2016 Turkey Harvest Report

[Tuffy]

See Post #10 for Counties included in each chart........

[Spur hunter]

Not all upstate hunters wanted a longer season. I figured an earlier start, hunting pressure when birds were with hens, woods wide open would likely make things more difficult overall for those hunters who already struggle to kill a bird. All the increased hunter effort seems to support that, at least in the upstate and if I am reading and understand at least some of this data correctly. The comment in the report about the hunters killing 3 birds taking 27%ish of the harvest should come as no surprise. Killers are killers.

[Tuffy]

Not all upstate hunters wanted a longer season. I figured an earlier start, hunting pressure when birds were with hens, woods wide open would likely make things more difficult overall for those hunters who already struggle to kill a bird. All the increased hunter effort seems to support that, at least in the upstate and if I am reading and understand at least some of this data correctly. The comment in the report about the hunters killing 3 birds taking 27%ish of the harvest should come as no surprise. Killers are killers.

Yeah. I struggle with the best way to compare seasons and the "quality" of the hunting. One way to do it is simply with Hunter Success. Another is with the Man-Days per Harvest. That's what I've used. Once ran some math on the % of the Harvest coming from hunters shooting different numbers of birds, but there is something misleading about that and I think it misses the point in one way or another. Doing nothing but lowering the limit didn't appear to have as much effect on the Harvest as season length changes. The same is true for ducks, but more so because it was a Daily Limit.

For me, there is no one way to grasp it. It becomes a developed opinion from looking at it in different ways. My opinion is that we are shooting too many in the presence of some factor that is decreasing the population. Pretty complex any way you think about it.