By DAVID RAINER, Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources
For someone who got a late start chasing turkeys, Ray Jones of Huntsville has spent the last 60 years catching up.
In fact, Jones, 86, reached and surpassed a milestone this season by bagging the 400th and 401st turkeys of his career.
The reason he got off to such a slow start was because he lived in far north Alabama where turkeys were scarce for most of his life.
“We really didn’t have any turkeys north of Birmingham when I was a young boy,” Jones said. “They had all been killed during the Depression. We hunted squirrels. We didn’t even have any deer.”
During the middle of the 20th century, the Alabama Game and Fish Division (now Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries) started an extensive restocking effort of white-tailed deer and Eastern wild turkeys across the state. Jones recalled being contacted by Game and Fish in the late 1950s.
“They called and asked if we didn’t mind if they turned loose deer and turkey on our Jackson County place,” Jones said. “They said the only thing is you can’t hunt it for five years. I told them that would be all right. The only thing was the turkeys walked up into Tennessee, so we didn’t have any for a while. The deer did well, and the turkeys finally backfilled into Alabama.”
Jones, who graduated from Auburn with a degree in agriculture, didn’t go on his first turkey hunt until he was 26, and it wasn’t on his farm. It was in the storied Alabama Black Belt.
“I sold some cattle to a man in Boligee, Alabama,” he said. “Part of the deal was I was to come go turkey hunting with him in the spring. We stayed at his ranch, some bottomland called Shady Grove. It was teeming with wildlife, every kind of wildlife you could imagine.
“I didn’t know anything about turkey hunting. We set up and Andy (Allison) started yelping. The turkey was coming straight to us, but Andy didn’t know it. He moved and the turkey saw us. He was really grieved about that. We jumped in his truck and went to another place. We jumped a couple of jakes and I killed one.”
To say Jones was instantly hooked would be a monumental understatement. In the following 60 years, turkey hunting has been his passion. Earlier this spring, Jones’ 400th turkey was a Rio Grande taken near Haskell, Texas. Recently, he added number 401 with a nice gobbler from just across the line in Tennessee.
Since that first hunt, Jones has widely expanded his turkey horizons, hunting all over the United States, and he even ventured into Mexico. He has bagged five of the six species of wild turkey – Eastern, Osceola, Rio Grande and Merriam’s in the U.S. and a Gould’s in Mexico, earning him the NWTF’s Royal Slam designation.
The only wild turkey he hasn’t bagged is the ocellated, and he doesn’t plan to hunt the bird, which is located in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
“I did not go ocellated hunting,” he said. “The old boy we were supposed to go with told me he went. He said we had to shoot them out of a tree. I said I sure don’t want to do that, so I never did go. And they don’t gobble. There’s not much to turkey hunting if they don’t gobble.”
Before turkeys became abundant in north Alabama, Jones hunted a great deal in Marengo and Wilcox counties in the Black Belt.
“We really enjoyed our hunting in Marengo and Wilcox,” he said. “That’s where we learned how to hunt turkeys. We really didn’t have turkeys up here until a few years ago. But they had the turkeys down there. We really got into turkey hunting in Wilcox County.”
