Moose Droppings

Counting Your Turkeys Before Your Eggs Hatch

Apr 22, 2007 @ 08:40 am by Moose

That seems that’s what happened in Virginia with a ten year old plan to boost turkey numbers has not produced the expected return. Turkey hunters gave up 4 weeks off the fall turkey season with predictions of a 292% increase in spring harvest in 10 years along with a fall harvest return of 77%. Well the results was a bit more modest with the doubling of the spring harvest and the fall season harvest is a fraction of what it was prior to the change.
There has been a proposal for Virginia Wildlife to further protect the turkey by altering the season to open a week earlier and close a week earlier so as not to end on the same week as the deer season. Although it would appear that the State Chapter of the NWTF supports this alteration one local chapter does not.
The Botetourt Longbeards Chapter has formally requested that the four weeks they gave up in 1995 be restored so the 6 week season would once again be a 10 week season. They cite that the returns the biologists predicted never materialized and that the turkey hunter is more endangered now then they were 10 years ago.
There is no doubt that there has been a drop in hunters across the board but I’m not sure adding 4 weeks will have an impact on declining numbers. Furthermore the biologists state that the model they used to make those 10 year predictions was flawed because it utilized average or better then average hatch #’s which never materialized. With that in mind does anyone think if during that time period the season had remained the same that the flock would have doubled in size? It would seem to me that had the season remained the same the flock would have not grown as fast and maybe even seen a reduction. I think a 6 week season with good numbers is better for hunter retention then a 10 week season with a much reduced flocked. It will be interesting to see what Virginia decides to do with the fall turkey season.

Bill Cochran Roanoke Times
Mark Taylor Roanoke Times