Sunday, April 22, 2007
Fall turkey season becomes hot topic
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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During the past eight days, tens of thousands of turkey hunters have gone afield in hopes of connecting with a big gobbler.
Most hunters returned from the woods with only some memories, some lessons, and maybe, if they were really lucky, a handful of morel mushrooms.
But a couple thousand hunters were good, lucky, or both and ended up lugging gobblers from the woods.
By the time the season ends in mid-May the total kill will probably fall somewhere in the 15,000 to 18,000 range, right up there with Virginia's best spring seasons ever.
Yet some turkey hunters aren't happy with the way Virginia's turkey hunting has been going.
One of them is Richard Pauley of Daleville, who was among those hunters who tagged a gobbler this past week.
Pauley is part of a group of Botetourt County hunters who are making an interesting request to the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
They want an additional four weeks of fall turkey hunting, to coincide with the peak times that deer hunters are afield.
The hunters, members of the Botetourt Longbeards chapter of the National Wild Turkey Federation, recently made that formal request in writing.
This is an interesting twist in the very complicated recent history of wild turkey hunting in Virginia.
A big development came in 1995, when the DGIF cut the fall season by four weeks.
Agency experts, headed by turkey program manager Gary Norman, had recently completed a detailed study of the mortality of hens, a large number of which are killed in the fall when hunters may legally take birds of either sex.
Using a computer modeling program they deduced that reducing hen mortality would ultimately lead to huge increases in the turkey population and, thus, huge increases in the potential hunting season kill totals.
The predicted numbers were astounding. The fall kill was predicted to go up 77 percent and the spring kill to rise by a massive 292 percent in 10 years.
Those figures didn't materialize.
The average spring kill has roughly doubled. That's good, but it's not 292 percent.
The fall kill has plummeted.
This past autumn hunters checked in just 4,143 birds, not even a third of the kill in 1994, the final year of the long fall season.
No one has been more frustrated than Norman, who pushed for the 1995 change and has been the one taking the heat since it hasn't turned out like he hoped.
"The model was a huge mistake," Norman says bluntly. "We shouldn't have done it."
A problem was the scientists assumed average reproduction and average conditions. But recent years have produced a number of poor spring hatches, which kept the population from growing as much as it potentially could have.
The fact that the spring kill is up while the fall kill is down seems to indicate that the turkey population is still relatively larger than it was, which would make a lack of hunting pressure in the fall the primary culprit for the drop in the kill.
Pauley and his allies think turkeys could handle more pressure in the fall.
"There are undeniably many more turkeys today than 10 years ago, but the kill and hunter numbers have steadily dropped," they wrote in a letter to John Montgomery, chairman of the game department's board of directors. "This is not wise management of an abundant resource."
Survey data shows that there are now only about 60,000 fall turkey hunters, about 40 percent fewer than before the fall season was shortened.
That drop is not unexpected.
Hunter numbers in general have fallen. (Resident big game license sales dropped from about 265,000 in 1994 to roughly 226,000 in 2005.)
There was also that attrition of turkey hunters who weren't really turkey hunters, but were deer hunters who would shoot a turkey if given the chance.
The hunters who are left are, by and large, dedicated fall turkey hunters.
Ronnie Lambrich, president of the NWTF's Virginia state chapter, thinks the current six weeks of fall hunting suits them fine.
"Your hard-core fall hunters have sufficient opportunities," said Lambrich, who attended a recent game department board meeting to say the letter from the Botetourt group didn't reflect the feelings of the majority of the state's 8,000 NWTF members.
Pauley said the fall season doesn't just have to be for hard-core turkey hunters, though.
"I think we need the fall season as an incubation period for turkey hunters," he said. "The thing that's endangered is not turkeys, it's turkey hunters.
"We'd like to get turkeys and hunters together."
Pauley said many hunters, including youngsters, focus their hunting time during the primary weeks of deer season in November.
Allowing them access to turkeys, be it on turkey-specific trips or while deer hunting, might encourage them to become hard-core turkey enthusiasts, Pauley said.
"One you let that person become interested in turkeys, he or she becomes an ally," he said.
The game department is currently formulating a list of hunting regulations proposals. The initial list of issues under consideration doesn't include adding more weeks to the fall season.
Pauley said the Botetourt Longbeards have requested a public meeting with game department officials so they can make their case for expanding the season.
They won't have an easy time convincing department officials, not to mention plenty of turkey hunters, that killing more turkeys in the fall will be a good thing for the resource over the long term.
