Game managers in South Carolina will be enforcing new hunting regulations this spring in an effort to reverse significant statewide declines in Palmetto State turkey populations. In addition to banning a form of turkey stalking commonly called reaping, the new rules prohibit turkey hunters from shooting immature male birds, also known as jakes.
While the new regs ban reaping on all private lands, they don’t prohibit the similar practice of fanning, South Carolina resident and National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) Science and Planning Director Mark Hatfield tells Field & Stream. “Reaping is when you are moving toward and stalking a wild turkey behind a decoy or tail fan,” says Hatfield, who was part of an NWTF-led task force that laid out official definitions for the relatively new methods. “Fanning is defined as hunting from a stationary position while holding or using a fan or decoy for concealment. It is still 100 percent legal to use any type of turkey decoy placed away from the hunter in South Carolina.”
Both fanning and reaping have been outlawed on public land in South Carolina since 2020, Hatfield says. And last year, game managers reduced season lengths and bag limits in hopes of bolstering bird numbers across the state. According to Hatfield, NWTF doesn’t have an official position on the practices of fanning and reaping, but they support state wildlife agencies “making changes that are necessary to ensure turkey hunting remains safe and acceptable.”
According to SCDNR Big Game Program Manager Jay Cantrell, South Carolina legislators have final say on hunting and fishing regulations before they become law. The state does not have a governor-appointed game commission that sets rules like some other states do, he says. “During the legislative process last year, lawmakers started talking about banning fanning and reaping—using those terms together and interchangeably,” Cantrell tells F&S. “They ended up deciding to only ban reaping on private lands in the state, and to keep fanning legal. Had it been up to us, we would have kept it consistent with our public land law, which prohibits both fanning and reaping from a safety standpoint.”
Cantrell says the priamry argument against reaping and fanning is that the methods “trigger something primal in the turkey’s brain, and they just flip a switch. Instinct kicks in, and they just come in to a fan.” But he says there’s no empirical data that supports those claims—or that either fanning or reaping are contributing to the state’s ongoing turkey woes. That’s why SCDNR points mainly to the safety side of the equation when educating hunters about the new regs, he says.
A Complete Ban on All Jake Hunting
The decision to ban jake hunting also came from the legislature, Cantrell says. “Unlike other places where there are jake regulations in place, there’s no exception for youth with this,” he says. “It applies to all hunters on all lands, and a Jake is defined as a bird with a beard less than 6-inches long.”
He says the development of the tail fan is another way to tell if a turkey is an immature jake or a full-grown tom. “If the tail fan is not fully developed with the central tail feathers being longer than the rest, that bird is a jake by law,” he says.
The public’s perception over the move to outlaw jake hunting has been a mixed bag, Cantrell added. “There are a lot of strong feelings on both sides,” he says. “A lot of people applaud it and think it’s a really great thing, and a lot of people are not happy with it. We didn’t push it one way or the other. In our reports to the legislature, we were more concerned with season dates, bag limits, and season lengths.”
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With the jake prohibition now in place, though, Cantrell is hopeful that South Carolina’s turkey numbers could be on the front end of a much-needed rebound. “A jake is a bird that’s not sexually mature. He’s not contributing anything the population,” Cantrell explains. “He’s run the gauntlet. It’s no small task to make it from an egg to a year-old turkey. If you can let those birds survive to breeding age, your overall populations should benefit from that.”
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