According to preliminary data, West Virginia hunters harvested 11,314 birds during the spring turkey season, a slight increase over the 2019 harvest of 11,215. The 2020 spring turkey harvest is close to the five-year average of 11,344 and 9 percent above the 10-year average.
“We had a good harvest this year thanks to a great youth turkey season,” said Mike Peters, wild turkey biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. “The youth turkey season expanded to two days this year and it appears our young hunters took advantage of the additional opportunity.”
Youth hunters harvested 643 gobblers during the two days — 368 on Saturday and 275 on Sunday — representing a 37 percent increase over last year’s youth harvest. Those numbers are included in the table below with county totals.
Districts 4 and 5 reported slight harvest increases over last year’s totals. The remaining districts harvested slightly fewer birds than last year. District 1 harvested the most birds (2,749), followed by District 6 (2,284), District 5 (2,131), District 4 (1,617), District 3 (1,521) and District 2 (1,012).
The top five counties with the highest turkey harvest were Mason (457), Preston (434), Jackson (402), Wood (344) and Harrison (339) counties.
Spring harvest of wild turkeys in West Virginia, 2016-2020:
County 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
Berkeley 115 147 162 141 151
Grant 161 145 160 140 124
Hampshire 170 184 166 203 176
Hardy 132 132 151 142 123
Jefferson 79 115 115 125 121
Mineral 134 133 148 121 113
Morgan 54 64 65 83 93
Pendleton 88 112 112 112 111
District 933 1,032 1,079 1,067 1,012
State Total 10,361 11,545 12,287 11,215 11,314