Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Look for a challenging gobbler season
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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I’ve heard tom turkeys sounding off from the ridgetops for more than two weeks, but this doesn’t mean they will be pushovers come Saturday, opening day of the spring gobbler season. Maybe just the opposite.
Turkeys always are a challenge, but the April 9-May 14 season could be tougher than usual for a couple of reasons: Populations are down and spring is slow arriving.
What this means, the season is expected to be even less productive than last year, when hunters heard, called, saw and killed fewer gobblers. The 2004 kill was 14,338 birds, 20 percent fewer than the previous year. Hunters chalked the season up as being less satisfactory than in the past, just the opposite of what state wildlife officials had predicted when regulations were changed 10 years ago.
Turkey reproduction has fallen onto hard times of biblical proportion. You have to go back to 1994 to find a reproduction year that was above average, according to records kept by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
The bulk of the big toms awaiting hunters this season were hatched in 2002 and 2003. Both were poor recruitment years. The juvenile-to-hen ratio, which is used to determine hatching success, has averaged 3.2 for as long as the DGIF has kept records, which is 26 years. In 2003 it was 2.0; in 2002, 1.4. That translates to fewer boss gobblers for this season.
“Fortunately, things picked up [last spring], so we may be in for a rebound next spring,” said Gary Norman, DGIF turkey biologist.
Last year’s hatch of 3.1 not only is hope for the future, but it likely means that hunters will be dealing with more juvenile toms this spring. Some hunters pass up shots at the younger birds, called jakes, but these turkeys traditionally make up about 15 percent of the kill. That figure likely will be higher this year; in fact, hunters out Saturday for the Youth Hunting Day reported confrontations with jakes.
The recent string of poor hatches often is blamed on unfavorable weather, such as rain and cold temperatures, during the spring months when young birds are vulnerable. It’s not just a Virginia problem.
“The trend of depressed reproduction is region wide and has effected spring harvest trends in other states,” said Norman.
West Virginia has been grafting a similar poor reproduction curve, but, like Virginia, it monitored a better hatch last spring. Biologists there say reproduction was 9 percent above normal last year.
In addition to low reproduction, hunters are likely to be challenged by a late spring, Norman said. The annual green-up appears to stimulate the activities of turkeys, including gobbling.
“I suspect hunters will have their hands full in the first couple of weeks,” he said. That is the message Norman is getting from the 70 gobblers that officials have equipped with radio devices.
“They’re just now starting to break up and some are still together in gobbler flocks,” he said. “Gobbling is picking up as the boys are trying to attract the girls.”
Early season hunters will have to compete with hens possibly to a greater extent than normal; even so, the first week of the season, no matter the weather or the hen factor, always produces productive hunting. If you wait, hoping the weather, the gobbling the competition with hens will improve, you miss some key hunting.
Hunters this season for the first time can check their birds by calling the DGIF’s Got Game phone number: 1-866-468-4263. This means successful hunters can register their game with a cell phone on the way to work, rather than drive to a traditional game checking station located in a country store. Twenty-eight turkeys were checked by phone Saturday during Youth Day. That was down sharply from the 191 of last year, and the decrease probably can be credited to bad weather. Let’s hope it wasn’t a foretaste of the general season.
Opinions are mixed on whether or not the new system will lead to more or less compliance of the checking requirement.
“Telecheck will be convenient for many hunters, but it will add an asterisk on our data as we have no idea of the effects,” said Norman.
With that in mind, I checked with Matt Knox, DGIF deer biologist, to see how the new telecheck system worked when it was tried for the first time during the past deer season.
“When we were proposing it, we had doomsayers predicting that our deer kill would fall in half,” Knox said. “Of course, that did not happen. I do not have any real good reason to think that it resulted in any more or less deer being checked.
The new check system is praised by many, who enjoy its convenience, but one Bath County Supervisor recently asked the DGIF to remove his county from the process. He said it was hurting the economy because too many hunters are bypassing country stores.
