Nebraska Suspends Out of State

Probably too late this year but anyone interested in traveling Turkey trips ought to research New Mexico.

Loads of opportunities to hunt public land with no competition with an over the counter tag and a hunting license. Also there are draw hunts but getting drawn is as convoluted a process as they can make it....and it ain't necessary.

Almost the entire state, I think the 5th largest in size in the country, is BLM, NFS or Reclamation land and open to the public....and the Merriams and Goulds are THICK in places, and dumb as a stump compared to Easterns.

The area around Ruidoso (for about 10 miles north and south and about 50 miles east to west) is almost ALL public land, an immense area and crawling with turkeys with very few people chasing them.

Northern New Mexico is also thick and uncrowded...and the Pecos River Valley is another option but there is a lot of private / public land mixed together (OnX works very well in New Mexico). And, to top it off, if it ain't posted its open to the public...and only the land owner can ask you to leave if it is posted....not the Sherriff or the Game Warden ( I personally wouldn't test this but I know people who have and survived LOL)...and there are VAST areas privately owned that aren't posted and the owner of record has never seen it and may not know they own it and probably never set foot in New Mexico....this is also true of Quail and Dove in the fall in Winter....and both are hard to beat in the US and dove are, in places, as good as anywhere on earth with the exception of there being a limit of 15 which means about a 30-45 minute shoot in the evening in the same kind of quality found anywhere...including $500 a day trips in exotic locations.

New Mexico is a hunting paradise...unfortunately they had discovered the revenue that big game can drive so it is almost impossible to hunt big game even as a resident for a reasonable fee. But chances are you'll never see another living soul hunting...I hunted Ducks in New Mexico, all on public land, for 5 seasons and never got checked by a warden (try that ANYWHERE in the US....it ain't happening) and only saw other hunters 3 times....about 45 trips a season, 5 years, with limits of DECOYING birds not uncommon and skunks almost non-existent....without ever seeing another hunter and not hearing another shot fired in anger 99% of the time....

You can also dry camp just about anywhere you like....about as liberating a place as you can find in the United States.....A long haul from just about anywhere and flights even into ABQ are overpriced but its worth the effort until they change it....

Where do you live?

GTMO...nice to run into you on another forum! I met up with you 2 years ago and we dove hunted outside of Carlsbad one evening. I had 3 or 4 other guys out there with me and you sat around a water hole with your black lab picking up doves they shot.

The same group of guys applied for NM elk tags last year but didn't get drawn so we went to Colorado. Since we had already bought NM general licenses we stopped off for two days and dove hunted around Hobbs. We killed a few but it wasn't anything like what we got into a couple of years ago.

Hope all is well with you in the PNW and you found all those ducks you were reading about!

Yeah, that was me...but that was former stay home riders until the end of June. F that

Where would you go if you had a choice for Merriams in N Mexico? Just lost our hunt in Nebraska because of the ole Governor and hate to have my boys miss a turkey trip. Any info greatly appreciated!