Time to talk turkey: Excellent hunting expected as Minnesota's spring season opens

Greg Stanley, Star Tribune on Apr 23, 2025

Published in Outdoors

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MINNEAPOLIS — Some 60,000 turkey hunters are expected to head out into farms, fields and woods across Minnesota last week in the hopes of hearing the scratchy, echoing cry of a tom and calling one in. Spring turkey hunting season, which ends May 31, has begun.

Turkeys, which were once completely wiped out of Minnesota and nearly all of the United States, are thriving. They’ve made themselves at home in the northern woods and western cornfields, as well as near the busiest bus routes and light-rail lines of downtown Minneapolis.

Here is a quick guide for the 2025 hunting season.

How’s the outlook for hunters?

Excellent. Biologists with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources are expecting bird hunters to see more action than normal this year. And it’s not just because the turkey population as a whole is doing well. More specifically, the two-year-old birds that most hunters shoot are flourishing, said Nate Huck, a game bird consultant for the DNR.

“It’s the two-year-old toms that make up the majority of the harvest,“ Huck said. ”So those birds now were hatched in 2023. And if you remember, the winter of 2023 was so warm that it was practically nonexistent and the winter of 2024 never had high snow loads."

As a result, biologists expect that more young turkeys were able to survive to their second year.

Is there a permit lottery?

No. Minnesota did away with its lottery system several years ago, other than in a few specific wildlife management areas where the state is worried about too much early season hunting pressure. Hunting licenses can be bought anytime.

How does the season work?

The season is divided up into six weeks labeled A through F. When gun hunters buy a license they need to select which of the one-week windows they plan to hunt. As usual, hunters are limited this year to taking one male turkey for the season. All gun hunters who are unsuccessful during their week are given a second chance, and are allowed to hunt the final week of the season, which has become affectionately known as “losers week.”

Archers and crossbow hunters are allowed to hunt the entire six-week season. Any hunter with a gun or archery license may use a crossbow.

How high is demand expected to be this year?

The number of turkey hunting permits sold has been relatively stable since 2020, Huck said.

The number of hunters shot up that year to just above 65,000, likely thanks to a bump in outdoor interest from the pandemic. Since then, sales have hovered in the 60,000 range each year.

Turkeys were once wiped out of Minnesota?

They were killed off by some combination of disease, over-hunting and habitat loss and nearly eliminated from the entire United States. By the early 1900s, only a few small pockets survived in the Ozarks of Missouri and the Florida Everglades. Conservationists, state officials and, primarily, hunting groups, saved wild turkeys by capturing some of the few surviving birds out of the Ozarks and reintroducing them in places like Minnesota. They’ve been flourishing ever since, and are one of the greatest success stories in American conservation.

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