There are some mature birds that have short beards from a lack of melanin that makes the beard weak and it will break. The best method is to wait and see the bird in full strut. If his fan (tail feathers) form an even-edged circle, then he's mature. If there are shorter feathers on the edges of the fan with taller feathers in the middle, then it's a jake.

James Austin

Related Quotes

Combine it all, and it could be tougher to find a lot of legal mature gobblers to chase.

— James Austin

Last year, we had a shortage of 2-year-old birds from the poor hatch in 2003, so we didn't have a surplus of those birds to carry over. The fact that there was a shortage of 2-year-olds to hunt last year meant more pressure on the older birds, so that cuts down the carry over on those, too.

— James Austin

How do you keep something alive and make it commercially viable?

— James Austin

There wasn't one particular thing that made us say we needed to have this drill, it's more of a general preparedness thing. We drill annually because a disaster situation stretches our resources and goes beyond our normal scope of day-to-day operations.

— Mary Austin

When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience.

— Mary Austin