Friday, October 27, 2006
Time for the birds
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
Recent columns
Grouse
Season dates: Saturday through February 10 (season open only west of Interstate 95)
Bag limit: Three per day
Licenses required: State or county hunting license, archery or muzzleloader license and/or national forest permit when applicable
Grouse hunting has been pretty consistent in Virginia over the past decade.
Unfortunately for hunters, it's been consistently poor.
How poor?
According to surveys from 63 cooperating hunters last year, those hunters spent an average of nearly 14 days afield. Those hunts averaged 3.3 hours, and produced an average of .85 flushes per hour.
That's the lowest flush rate since the 1988-89 season, when the rate was .83.
"Sometimes you're lucky when you go out and you can get two or three flushes," said Roy Neff, a 72-year-old grouse hunter from Troutville. "It seems like you don't run into enough to keep your dogs sharp."
Grouse populations are cyclical to begin with. Making things tougher in Virginia is a shortage of the kind of early successional habitat in which the birds thrive. That habitat is often created by logging cutovers, now a rarity in Virginia's mountains.
Not surprisingly, the number of Virginia grouse hunters has dropped significantly over the past quarter century.
In 1980 the state had an estimated 38,333 hunters. The number had fallen to 18,911 by 2000, the last year for which the figures are available.
Despite the tough hunting, grouse hunters remained relatively satisfied.
On a scale of 1 to 7, they rated their experiences a 3 last year, even though the actual hunting probably deserved a score of 1 or 2.
Neff said even though he can't cover ground like he once could, he still enjoys his 25 hunts a year.
"The great thing about it is it's just fun watching the dog work," said Neff, who hunts behind a female Brittany named Joy. "It's not real great but we'll keep going."
Turkey
Fall firearms season dates*: Saturday through Nov. 10; Nov. 23; Dec. 11 though Jan. 6
Bag limit: One turkey of either sex per day, no more than two during the season
Licenses required: County or state hunting license, big game license, archery or muzzleloader license and/or national forest permit when applicable
Checking requirements: All birds must be taken to an authorized game-checking station.
*Most counties. Check Virginia hunting regulations digest for county-by-county specifics
Virginia's fall turkey kill reached a low for modern times last year, when hunters checked in just 4,428 birds.
The total was just 60 percent of the 10-year average.
Gary Norman, the biologist who oversees the state's forest game bird program, said he expects the kill to be about the same this year.
A number of factors can impact the fall kill, Norman said. They include the success or failure of the previous spring's hatch, hunter pressure and the mast crop.
Prior to last season, the hatch was fairly poor. The mast crop was decent, which can make for challenging hunting because birds can be scattered and difficult to locate.
Based on results of poult sighting surveys, this past spring's hatch appears to be good, Norman said. However, the mast crop is excellent in many areas, a factor that may wipe out any advantage provided by the good hatch.
"Where the mast crop is uniform -- and I've seen places where you can barely walk -- the birds won't move much, and they won't leave much sign," Norman said.
Hunter pressure -- or lack thereof -- also is impacting fall kill numbers.
Norman said some hunters are simply focusing most of their hunting attention on white-tailed deer.
"Every [state] you look at, hunter effort for fall turkeys is declining," Norman said.
In Virginia, some of that reduction in pressure was mandated just over a decade ago when the fall season was shortened, removing a portion of the season where turkey season overlapped with general firearms deer season. That immediately reduced the number of turkeys killed by deer hunters who just happened to see a turkey.
Even today, deer hunters account for a large portion of Virginia's fall turkey kill because turkey season overlaps portions of muzzleloader deer seasons, as well as general firearms seasons in some counties east of the Blue Ridge.
This fall, hunters who specifically target the big birds should have fair success if they're willing to put in their time and cover some miles to find birds certain to be scattered.
When Virginia's grouse and fall turkey seasons open Saturday, prospects for the state's hunters won't have changed much from recent years.
Turkeys should be fairly plentiful, but might not be too easy to locate.
Grouse will remain relatively sparse, so locating them will be even tougher.
Here's a closer look at what hunters of Virginia's forest game birds can expect.
