Thursday, April 28, 2005
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: A weird, but typical, spring gobbler season
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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What kind of spring gobbler season are we having?
The toms are gobbling their heads off. They are gobbling just one or two times then flying down from their roost and you never hear them again.
Check stations are doing a record business. Check stations have registered very few gobblers.
Toms are still with hens because the season is late. Most of the hens are on nests and the toms are looking for action.
I am hearing shots all over the place. I’ve yet to hear a shot.
The weather has been horrible: rain, snow, freezing temperatures, wind, wind, wind. There have been some decent days that are mild, windless and sun-splashed.
There you have it. Reports on the season different greatly, depending on whom happens to be doing the talking. It is a weird season, which means it is typical. Turkey hunting is like that. The only thing certain about it is its uncertainty.
Even Gary Norman, the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries turkey biologist, admits to having a tough time evaluating the season.
“I’ve received a mixed bag of reports, but most hunters are reporting poor gobbling,” he said. “Despite this, it seems like many people are having luck and I’ve talked to several people that have used all of their tags.”
Norman is more comfortable predicting next spring’s season than this one. “Next year should be better,” he said.
That’s because last years hatch was the best in several years. These birds will be mature gobblers next spring. This year, they are juveniles, or jakes, as hunters call them. That’s why so many hunters have been confronting young birds this season.
The mature toms of this season are from the 2002 and 2003 hatch, both of which had poor results. This leads Norman to say, “I don’t expect a record season.” He will be happy if the 2005 kill is as good as the 2004 take.
Last year’s harvest was 14,338 toms, 20 percent fewer than the previous year.
You can get the feeling that last year’s mark will be topped when you step into the Fishin’ Hole, a game checking station in Wakefield. It had registered 63 toms through Monday, which is more than the store checked the entire season last year.
The mark is even more impressive when you consider that for the first time this spring hunters have the option of bypassing big game stations in stores and registering their kills by calling the DGIF’s Got Game phone number (1-866-468-4263). Through last weekend, just over 2,500 gobblers had been checked this way, not a particularly high number since the season opened April 9.
“Turkeys are doing pretty dagone good down here, although we don’t have a lot of folks hunting, which is nice for me.” That is the report from Penn Riggs, who hunts in southeast Virginia. “There are lots of gobbling some days; nothing others. Frankly, it is a fairly typical year except for the fact that I’ve killed two already.”
A mature tom Riggs killed didn’t gobble a single time.
“I set up a blind and some decoys under a dogwood tree on the edge of an old soybean field,” Riggs said. “At 10:05 a.m. he came strutting over a hill about 150 yards away and came straight to the decoys. He didn’t break strut for the last 35 yards or so. He came spitting and drumming all the way in, with a snowball white head and bright cherry wattles. Never gobbled. I shot him at 15 yards. Cool.”
On a hunt in Botetourt County Tuesday, Carson Quarles set up on a gobbler in the darkness of pre-dawn. “He must of gobbled 50 times on the limb,” said Quarles. Other toms joined in. “At 6:15 they hit the ground and none of them made another sound. From the scratchings that I am seeing they must still be in a gang of 15 to 20.”
Jay Dowd and some buddies from South Carolina spent time hunting in Roanoke County where Dowd reported: “The turkeys were slow, but we were able to bag three.” They missed a fourth one.
There still were patches of snow in Grayson County Tuesday when Walt Hampton and his son, Wade, killed a tom in the high country.
“I suspect gobbling will get better as the weather improves and more hens begin to incubate nests,” said Gary Norman. “Nesting is likely behind schedule. With fewer gobblers, I think gobbling is suppressed as the boys have their hands full of females.”
A weird season, all right. But typical.
