I received this in an email from Jim Lowe from MDC:
JEFFERSON CITY-Last year Missouri's wild turkey flock had below-average nesting success for the third year in a row. Yet experts predict a harvest of more than 50,000 birds. How does the Show-Me State do it? Missouri's turkey biologist says timing is the key.
Resource Scientist Jeff Beringer with the Missouri Department of Conservation predicts that Missouri's 2006 spring turkey harvest will not break the record of 56,882 set in 2004. He expects it to be closer to the 53,798 bagged during last year's three-week season. The actual harvest will-as always-depend heavily on weather, but previous year's reproduction also plays a role.
Beringer says 2005 was not a banner year for turkey reproduction. He tracks turkey's nest success through a network of thousands of citizen cooperators. They record observations of hens with young turkeys, called poults, throughout the spring and summer. The more poults they see per hen, the better the reproduction.
Over the past 10 years, the number of poults per hen has averaged about 2. The ratio dropped to 1.6 for 2003 and 2004. Last year it fell again, hitting 1.2 poults per hen.
Beringer attributes last year's turkey reproduction fall-off to a week of wet, unseasonably cold weather during the incubation period. Poult-to-hen numbers rebounded during the summer. This led him to believe that hens that lost clutches during the spring had tried again, making up some lost ground.
"Honestly, I thought they would do better than we ended up seeing," said Beringer, "but when we ran the numbers at the end of the season it was still pretty low."
After three years of below-average reproduction, you might expect hunting to be poor. Beringer says this is far from true.
"What you have to remember is that Missouri starts every year with a very large flock," he said. "We estimate a total statewide turkey population of 600,000 birds. About 60 percent are hens, and if each of those hens produces 1.2 poults, that's 432,000. We can have a poor hatch and still make a lot of birds."
Another factor in Missouri's favor is the way the Show-Me State sets its turkey season. The opening day of the spring turkey season is the Monday nearest to April 21. The formula is intended to start the season at the point where nearly every hen has had an opportunity to mate with a gobbler and is sitting on a nest. This reduces the chances of hunters accidentally killing hens.
Missouri's spring turkey season framework also keeps hunters out of the woods during the time when hens first become receptive to gobblers' amorous advances. Mature gobblers-those two years and older-are particularly vulnerable to hunters during this flurry of mating activity. Hunting them then would disrupt nesting activity and increase the number of mature gobblers shot by hunters.
Under Missouri's turkey management plan, hunters harvest 30 to 50 percent of mature gobblers each year. In states with earlier season openers, the mature gobbler harvest sometimes exceeds 70 percent.
"If we opened our season two or three weeks earlier we could have fantastic hunting for a couple of years, until we burned through our mature gobblers," said Beringer. "After that, the quality of hunting would be much poorer, and each year's harvest would depend much more heavily on the number of jakes-male turkeys hatched the previous spring. I'm pretty confident that if we had a tradition of an early-April opener we would not be harvesting 55,000-plus turkeys following three years of poor hatches."
Missouri's late-April opener puts hunters in the woods just when hens become unavailable to gobblers. This period sees a second peak in gobbling activity as gobblers compete for the few remaining receptive hens. The flocks seen earlier in the spring have broken up.
Beringer said he expects the number of two-year-old gobblers to be down slightly this year due to the smaller-than-average 2004 hatch. He said the number of jakes, which usually make up one-fifth to one-quarter of the spring turkey harvest, will be a little lower, too. However, compared to other states, Missouri will continue to have superb hunting.
"There are only a handful of states that have turkey harvests anywhere close to ours," he said. "The fact that we could still break 50,000 after three poor years of reproduction tells you something about the stability of Missouri's turkey flock."
Spring turkey season opens April 24 and runs through May 14. This is the latest possible timing under Missouri's formula. This and the warmer-than-usual spring may cause turkeys to mate and nest a little earlier than usual this year. However, Beringer said the wild turkey's breeding season lasts much longer than most hunters realize.
"The most intense mating occurs from late March through early April, but mating continues on through May. Hens that have nests destroyed by predators or bad weather renest and mate again. The last time we had an April 24 opener we also had a record harvest."
- Jim Low -