Hunters collect turkeys worldwide

WILD TURKEY HUNTING is a true American tradition that has been transplanted to some exotic locales.
Ken Sullivan of Fishers Shore Road recently returned from an exciting hunt for Merriam wild turkeys in New Zealand.

In five days of hunting, he took 17 birds — three short of the limit. The farmers there consider the turkeys, which range the countryside in large flocks, as vermin.

“The crops of the ones I killed were full of alfalfa sprouts,” he said.

But they are no less hard to hunt than the native birds in the United States, he said.

“The real hunting is in the hills. The birds there travel in much smaller groups, and they don’t respond to calls very well. You have to glass them with binoculars, and it’s tough hunting. I think I only had two birds come to my calling. But if some birds busted me, I’d call on the slate and that seemed to settle them down.”

Sullivan grew up in the mountains of Virginia, where he heard about turkey hunting but never did any.

“I had seven uncles, and they all talked about turkey hunting. They’d sit on the porch and call with their mouth,” he said. “I was fascinated.”

Before he had a chance to take up the sport, life intervened. He spent 28 years as a Navy pilot and retired as a professor of Naval Science at the University of South Carolina in 1996.

“Since then, I hunt and fish, run errands for my wife and play with the grandkids,” Sullivan chuckled.

Then fate intervened in the form of his future son-in-law, Trey Brown.

The pair went turkey hunting near Clinton and saw two gobblers in a field.

“Trey called with a mouth call, and they came running,” he said. “They stopped about 30 yards away and he said, ‘1-2-3-shoot!’” Both birds dropped. “And I was hooked,” Sullivan said.

He was invited to join members of the Knight & Hale Game Call Company pro staff for the trip to New Zealand this year.

“I had a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles for $311, and then it was $970 for the flight from Los Angeles to Auckland and then to Queenstown. The cost to hunt was $200 a day U.S., but now it is $250 a day. I did everything I needed to do for about $2,700 total,” he said.

Sullivan and the Knight & Hale group hunted with Doctari Safaris, Ltd., in Ranfurly, Central Otago, N.Z. The outfitter offers hunting for turkeys, deer, small game, birds, ducks, wild pigs and goats, more than 20 game species in all, plus fishing.

“New Zealanders are into two things: rugby and pig hunting,” Sullivan said. “They use dogs, and when they surround the pig, they run in with their knives and hog stick them.”