Hunting Archery Duck Deer

Fewer folks hunting turkeys in Virginia in the fall - On the surface, the trend of Virginia’s fall turkey kill is worrisome. A decade ago, the fall kill routinely pushed 12,000 birds.

It’s been lagging steadily since, hitting an all-time low of 5,656 last year. That’s barely one-third of the record kill of 16,861 taken in 1990.

Typically, a trend like that would indicate a declining population.

Certainly, there have been some ups and downs in the turkey population in Virginia and in surrounding states. Those peaks and valleys are largely attributable to poor hatches, while the drop in the fall turkey kill is the product of several additional factors.

The year’s mast crop can have an impact. When mast is scarce, turkey flocks can be easier to find. Often, they’ll spend lots of time in open fields. When mast is thick, as it has been the past couple of years in many areas, the birds can be scattered and tough to lcate.

Yet the biggest factor is probably declining hunting pressure.

Pressure on the fall flock took a huge dip in the mid-1990s when the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries restructured the fall season.

The main point of the move was to eliminate the overlap between the turkey season and the general firearms season in the western half of the state.

Deer hunters killed a lot of turkeys back then. Plenty of hunters went afield with special double-barrelled guns that could shoot both high-powered rifle cartridges and shotgun shells. But many hunters just used their high-powered deer rifles to dispatch turkeys that happened to wander by their deer stand.

At the time of the change, interest in spring turkey hunting was booming and the thinking was that reducing pressure on the flock during the fall would reduce the mortality of hens, and therefore help the population grow faster.

When the season structure was changed, the fall kill took an immediate dip. It dropped from nearly 15,000 in 1994 to just over 11,000 the next year when the season was shortened.

The fall kill held to around 11,000 for a couple more years, slid down to just over 8,000 by 2000, then jumped back up to nearly 12,000 in 2001, before falling quickly to its record low last year.

Trends with the spring kill have been quite different.

Although the flock hasn’t grown as fast as spring hunters or biologists had hoped, the spring kill has generally trended upward, averaging about 16,500 the past five seasons.

So it’s a pretty safe bet that Virginia has more turkeys than it did 15 years ago.

The drop in fall pressure is probably not all due to deer hunters no longer being able to legally shoot passing turkeys.

Virginia’s hunters are aging as a whole, and hunting fall turkeys can be physically demanding because it often requires hunters to cover a lot of ground.

Those aging hunters, too, came of age in an era when deer were scarce and turkeys were a bigger deal in the fall. Now, deer are plentiful and get most of the attention from the younger generation.

I know some pretty serious fall turkey hunters. And I know their sons are more focused on deer than on turkeys.

I wonder if one other factor might have contributed to the low official kill last fall: the game department’s new phone-in game checking system.

Hunters are not allowed to use the system for fall turkeys. The department still wants the birds to be taken to check stations for the collection of sample feathers. Those feathers allow biologists to age the birds, and helps them gauge the recruitment rate from the previous spring.

However, I’ve talked to at least two hunters who were confused and thought they were no longer required to take their fall turkeys to check stations. I wouldn’t be surprised if some hunters who killed birds last fall, whether they were confused by the telephone system or simply spoiled by the ease of checking in deer, simply didn’t bother to check their turkeys
The Roanoke Times