BUCKHANNON, W.Va. — There is a wild turkey population in 49 of the nation’s 50 states. Alaska is the only state not blessed with turkeys. Tanner Burns of Buckhannon, West Virginia has set a goal to kill a turkey in every one of those 49 states and he’s well on his way to doing it.
“I’m 36 states down and I have 13 to go,” he said on a recent edition of West Virginia Outdoors.
Burns is a school teacher in Upshur County and also flourishes as a taxidermist. His quest, known as the Wild Turkey Super Slam, started about six years ago. He’s put himself on the clock to accomplish the feat. Only about a dozen people in history have completed the Super Slam and none from West Virginia. Burns at age 27 hopes to not only be the first from the Mountain State, but also the youngest to do it.
“The youngest guy to ever do it was 33, so I have six years to get 13 states done,” he said.
He’s already been able to knock out some of the more challenging turkeys like Nevada and Arizona.
“It gets really spotty because a lot of states out west don’t have a lot of turkeys. Arizona and Nevada come to mind. There’s only a couple thousand turkeys in Nevada,” he said. “I’ve got a folder with everybody’s DNR information to know what I need to do as far as applying and getting drawn for permits.”
Burns called the Arizona turkey his most memorable hunt so far. He spent three days on an Indian reservation in the mountains 100 miles up a dirt road from the nearest gas station.
“We slept in our rental vehicle for three days,” he said. “Those turkeys weren’t transplants, they were native Merriam’s that have been there for thousands of years.”
Although he plans most of his hunts on his own, Burns admitted having friends doesn’t hurt. A friend who had already completed the Super Slam was able to connect him with a landowner in Nevada who had a tag and owned land with one of the few huntable turkey flocks in the Silver State.
Burns’ New York turkey came in the Catskills not terribly far from the city that never sleeps.
“I killed it on a watershed of New York City,” he explained. “Once you get outside of New York City the watershed has thousands and thousands of acres of public land.”
Burns’ research on each state starts with a check of the annual turkey harvest from that state’s Division of Natural Resources. He takes the counties where the kill was highest from past seasons and checks a map for the available public land in those counties. The next step is a study of satellite imagery to determine the most likely turkey habitat on those public lands. So far the formula has been effective.
The states left on his list: Hawaii, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon.
“I’m going to knock out as many as I can this spring, but the problem is Hawaii. If you’re going to do Hawaii you have to go pretty early in the year because of their season,” he said. “If the stars would align and I could kill all 13 this spring that would be great, but I’m thinking next spring is more likely. I don’t have it all ironed out yet.”
A lot of turkey hunters set a goal of killing one of each of the subspecies of wild turkeys in the United States. Those include the Eastern, Rio Grande, Osceola, and Merriam’s. Burns has already completed that cycle. He added he may try to add the Gould’s turkey of Mexico and the ocellated turkey of central and South America when his current quest is finished.