RUMFORD – Twin 11-year-old hunters Jacob and Caleb Miele of Peru could hardly contain their excitement Saturday morning at the Rumford Fire Department game-tagging station.

Saturday was Youth Only Day of the spring wild turkey hunt. The regular season opens Monday in all but northern Maine and ends May 31.

Using a 12-gauge shotgun, Jacob bagged a 17-pound tom turkey in Peru from a distance of 40 yards while stalking it, father Troy Miele said.

The boys hovered around tagger Ed Carey inside the station as he measured the bird’s 8½-inch beard and ¾-inch leg spurs, then followed Carey outside to watch him weigh it.

“How much do you think?” Carey asked.

“Fifteen,” one brother said.

“Seventeen,” Carey replied after dangling the turkey from the scale.

“Seventeen!” the brothers echoed simultaneously.

Decked out in camouflage-style clothing like his sons, Troy Miele and hunting buddy Abe Bradeen of Carthage grinned while watching them.

Saturday was the twins’ debut wild turkey hunt. Last year, each boy bagged a deer two minutes apart on the state’s special youth hunting day.

Bradeen spent most of the morning trying to call turkeys in to the boys after beginning the hunt a half hour before sunrise.

Supervised by the elder Miele and Bradeen, the twins hunted in Canton and Peru. They saw about two-dozen turkeys, six or seven of which were males, Bradeen said.

“It was pretty exciting,” Caleb Miele said.

They chased one round and round in a field for an hour before reluctantly giving up, Bradeen added. Jacob shot at one turkey, but missed just before it flew away. Later, they spotted the 17-pounder.

“I let him shoot first,” Jacob said, “because he got his deer before me, and I didn’t know how much my 20-gauge (shotgun) was going to kick.”

“It kind of jumped me,” Caleb said of the turkey. “I had to climb over a fence to shoot it. I was thinking, ‘I’m not going to get it, I’m not going to get it,’ and ‘But I can’t give up, I can’t give up.’ “

He got it with one shot, reacted exuberantly, then ran out to retrieve it.

“He was pretty tickled,” Bradeen said of Caleb. “I didn’t think he could run that fast.”

Like Caleb, 87 other youngsters each bagged turkeys in Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties by late morning, according to calls made to 18 game stations.

Thirteen were tagged in Franklin County in Kingfield, Strong and New Sharon; 34 in Androscoggin County from Auburn to Livermore Falls; and 40 in Oxford County from Andover to Denmark.

Although each day’s hunt only lasts until noon, tagging stations registering the most turkeys on Saturday were Jim Bob’s store in Denmark with 15 by 10:40 a.m., and 13 each by 11:30 a.m. at J & K Sporting Goods in West Paris and Schrep’s Corner Store in Turner.

Before Caleb Miele’s bird, only two were registered in Rumford – a 20-pounder bagged in Byron by Devon S. Hamel, 14, of Mexico, and an 18½-pounder taken in Dixfield by Cooper Easter, 12, of Auburn.

Rumford taggers Carey and Jeremy Volkernick said Saturday was unusually slow. Normally, they’d register 15 or more turkeys on youth hunt day. Carey, a turkey hunter, attributed it to heavy snow this winter that lingered late into spring.

“We’ve just got rid of our snow, so the birds aren’t normally in their spots where hunters would find them,” Carey said.