Another Perspective on Season Date Changes

[Tuffy]

I'm sure that we'll get back to this subject in different ways at different times, but, after some conversation about the differences in GZ-6 vs. the others, it struck me that the Harvest-per-Day in those areas might be interesting. I'll just put these here for now and come back later to think-out-loud about what they say to me.

[Tuffy]

Game Zone 6:

[Tuffy]

Game Zones 1-5:

[Tuffy]

South Carolina: (Offsets one another to a small degree, but makes a point.)

[Tuffy]

Okay. What does it say? Somewhere in here we might find signs of an impact on the population and on the quality of hunting. In effect, we made the season more conservative in GZ-6 by removing 5 days from the opening. In the remainder of the state (GZ-1-5), we added an additional 12 days to the front end of the season, a much more liberal change. In both cases, 4 days were added to the end of season. In effect, the changes went in opposite directions.

The delayed opening in GZ-6 saw much higher Harvest-per-Day for days in March and the first week of April. Week 2 of April was still above previous seasons and was followed by two weeks slightly below previous years and the 4 extra days in May which was at about the same level as the end of the season in previous years. You could infer that the hunting was "Better" for the first 26 days of the season than we had seen on those days in the past. The first chart shows us that we had exceeded previous cumulative harvest by the end of March and stayed above past levels throughout the season. GZ-6 also saw over 600 birds (over 16% of the usual total Harvest) that did NOT die prior to March 20, many of which were dominant birds busily passing on their dominant traits. In GZ-6, it would appear that delaying the opening of the season was a POSITIVE thing. Was it enough? We could have saved more breeding birds and, possibly, seen even higher hunter success early in the season if we had delayed it even longer.

[Tuffy]

So, what happened in the remainder of the state that experienced more liberal seasons by adding 12 days to the front-end of the season. First, over 5,100 gobblers died prior to April 1. That's just about 40% of the normal season harvest and represents the removal of much of the natural male breeding stock prior to completion of the breeding season as measured by the peak of incubation. If that weren't enough, it also resulted in lower Harvest-per-Day for every week in the month of April. It's the exact opposite of GZ-6 by this measure of Hunting Quality. Earlier seasons resulted in lower hunting quality just as the biologists had predicted all along. It was a NEGATIVE thing.

Although this part of the state did get far ahead of the previous pace with those 5,100 birds, the end result was Harvest BELOW the 3-year average because of the poorer hunting overall. Remember that the season change also increased effort, by about 24% over the average of these 3 years and still left us with a decreased harvest. That also implies that the population was down but some of that effect was just the lowered quality of hunting resulting from the earlier opening.

[Tuffy]

So, what would happen if we changed the entire state to an April 1 start? It looks like we would allow over 7,000 more gobblers to live and participate in 12 more days of the intensive breeding season AND allow us to experience significantly better chances of killing a bird throughout the month of April.

If we would/could move the start even closer to the peak start of incubation about April 10, we could allow an additional 4,000 gobblers to finish the breeding process and, even before the future benefits of that increased effective breeding, probably see even higher Quality-of-Hunting over the remainder of April with no real decrease in total Harvest.

Are we just stupid, or what?

[Jay]

Go ahead and outlaw any Jake/strutter/fan decoys while you are at it. That by itself would probably help the population quite a bit.

[Strick9]

If things keep going this way, we will have a two week season.

[Tuffy]

That may very well be the right thing to do in many ways if it were the RIGHT two weeks.

[GobblerHntr]

Let's just close the season altogether. No reason to hunt turkeys anyway.

[Tuffy]

OR: If we could just get rid of ALL of the turkeys, we could have the season open all year with NO LIMIT.

[Strick9]

Hunters are most certainly adept at cutting off the nose to spite the face.

[joshua2]

Wouldn't the lower limit have an influence on the late season decline in harvest? Most folks that I know in the upstate were tagged out by the end of March.

[joshua2]

Let's just close the season altogether. No reason to hunt turkeys anyway.

If the talking heads really cared about the resources as they imply, this is exactly what they would do.

[trkykilr]

Ban male turkey decoys. Close thread

[Tuffy]

It's not how many we will, but when we kill them. It's another topic to talk about what is acceptable in the way of methods. If we could show that the technique made that much difference in total harvest, it might mean something. Sadly, it probably just compensates for a general decline in hunting ability and the results haven't changed very much. It's possible that we are killing a larger percentage of the population, but it's taking a lot more effort to do it. That's not indicating any magic increase in efficiency.

[Strick9]

I would most certainly stand behind any legislation put forth that bans fanning, male strutters, jake, remote control decoys and etc.

[Tuffy]

All of those things are distasteful to me, too, Strick. Still, how would we justify exactly where we were drawing a line between acceptable and non-acceptable. It's not some sense of "purity" or "ethics" or we might just include hen decoys and/or even hunting during the breeding/nesting season at all. Without that evidence that these specific methods are having some step-up effect on the resource, there is simply no justification for it. That would take us back to a political thought and even further away from the science/facts of "managing" the resource. No, I would not support these, although I would shake my head at their widespread use. (May have to get myself one if I don't get back to being a little better hunter soon.)

[Stripa Swipa]

Tiffy, would you mind sending me the source data? I'd like to play with some different charts. Good stuff and thanks for putting your thoughts and data out here for discussion.