Outdoors: Stay safe while hunting turkeys this year
Georgia's turkey hunting season is remarkably safe - particularly compared to deer season, when the majority of the state's hunting accidents occur.
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Most of those accidents happen when deer hunters fall out of tree stands - which is not an issue in turkey season, since the hunting is done on the ground.
"I used to tell folks that statistically, if you want to get hurt while you're hunting, climb up in a tree," said Lt. Judd Smith, a law enforcement officer with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resources Conservation Center. "Statistics have shown that if you're gonna get hurt while you're huting, that's how it's gonna happen - you'll fall out of a tree."
Smith said the most frequent cause of accidents during turkey season is when a hunter misidentifies another hunter as his target.
That typically occurs when the shooter sees the colors he'd normally associate with a turkey's head in the other hunter's wardrobe and mistakes it as a turkey.
"Hunters can help with that by not wearing certain colors, like red and blue and white, because it's only legal to kill gobblers (male turkeys) in Georgia," Smith said. "Especially this time of year, because they're breeding, their heads turn those different colors and that's how you tell the difference between a hen and a gobbler i
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