Story by Nora Mishanec

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2 min read

NEW WINDSOR — A man was shot in the face Tuesday while turkey hunting in Orange County’s Stewart State Forest, State Police said in a statement.

The man called 911 around 11 a.m. to report that he had been struck with a specialized shotgun ammunition known as birdshot, police said. Paramedics airlifted him to Westchester Medical Center in stable condition.

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Investigators identified a shooting suspect whom police said was in custody as of Tuesday afternoon. It was unclear whether the victim and the shooter were hunting together at the time of the incident.

Also unclear was whether the shooter had been charged with a crime. State Police investigators based in Middletown are leading the investigation, but declined to answer questions about the case.

The shooting prompted a brief manhunt Tuesday involving at least nine law enforcement agencies, including state forest rangers, the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, and the municipal police departments of the town of New Windsor, the village of Blooming Grove, the village of Maybrook, the town of Montgomery, the town of Woodbury and the town of Newburgh.

Stewart State Forest is one of the state’s most popular hunting destinations, according to the Department of Environmental Conservation, which manages the 6,700-acre preserve in New Windsor, about 11 miles west of Newburgh. Its game populations include white-tailed deer, pheasants, turkey, waterfowl and rabbits, the agency said. The forest is open to the public during the spring and summer months but closes for several months in the fall for big game hunting season. 

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New York’s spring turkey hunting season opened May 1 and runs through May 31 in the state’s southern regions. Regulators shortened the season in 2015, citing declining turkey populations across the state.

On average, about 12 people are injured or killed each year in hunting-related shooting incidents, according to DEC data. About half of the shootings involve two people. The last turkey hunting-related shooting incident occurred in 2022. 

Hunting accidents fell sharply in recent decades after the DEC began requiring first-time hunters and trappers to complete safety training and pass an exam as prerequisites to obtaining hunting or trapping licenses, a DEC spokesperson said.

Turkey hunters often wear camouflaged gear and use decoys to fool the fowl, though it was unclear whether the hunters were doing so on Tuesday. 

By Jim Robertson

Ahh, Spring! It’s the time of birth for wild animals and re-birth for the natural world. A time of emergence—an American robin hatching from a powder blue egg; a black bear, followed by her newborn cubs, leaving their cozy birthing den—spring is a sacred time of life-giving celebration.

So, who, in their right mind, could imagine that spring would be a good time to declare open season on bears, turkeys or any species of animal? Well, no one. But we’re talking about sport hunters, so the “in their right mind” part may not apply here.

Majestic, bold and faithful is how founding father Benjamin Franklin would have described turkeys and yet today’s “sportsmen” seem overly intent on going after “gobblers” (as well-thumbed hunting magazines are fond of calling turkeys) in the spring. Gobblers is an over-used epithet aimed at objectifying and degrading the birds in much the same way that the N-word was meant to de-personalize slaves in centuries past.

As a “sport,” spring turkey hunting is getting so popular that it threatens to overtake baseball as a new American tradition. To be clear, baseball is a sport, and along with football and basketball, it’s a team sport, played by two evenly matched teams. But hunting doesn’t qualify as a sport for the simple reason that deer don’t practice archery against hunters and turkeys don’t carry shotguns for self-defense. And unlike hunters, neither of those species has a misguided sense of what kind of behavior constitutes a sport.

Spring hunting season is nothing more than a tweaked and twisted notion that needs to be exposed and squelched before it becomes yet another “tradition” in the name of animal exploitation.

We’re not just talking about the mindless slaughter of one incidental individual turkey for the sake of someone’s sport. Turkeys are social birds, so the perverse pleasure hunters get from crouching in the bushes, fully camouflaged, hoping their imitation mating call draws an unsuspecting turkey into their firing zone is the sort of behavior a civilized society should discourage, rather than promote.

But promoting spring hunting is the rule, not the exception. It makes no difference whether it’s a red state, a blue state, pink, green or purple, every state’s game departments are pushing for new or expanded spring turkey hunting seasons this year after having planted the highly prized “game” birds just about everywhere they could possibly think of—including many regions which never supported turkeys in the past.

But what difference does it make? If people want to hunt turkeys or bears in the spring, shouldn’t that be the right of every taxpayer? Well, if you can’t see the wrong in allowing and encouraging the targeting of non-human animals for the simple pleasure of taking a life for recreation, perhaps the threat that said sport poses for the average citizen would put things into perspective for you.

Today’s headlines announced that two people—in two separate incidents—were struck in the neck, face and/or head with 12-guage shotgun pellets. The first such case took place in Indiana after a landowning hunter blasted a passing hunter as he walked by his property with his son. The 41-year-old hunter was airlifted to the hospital where he survived (by the skin of his teeth). Meanwhile another, very similar turkey hunting accident happened in New York state yesterday. Names and specifics have been withheld in that incident, except for the fact that the victim also ended up in the hospital.  

Close calls like these, as well as fatal hunting accidents, are common occurrences during spring hunting seasons and as more non-consumptive recreationists head to the woods for hiking, mountain biking, bird watching, etc., eventually they too will become victims of all the senseless blasting that game departments are actively encouraging.

One group of non-target victims who are continually being killed during hunting seasons like the spring hunting frenzy are America’s endangered grizzly bears. On May 9^th, a young female grizzly in northern Idaho’s Bonner County was illegally shot to death by an otherwise “law-abiding” spring black bear hunter. Though grizzly bears are threatened with extinction in the lower 48, the killer wasn’t charged with any type of crime, but was merely reminded by Fish and Game that as of January 1^st 2025, hunters are required to pass a bear identification test to differentiate between black bears and endangered grizzly bears to avoid mistaken identity.

Of course, the surest way to avoid hunting accidents such as being shot in the face by a turkey hunter, or bear hunters mistakenly killing the wrong species, would be to simply put an end to spring hunting seasons. Then the animals won’t have to add avoiding armed hunters to their already stressful springtime routine of birthing and raising their young.