Friday, April 04, 2008
Springtime means turkey time
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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Spring gobbler hunters probably won't set the world on fire in the coming weeks, but can expect a fair season.
"I expect it to be about the same as last year," said Gary Norman, the top turkey biologist with the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
The season gets started with a youth hunting day on Saturday, with the general season getting under way on April 12.
Last spring, Virginia's estimated 63,000 turkey hunters tallied a total of 14,090 gobblers. The total represented a drop of 18 percent from the previous year, and was about 9 percent below the 10-year average of 15,403.
The decline, Norman said, could primarily be attributed to a couple of factors.
One, a below-average hatch in 2005 meant there weren't as many 2-year-old gobblers in the woods as normal, and 2-year-olds typically account for a large percentage of the spring kill.
Also hurting hunting last spring was poor weather in the early season, when both hunter pressure and kill totals are typically high.
Opening day was wet and cold across much of the state, and that could have resulted in less hunting pressure. The next couple of hunting days brought high winds, which many turkey hunters believe can make for the toughest hunting.
While it's too early to confidently predict the weather for the general opener, things look better for Saturday's youth day than last year, when many young hunters and their mentors had to battle sub-freezing temperatures and snow across much of the state.
Hunters who head afield on Saturday need to remember that a recently approved change to youth hunting rules allowing all-day hunting won't take effect until 2009.
Looking toward this spring, Norman said the 2 year olds again may be in relatively short supply because analysis indicates a relatively poor hatch in 2006.
On the bright side, if poor weather was in fact a major contributor to the low kill last spring, that could translate to a fairly solid carryover of mature birds.
Norman has at hand some data that may support that hope.
For three years the DGIF has been conducting a study of gobblers that have been trapped and outfitted with radio collars.
Although Norman and his staff are still analyzing the final results of the study, basic data from last season are available and point toward a surprisingly high survival rate of collared mature gobblers.
For example, in the first year of the study, hunters killed nearly half of the gobblers being tracked.
Last year, only 15 percent of the gobblers being tracked in Southwest Virginia were killed in the spring. The kill rate was not much higher -- 25 percent -- at the study site in Eastern Virginia.
Several Roanoke-area counties have been among Virginia's best for spring turkey hunting in recent years, and there's little reason to expect that to change.
Bedford was the top county last year and in 2006, and Franklin County was second both years.
The kill in Bedford last spring was 462 birds, 58 more than in Franklin County. Botetourt County had the seventh-highest kill at 285.
While raw numbers can offer some insight into the state's best turkey counties, a more accurate way to gauge the quality of the hunting is to examine the kill per square mile of habitat.
Based on that criterion, a number of counties in Western Virginia score far better than the statewide average of .56 per square mile.
Those top counties include Bedford with a rate of 1.03, Floyd (1.05), Franklin (.9) and Wythe (.95).
The DGIF tracks kill rate on the George Washington and Jefferson national forest, too, and those figures indicate that hunting can be excellent, especially considering that hunting pressure is often relatively light on some of the more remote and rugged tracts.
Of counties with significant national forest acreage, none was better for turkey-hunting success in 2007 than Botetourt. The kill total on national forest land there was 76 last spring, a rate of .62 turkeys per square mile.
The rate in Craig County, which has more than 114,000 acres of national forest land, was a respectable .46, well above the statewide average of .34.
Counties with relatively small amounts of U.S. Forest Service property showed that those areas can offer decent turkey hunting.
Bedford County doesn't have quite 20,000 acres of huntable national forest land, but it still produced 21 gobblers for a rate of .71, while Pulaski County had a rate of .7 for its 19,264 acres.
