A few years back, I began my spring turkey season in classical fashion -- sitting in a blind in the dark, beneath a ridge where I'd put several gobblers to bed the night before. I like to keep my mouth shut until the birds are talking and about to leave the roost. And so I sat and waited and listened to the unwelcome sound of the wind building in the pines overhead.

And waited and waited… Although I'd set up as close as possible without spooking the roosted birds, an hour after sunrise I had to accept the fact that I'd lost my turkeys.

Extremely steep terrain lay between us, and I surmised that they'd flown down on the other side of the ridge where the wind kept me from hearing them.

Abandoning my blind, I shouldered my daypack and started to climb. At first the terrain felt more suitable to hunting cougars than turkeys, but finally I reached the open habitat on top of the ridge and began to cover some ground.

Patchy old snow lying in the shade beneath the pines soon confirmed my theory when I found fresh turkey tracks headed down the backside of the ridge. The wind had fallen off, which meant that I could hear turkeys and they could hear me. I spotted a fallen pine still bearing its needles and moved in behind its shelter and yelped.

My calls produced an immediate gobble, and a few minutes later a lone jake was strutting in front of me. Am I the kind of guy who would end his turkey season by killing a jake on opening morning? You bet I am. And when the bird pivoted and eclipsed his vision with his tail, I did.

Welcome to the world of Western turkey hunting, where conventional rules are meant to be broken.

Biology may be made up of lumpers and splitters, but both camps agree that there are five subspecies of wild turkeys in our country, and serious gobbler chasers have turned them into a turkey Grand Slam. I've seen Gould turkeys in Arizona, photographed Rio Grande turkeys in Texas while hunting nilgai, and received lessons in humility from a few Osceolas in Florida. I've even killed a couple of the Eastern variety. But the vast majority of my turkey hunting has been for Merriam turkeys in my home state of Montana.

Every eponym has a story. C. Hart Merriam was a prominent biologist who, in 1886, became chief of the division in the Department of Agriculture that eventually evolved into the Fish and Wildlife Service. Merriam advanced important early ecological theories, conducted extensive explorations in the American Southwest and coastal Alaska, and ended his career as a noted Native American ethnographer. Like Coues, Shiras, and other pioneering biologists of his time, he deserves to be remembered through the name of an important game species we hunt today.