Thursday, March 01, 2007
Big game figures are cause for grins and frowns
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
If you want to kill a bear, then get a crossbow. If you want to kill a turkey during the fall season, then pray.
Those are a couple of tidbits that can be gleaned from the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries' preliminary kill figures for the recent deer, bear and turkey hunting seasons.
Before I explain how crossbows and prayer figure into the equation, here is the raw data:
DEER: Hunters reported killing 223,198 deer, which was the second highest figure on record. It was a 4-percent increase over the previous season and 7-percent higher than the most recent 10-year average.
BEAR: The bear kill has been increasing nearly 8-percent annually the past decade and shows no indication of slowing. The recent season was up 13 percent over the previous one, settling on a record of 1,633, which was 122 more than the previous record of 2003.
TURKEY : The fall turkey kill continues to decline, dropping by 6 percent this time as it skidded to a dismal 4,143 total. You have to go back more than 20 years to find a lower figure; in fact, the kill was only about one-fourth the 16,861 record set in 1990.
You can get a whole lot more data from the game department's Web site, www.dgif.virginia.gov , which leaves me to point out some things I found interesting.
Hunters using hounds killed about 50 percent of the bears, which is little surprise since mild temperatures and decent mast kept the big animals active through the entire season. What is interesting, slightly more than one-quarter of the bears were killed during the bow/crossbow season, and 38 percent of these were taken by crossbows.
Sometimes hound hunters grow a bit disgruntled over the early season bow take, saying that the bow-season crowd may be killing a high percentage of females. That concern wasn't merited this time. The percentage of females taken during the bow/crossbow season was 32 percent while it was 33 percent during the hound season.
The fact that the female bear kill averaged just 35 percent for all seasons speaks well for the continued expansion of the bear population. I recall in the 70s when too many females were being killed and there was serious debate that the black bear was facing extinction in Virginia .
Now the concern has switched to turkeys. No one is saying turkeys face extinction, but the fall kill figures sure are plummeting. You have to wonder if the bear kill soon is going to exceed the fall turkey kill.
What's happening to our turkeys or our tradition of turkey hunting?
Wildlife officials continue to blame the decline on the weather. Cold conditions in March were believed to be responsible for delaying the onset of breeding and nesting, which diminished success. High rainfall in April resulted in poor nesting success and survival. A wet spring not only is tough on the chicks, but it also aids predators in finding nesting birds. Then, add to that, there was a good mast crop in the fall and that kept turkeys scattered.
I buy all this, but there has to be something more that we aren't considering. Most of us are seeing more turkeys than ever before. They are showing up everywhere but in the fall kill figures.
Could it be that the major problem isn't the recruitment of turkeys, but the recruitment of turkey hunters? Do we need to take a fresh look at regulations that were put in place in 1995 with the promise that the fall kill would increase by 77 percent in a decade?
The deer kill was the second highest on record, and no doubt would have been even higher had success not been hampered by warm weather during the early season and an abundant mast crop that kept deer scattered.
When it comes to deer management, near-record kills aren't exactly what game officials want, because they often are a red-flag indicator that the deer population is too high.
Hunters reported killing a record 96,951 does, but that might not have been enough to avoid problems in the future.
Here are the top-ten counties for deer, bear and turkey:
DEER
- Bedford , 8,215
- Loudoun, 6,627
- Fauquier, 6,464
- Southampton , 6,366
- Franklin , 5,201
- Pittsylvania, 4,590
- Shenandoah, 4,389
- Scott, 3,950
- Albemarle , 3,910
- Augusta , 3,889
BEAR
- Rockinghan, 153
- Madison , 95
- Alleghany, 88
- Augusta , 86
- Rockbridge, 84
- Albemarle , 66
- Shenandoah, 66
- Page, 60
- Rappahannock , 57
- Bath 56
TURKEY
- Bedford , 157
- Botetourt, 138
- Scott, 138
- Amelia, 132
- Halifax , 129
- Pittsylvania, 117
- Franklin , 105
- Shenandoah, 102
- Dinwiddie, 90
- Alleghany, 86
