James Austin Quotations

How do you keep something alive and make it commercially viable?

There are some mature birds that have short beards from a lack of melanin that makes the beard weak and it will break. The best method is to wait and see the bird in full strut. If his fan (tail feathers) form an even-edged circle, then he's mature. If there are shorter feathers on the edges of the fan with taller feathers in the middle, then it's a jake.

Combine it all, and it could be tougher to find a lot of legal mature gobblers to chase.

Last year, we had a shortage of 2-year-old birds from the poor hatch in 2003, so we didn't have a surplus of those birds to carry over. The fact that there was a shortage of 2-year-olds to hunt last year meant more pressure on the older birds, so that cuts down the carry over on those, too.