As one who has bagged birds on both the last Thursday and Saturday of the season, I can tell you that you have until late May to bag a turkey. Even if you don't get a late-season bird, those you do hear may be pre-season tip-offs for the following year's hunt.

Getting back to those top 10 counties after having left off with the four of the Northern Panhandle, their turkey bounteous brethren seem to have common denominators of habitat. That is, they support a well-smattered proportion of wood lots and hay fields with approximately one-third to one-half in hay fields.

Some experts have even gone as far as calling a 60 to 40 proportion of hardwoods to hay and crop field mixture as the magical percentage for both deer and turkeys. Top turkey counties are invariably top deer producers as well. And Mason, Monongalia, Wirt and Pleasants are top turkey counties bordering the Ohio River Valley.

Public options in Mason County include the well-known McClintic and Chief Cornstalk WMAs. Northern Wirt County features significant portions of the 10,000-acre Hughes River WMA. This WMA has been graciously kept a public option through the hospitality of Mead-Westvaco Corporation.

Monongalia County prospects include a new sleeper that hasn't even yet made the printed regulations brochure! What's more, the new 765-acre Pedlar WMA is just seven miles west of downtown Morgantown nearby to West Virginia University. University students may take note of this, especially in view of current gasoline prices. Pedlar WMA is accessible via state Route 7 and county Route 41. Consol Energy, better known to West Virginians as Consolidation Coal Company, made the gracious gift deed.

Rounding out the top 10 counties are Summers and Mercer, a southeastern West Virginia dynamic duo of the Bluestone and New river valleys. Summers County contains the 18,000-acre Bluestone Lake WMA. Mercer features the 6,000-acre Camp Creek State Forest, in addition to the 600-acre Tate Lohr WMA.

If that doesn't get you started, there are the million acres of national forest land along the eastern Appalachian front and spine of West Virginia running generally north and south along the state's long axis. Though the "big-woods" birds are down, there's plenty of elbowroom to have that gobbler all to yourself.

The many counties of the southwestern coalfields still afford plenty of unposted open range in the form of major company holdings. Active coalmining operations are usually well marked and protected by security gates and guard shacks. Once the mining moves through, the grasslands reclaim those Ohio River hay fields quite nicely.

A lot of coalfield hunting is thus geared to within a mile or so of surface coalmine reclaims. The bowhunting-only counties of Logan, Mingo, Wyoming and McDowell are seeing more posting to leases for trophy deer hunting. However, exceptions can be made for spring turkey hunting by asking permission. I even got an extra bonus of winter grouse hunting by approaching such a leaseholder just last year.

Though the Eastern Panhandle is rapidly being lost to suburbanization, there is still a nice assemblage of WMAs and good proximity to the national forest spine just to the west. If you were contemplating writing off this Panhandle altogether, you could just be making more elbowroom for the thousand or so others that annually bag their bird in what the DNR calls District 2.

The price of gas shouldn't be a hindrance to the flock of West Virginia spring gobbler hunters. Good hunting is as close as where you can go when you can go. For many Mountaineers, it's out in their very own back yards and up the nearest mountain.

Though West Virginia's turkeys have been worked over a bit by the forces of nature, they are as proud and positioned to stage a rebound as we are humbled by their prowess. Recent tsunamis, floods and hurricanes help put these dealings in perspective.

In my wildest dreams as a boy, I never thought that we would have such good hunting for turkeys as we do now, even if at a notch or two down from record proportions.

When the big boys of 2006 get to gobblin', you'll have things that are more pressing on your mind. I guarantee it.