Thursday, March 31, 2011
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Spring gobbler season has its peaks, but best time to go is anytime you can
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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Jim Riggs has a problem.
“My spring turkey hunting vacation for the first week of the season got all screwed up because of my work schedule,” said the Norfolk sportsman who works for the U.S. Coast Guard.
The gobbler season is April 9-May 14, with a youth day April 2.
Riggs knows that no matter what the weather or when opening day falls on the calendar, the first week of the spring gobbler season always will produce the highest number of toms. It isn’t something a serious hunter wants to miss.
“I definitely think the opening day and week is the absolute best time to kill a gobbler,” said Freddy McGuire, a grand slam hunter who hosts vaturkey.com. “Yes, they might be ‘henned’ up and not gobbling as much, but they are totally un-pressured and can be fairly predictable.”
It is like you are starting with a clean slate. There are more targets out there opening week than any other week.
Gary Norman, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries’ top turkey biologists puts it this way: Young two-year olds and gobblers without hens are like low hanging fruit at the start of the season. Even hens are likely to respond to calls, and gobblers will come with them.
So you have an early season peak of hunter success that occurs even during the apex of mating, when toms often gobble from their roost a time or two, then fly down into a harem of hens and shut up. The best advice is to “go early and go often.” Never mind the weather or the lack of gobbling or how many hens you are competing with or how much work you have to do at home or how tired you happen to be. Just go. After that first peak, the kill, for the most part, will be in decline.
The problem for Riggs: he is going to miss the big party. He has to work. So do others. So what is left for them?
Good news: there is a second peak, a time when the kill-per-hour rate goes up even though the total harvest is lagging behind first-week results.
“Based on our spring gobbler hunter-survey data, the second peak comes in late April and early May,” said Norman. “That coincides with the peak of nest incubation. Gobbler harvest rates take a big jump at the same time.”
Riggs shouldn’t feel too sorry for himself over missing the first peak. The second one has its perks, said Norman.
>Older, dominate toms are suddenly more vulnerable.
>Hunting pressure is less because many sportsmen have used up their time and tags and are no longer in the game.
>Toms are likely to gobble later in the morning, past 9 a.m.
Sure, there is a down side to late season hunting. A lot of the toms that were strutting around earlier are looking at the inside walls of a freezers at this point, and the survivors have had their skills honed to a peak by encounters with hunters.
Last fall’s heavy acorn crop and the lack of extreme winter weather should mean that turkeys are entering the spring breeding season in excellent shape.
“Which should translate to better gobbling,” said Norman, who expects hunter success this season to be similar to last year when 15,109 bearded birds were reported killed. It could be up or down 5 percent, he said. Weather is a factor. On the positive side, reproduction was slightly above average last year.
“I am seeing and hearing about the same number of birds during my preseason scouting as I did last year,” said McGuire of his Bedford and Franklin County hunting areas. “The one encouraging thing is that I’ve been seeing a lot of jakes (young of the year gobblers) which obviously bodes well for next season.”
Spring gobbler success has been on a downward trend since 2002 when a record kill of 18,345 was established.
“We need several years of above-average hatches to move to a higher plateau of turkey populations,” Norman said.
Much of a season’s success depends on the abundance of two-and three-year old birds, the most likely candidates to answer a hunter’s calls. The hatch index in 2009 was 2.0, which means each mature hen produced two poults. That better than the previous year of 1.7, or the five-year average of 1.8, but you aren’t going to produce a boom year or grow the population until the figure hits 0.3 or more.
During the decade of 1979-89, the index was as high as 4.9 and averaged 3.9.
As for the best time to hunt, it comes down to this: Anytime you get the chance is the best time. Sure, some days are going to be better than others, and there are the two peaks to consider, but any day can produce a trophy, the first day when it is snowing and the last day when it so hot you want to peal your coveralls.
