FARMINGTON, Mo. (News First) – The first half of Missouri’s archery season for deer and turkey hunters will come to a close at the end of the day on Friday, November 15th. Alan Lamb is a conservation agent for Madison County. He says bow hunters should check their regulations because there have been some major changes in archery season regulations.
“They’ve changed a few things. It’s always advised if you’re new to archery hunting or if you’ve been doing it for years, always get a regulations book and look at the regs. But new this year is they removed the archery turkeys from the archery permit. If you want to harvest a turkey with your bow, you have to buy an additional permit. What that was a result of was public outcry. We surveyed a lot of hunters across the state when it came to our turkey regulations. And we said, ‘How can we better help our turkey population through hunter-harvest?’ And we had an outcry from the public warning a reduction in the fall harvest,” Lamb says.
We asked Lamb if he gets many bow hunters in Madison County.
“I do, yeah. A lot of our US Forest Service property that we have down here, we have a lot of individuals that come from the city or even up from the Bootheel on the weekends, along with a lot of local residents. We’ll hunt the US Forest Service properties. Of course, when there’s thousands of acres of free public hunting, it gives you a lot of opportunity,” Lamb adds.
Locally for the News 1st coverage area, the top three deer bow hunting counties are Jefferson with 880 checked in, Franklin County has 693 and Wayne County has 449. For archery turkey hunters, the top three local counties are Jefferson with 18, Franklin 17 and Cape Girardeau County has 13 turkey harvested with a bow and arrow. After Friday, November 15th, Missouri’s archery season will be closed while the regular firearms deer season takes place on Saturday the 16th and will run through the 26th. The second half of the archery season will then pick back up on November 27th and will go through January 15th.
