Friday, October 23, 2009
Fall turkey free fall
As Virginia's hunters focus more on deer, interest in autumn turkeys wanes.
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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The stock market wasn't the only index in free fall last autumn.
Virginia's fall turkey kill also plummeted, hitting an unprecedented low of 3,505 birds last season.
The turkey drop, from a record of nearly 17,000 in 1990, is part of a long and steep decline that makes the recent stock market slide seem like a bunny slope.
As low as it's gotten, there's no guarantee that the turkey tally has hit the bottom, either.
There are decent numbers of turkeys out there to hunt, but those birds just aren't getting hunted.
"Anyway you look at it, turkey numbers are staying pretty stable," said Gary Norman, the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologist who oversees the state's turkey program. "Effort is decreasing."
Overall hunter numbers have declined over the past two decades.
More importantly, the hunters who are still at it are focusing on other species. Or, more appropriately, another species.
"The main reason is they are hunting deer instead," said Norman, who bases that observation on data collected during surveys of Virginia hunters. "There's the expansion of the deer season, whether it's with muzzleloaders or crossbows or whatever.
"And there's a tendency, of young hunters in particular, to want to go after big bucks."
Part of that focus on whitetails was mandated when the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries changed the fall turkey season to eliminate an overlap with the firearms deer season.
The rationale for the move was that many turkeys being killed in the fall were just targets of opportunity for deer hunters.
The change was expected to help the turkey population grow, and to lead to better hunting during spring gobbler season.
That happened -- the spring turkey kill increased after the change -- though not to the degree predicted.
And, really, with four of the six weeks of turkey season overlapping with popular muzzleloader deer seasons, and with a busy rifle-hunting day on Thanksgiving, deer hunters still have ample opportunities to take turkeys if they care to.
Another relatively recent change that allows turkey hunters to save all three of their turkey tags until the spring might have also contributed to a drop in the turkey-hunting effort in the fall.
Steve Vinson, a retired Virginia game warden who worked for decades in Giles County, has witnessed the general decline in turkey interest first hand.
"When I first started, we had crowds of people who would go," recalled Vinson, who still keeps tabs on trends from his part-time job in the sporting goods department at Pembroke Stop and Save.
Virginia has already had one taste of firearms turkey hunting this fall -- youth day last Saturday. But, unlike a new youth deer hunt, the turkey hunt seemed to generate little interest.
Pembroke Stop and Save and two other popular check stations in the region -- Old Mill Grocery in Fincastle and the Hunter's Den in New Castle -- didn't check in a single youth-killed bird.
Once the general season gets started on Saturday, hunters who plan to pursue turkeys this fall should find decent action despite a spring hatch that appears to have been poor, likely on account of the wet weather.
Over the summer, 60 DGIF staffers recorded turkey sightings while driving roughly 300,000 miles. They spotted an average of 4.4 turkeys per 1,000 miles, down from 7.5 in 2008 and 10.1 in 2007.
The most accurate hatch information won't be available until after the fall season, when the agency has examined wing feathers collected from hunter-killed turkeys. The resulting age data provides a good index of the number of juvenile birds in the kill, a reflection of hatch success.
But a poor hatch doesn't always translate to poor hunting.
"The counterpoint is that the mast crop looks equally below average," Norman said. "And that may counter the low production."
In low mast years, hunters can have an easier time locating and hunting turkeys because the birds can be concentrated in areas where mast is good. Birds also tend to spend more time feeding in open fields where they are easier to spot.
The season also starts Saturday for Virginia's other forest game bird, the ruffed grouse.
Grouse hunting has also experienced a drop in popularity.
Good grouse habitat on public land has declined over time as clear cuts have matured, and the smaller grouse population has made for tough hunting.
Recent survey data suggests that hunters spend more than eight hours of effort for each grouse bagged.
"It's become so difficult to have a good day anymore, a lot of older hunters are just not bothering to replace their dogs," Norman said.
