This year's artwork, "Watchful Eye," depicts an alert hen with her poults, a scene that every future spring depends on.
In keeping with our motto of leaving the world better than we found it, Mossy Oak will donate 100% of the money raised from the sale of the 2026 Wild Turkey Conservation Stamp to help directly fund wild turkey conservation projects to ensure the wild turkey population is around for generations to come.
David "Buzz" Nichols, Jr. is a gamekeeper, turkey hunter, artist, writer and proud husband and father raising future turkey hunters in the practice of old school woodsmanship and carrying on family tradition.
As support for the wild turkey stamp grows, with your help we'll continue to issue grants through our conservation fund, Gamekeeper Grants. We're supporting leading research in groundbreaking Lymphoproliferative disease (LPDV) effects on wild turkeys, disturbance ecology, nest success, poult survival and brood rearing work plus general habitat improvement and putting more prescribed fire on the landscape.
A special note about shipping & handling...
The calendar has turned once again, and the season of living is here. This will be the first turkey season I’ve ever spent without my dad.
For almost ten years, we treated every turkey season like it could’ve been his last. The past five years especially, every morning we got truly felt that way. For us, we were grateful for one last time and a life that most don’t get. For him, no matter how many he got, he always wanted just one more .
Sitting down to write, thinking back on all the mornings we’ve shared, thinking back further to when he first taught me to hunt and we had to drive down to Choctaw Bluff in south Alabama because there were no turkeys here at home in West Point. He was part of turkey hunting’s greatest generation that saved all of this.
Conservation is not just about conservation. Culture, history, tradition, all these things combine to create something worth caring for. Hunting history has shown that unless a group of people really love something, it doesn’t last forever. Dad was a turkey hunter and a turkey conservationist. A lifelong woodsman and a proud gamekeeper. This combination of loves is required if our hunting traditions are going to last forever.
And it’s that combination that creates the common thread in our community of gamekeepers. We need the talented wildlife biologists and the work they’re doing. But we also need every hunter doing what they can on their piece of dirt. Trapping, lighting prescribed fires, teaching their kids to love the land and love turkeys and turkey hunting. When you teach someone to love something, they’ll want to take care of it one day too.
His turkey last spring turned out to officially be his last. We buried him a few weeks ago on top of a hill beneath an oak tree over twice as old as him, where he’ll always be within earshot of a gobbling turkey. “Pass it on” is the spirit that he left behind, and that’s embodied perfectly in a piece of the story of his last turkey. He needed a lighter gun to be able to shoot at his old age, so we used a 28 gauge his great-granddaughter Evie had just gotten as her first shotgun. He killed his last turkey ever with it, and a week later, she killed her first. There’s not much more we can ask from a life of turkey hunting than that.
Pass it on,
Toxey Haas
