Turkeys Love Turkey Shoots Since Clay Is Top Target, Gobblers Can Rest Easy

They shoot turkeys, don’t they?

Yes, they do. But not at turkey shoots.

Nowadays, anything that involves shooting an actual turkey is called a turkey hunt. There is a turkey hunt underway in Washington right now, as a matter of fact.

But while only a few hundred hunters are pursuing real wild turkeys, thousands will be participating in turkey shoots around the Pacific Northwest this month.

Putting a turkey on the table is ostensibly what turkey shoots are all about, although some participants will tell you it’s just an excuse to get together for some fun and friendly competition.

Novice shooters may still be wondering just what it is they do at turkey shoots, if it’s not shooting turkeys.

They shoot pigeons, of course. Clay pigeons. Which are not pigeons at all. They’re more like small, ceramic frisbees.

These challenging targets are flung through the air by machines, giving the shooter only a moment or two to hit a moving target.

At some turkey shoots, however, they shoot paper targets instead of clay pigeons.

Indeed, turkey shoots are traditional at gun clubs throughout the United States, especially during the fall season. Some are skill contests, where the sharpest shooter takes home meat for the holiday table. Some are little more than lotteries decided by the almost random flight path of a shotgun pellet.

Once upon a time, turkey shoots were much simpler.

The turkey shoot - which is believed to be one of the oldest forms of competitive shooting in the United States - can be traced to colonial times.

Originally, the turkey was more than just the prize. It was also the target.

“In the colonial days, they actually shot at a turkey,” says Ken Durbin, head of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s wild turkey program. “They concealed its body in some way - either by putting it in a box or by staking it behind a log - so that its head was free to bob around.”

The turkey’s bobbing head thus became the target. And turkey shooters originally fired a single musket ball, not a spray of shotgun pellets, at their target.

It was extremely challenging, given that the musketeers did their shooting at fairly long range, says Robert Abernathy, who heads the restoration program for the National Wild Turkey Federation.

“It was a marksmanship competition using a live target the size of a 50-cent piece, at a preset distance, probably about 60 yards,” Abernathy said. “With open sights and with a target that was moving, needless to say it was extremely difficult.”

Abernathy said the practice of using live turkeys apparently died out around the turn of the century.

Various other targets took their place. And the nature of the turkey shoot sometimes shifted from a skills event to a game of chance.

Durbin, for example, says that when he was a youngster he entered turkey shoots in which every contestant was given one shotgun shell and a “piece of paper with a tiny red ‘X’ on it.”

Everyone shot at their piece of paper - and “whoever had a pellet closest to that red ‘X’ was a winner,” Durbin said. “It was a completely random deal.”

In some events, entrants purchase silver-dollar-sized circles on a huge board covered with circles. After everybody fires at the board, the winner is the person with the circle containing the most pellet holes.

The National Wild Turkey Federation sponsors “The Turkey Shoot” each September in Atlanta, Ga. But the top prize is not a turkey. Some $50,000 in cash was at stake in the high-pressure, three-day event this year.

Competitors had to shoot at 50 clay targets in each round.

In local club “fun shoots” ranging from Spokane to clubs in small towns such as Sprague, shooters might simply compare their scores on regular rounds of trap to earn their prizes.

In another version, entrants pay $15 for the right to shoot five rounds of five shots each, with each shot taken from a different spot on the range.

Novices and beginners fire from the front of the trapshoot area, about 16 yards from the device that launches the clay pigeons. Expert shooters are placed about 10 yards farther back.

Each entrant competes against four other shooters in each round. If a round ends with two or more shooters having broken the same number of targets, the top scorers step back and keep shooting in a sudden-death tiebreaker. The first to break a target at a distance at which his competitor misses gets the turkey.

In subsequent rounds, winners are matched against winners and losers are matched against losers.

Often, the clubs arrange it so a shooter who shoots four or five rounds gets a turkey regardless of whether he wins.