Brad Harvey: Are you sure of that turkey trophy?

For as tough as it can be to fool an old gobbler, just filling one of your allotted tags is reason enough to consider a season a success.

It’s for this reason that turkey hunters love to talk about the bird they bagged. You’ll hear them tell of the Tom’s beard length, the size of his spurs and his beautiful tailfeathers that make up a wide, full fan. Then they’ll make some sort of proclamation as to the age of the bird, boasting that he’s a bit of a geriatric since a well-aged bird is a very wise one, requiring great skill and sharp woodsmanship.

The truth is that the majority of turkey hunters have no clue as to how to determine the age of a male turkey beyond the telltale signs of an immature juvenile Tom, known as a Jake. These youngsters tend to have a very short beard that protrudes straight out from the breast; small, blunt nubs for spurs; and an uneven fan of tailfeathers. These easily observable traits make it pretty simple for the most novice hunter to determine that such a turkey is but a year old and somewhat dumb to the ways of the woods.

For bigger males that aren’t so easy to differentiate, there are many old myths that hunters have relied on for years. One such falsehood is that a Tom over 20 pounds is at least 3 years old. Some claim that a 9- or 10-inch beard is a sure sign of a 4-year-old gobbler, and then there’s the sharp-spur theory that declares a longbeard to be every bit of 3 if the spurs he’s sporting on his legs are three-quarters of an inch long and fairly pointed.

As I said, they are myths, so go ahead and forget them if you’ve been using such tactics to establish how your trophy measures up.

So is there a legitimate way to age them?

If you’re fortunate enough to bring a bird home from the woods when this year’s season opens next week, you’ll want to know how old he really is. Let’s bring an end to the controversy of it all and find out how best to judge a gobbler’s length of life.

According to wildlife biologists and most others educated in such things, these are the most biologically sound factors for nailing it all down. I realize that I’ve already covered the characteristics of the one year olds but I’ll give you the hard numbers for them anyway.

If the turkey has spurs that range from the aforementioned nubs out to a half inch and a beard that that runs anywhere from 3 to 5 inches, he’s a definite Jake.

A 2-year-old bird will feature spurs beyond the half-inch mark but not more than seven-eighths, with tips that are more pointed yet still somewhat rounded and smooth. His beard will fall between 6 and 9 inches in length, often having amber tips on the ends of the filaments.

If your gobbler was strutting around with 1-inch spurs that are somewhat sharp and a 10-inch or longer beard that would make the boys from ZZ Top envious, he is at least 3.

Beyond that third year, beard length doesn’t really come into play and the spurs alone are the best way to tell. If spur length has reached at least one-and-a-quarter inches or more and are truly sharp, that old boy has been sleeping in the trees for 4 years and possibly longer.

Although I’ve heard hunters make proclamations of a bird being 5 or more years of age, there’s no true way of knowing the age after that fourth year since any longbeard having reached that point has pretty much maxed out everything that he’s going to have.

So there you have it. If you happened to notice, I didn’t mention a single thing about the overall weight playing any part in the equation. That’s because it doesn’t.

Biologists state that there are way too many things that can affect a turkey’s weight, making it no more useful in the aging process of an old Tom than it would be to use it in determining the age of people. However, a hefty bird is a sure-fire sign of something that’s extremely important if our turkeys are ever going to bounce back from their low numbers of the last 10 to 15 years. It tells you that the ground you’re hunting and that those turkeys are living on is fertile habitat that’s providing them with everything they need to thrive.

Now that you know the real deal on aging those gobblers, go ahead and brag if you find yourself to be lucky enough as to take a true, old, trophy gobbler. It definitely doesn’t happen as often as many would like to believe.

This story was originally published March 26, 2015 at 10:12 AM with the headline "Brad Harvey: Are you sure of that turkey trophy?."