Turner Game Birds

Turner Game Birds

“Buddy, that dog in the first pen, I started him and he was doing so good that I got ahead of myself and I took him out and shot over him too soon, scared him, got him gun shy.” Ted Turner, the owner of Turner Game Birds, shook his head, “I hoped I hadn’t ruined him, but I thought he had too much drive, and he did.  He came back.” Turner and his son, Mike, raise both dogs and birds. Pheasants, quail, and chukars are the birds, and the dogs are trained to hunt. “Buddy’s trained now to hunt pheasant, he’ll get up in there and get that bird.”

“I started this as a retirement project,” Turner told us. He retired from teaching Agriculture at Covington High School.  “Ideally I wanted to do about four hunts a week, but it doesn’t always work that way. Some weeks, you have one or two, but as you get closer to the spring we have hunts every day.”  Turner explained. “It’s not much of a retirement, but as long as my health holds out, we’ll have fun.” Turner is 77, and while he says he’s getting a little long in the tooth, you can see how much he enjoys doing what he’s doing.

“We’ve been doing this for nineteen years.  We started in 2001, Mike and I went to North Dakota in 2000 to go duck hunting.  We knew some folks from the cattle business up there and went duck hunting on their place.  I told my son, while we’re here I want to go Pheasant hunting, too. I got my ag teacher directory out and they put me in touch with a guy that had just started in the business about three years before that.” Turner smiled at the memory, “On the way back, we looked at each other and said, you know, we could do that at home.  We figured we’d have to get the birds from up there, and when we got home, we started checking on it. They wanted $30 per bird, but we figured that was too much, so we gave up on it, but I was reading the Commercial Appeal a couple of months later, and they had a classified ad for a place down on State Line Road for Ring Neck Pheasants.  I brought them home, hunted them a couple of times, then kept the hens and we hatched out 50 birds.  That first year we had 14 hunters, last year we had over 300 hunters.”

How many birds are raised at Turners? “This year we raised right at 600 pheasants but we buy all of our quail and most of the chukars,” Turner added.  “The quail are a little difficult to raise, we have a guy over in Crockett Mills that raises them for us.” Birds harvested, well that’s a little different number too, about 1200 pheasants were released last year, and most were brought down by hunters, 2500 quail, and about 300 chukars.

The dog that we took out was a smart girl, you think she’s breaking a point, but she’s hunted enough that she’s figured out the pheasant is going to run and she goes around and catches them, she’s learned to play cut off.  “You know, you want birds to get up and fly, and depending on how good a shot people are, sometimes the birds do get away. They have to stay inside our boundary to get to shoot them”. Turner grinned, ”I can’t tell the birds which way to fly.  You want birds to fly, if they don’t it’s not much of a challenge.” Most of Turner’s hunts are about two miles, with people that aren’t great shots, you might walk up to about five miles.

Turner’s have gotten hunters from Guam, South Africa, Africa, England, Scotland, the Middle East, Canada, Alaska, and all over the United States.  They also have people that come back every year. “You get some interesting characters and some interesting accents.” Turner said, “We really enjoy people coming in, hearing the different accents, but they like our accents, too.”

The number one enemy at the Turner’s are Hawks.  “We’ve got a Hawk problem, and that’s also one of the problems with raising and hunting quail, the hawks swoop down and get them if they are not put up,” Turner explained.  Nets are atop the pens where the birds are kept to prevent the hawks from swooping in for dinner. That’s also why they wait to put the birds out until the hunters get there.  “They may have reserved for 6 people, but only 4 show up.” Turner laughed, “We make sure that everybody gets the number of birds they reserve to shoot for—doesn’t always mean they get every one.”

For more information, or to schedule a hunt, go to their website: TurnerGameBirds.com or call Ted: 901-476-2779 or cell: 901-619-7914.  You may also email him: Ted@turnergamebirds.com