.
It had a 9½-inch long bear and one inch spurs. The outlook for the quail season in Oklahoma in that part of the state this year looks really good, though you couldn’t tell it from our experience last week.
As we drove the roads and pastures getting an idea of where turkeys might be hanging out, we saw a few bobwhites, but nothing like we expected.
Until February of this year, I hadn’t hunted quail in the last four or five years.
Buoy had hunted with some other guys opening weekend, which was just a few days before he and I were out there, and they found quite a few birds. But as he described it, “It was not real good.”
When Steve and I hunt, we drive the roads and walk and drive some of the pastures, not only to spot turkeys and get an idea where they might be, but also hoping to find quail. He has a new, young Brittany that likes to hunt and has a good nose on him.
On the first day out there the wind was coming out of the north at about 30 to 35 miles an hour and that isn’t real conducive to hunting anything really. But, we enjoy being out there so we stuck with it.
The second day the wind was out of the south and while it was windy, it was nothing like the previous day.
In the last two or three years the quail population in that part of the state and in other areas seems to be increasing. The previous few years to that reminded me of when I was a young kid in around 1953-54 and my dad and his hunting partner stopped quail hunting.
It was so bad even, they gave up their bird dogs to friends and started duck hunting.
It would seem all the elements were right this past summer, they have feed, they have decent cover, they had rain in the spring and throughout the summer.