I don’t know if we have had a worse wild turkey season than this past spring season in Missouri and Arkansas in the past 40 years. And I think eastern Kansas could also be included in that observation as well.
The hunting was poor – darn poor. And you can blame part of that on the late season and cold. But mainly the problem is an alarming decline in wild turkey numbers which has been easy to see over several years, if you spend a lot of time in the outdoors in the winter.
That is when turkeys group together and are easy to see and count. Over the past several winters that decline in numbers seen in individual flocks has really been obvious. At the end of the 20th century, wild turkey numbers were good. Around 2005 there were seven mature gobblers feeding at one time at my corn feeder in the winter. In April of that year, I stood on my back porch and heard 11 different gobblers around me one morning. This past spring I heard two or three on the best mornings and they only gobbled a short time. Over the past winter, no gobblers came to my corn feeder!
Turkey hunting success always depends on the numbers of 2 and 3-year-old gobblers. If you went back in time you might be surprised to know that what we have now probably would have been thought to be a lot of turkeys in the 1950s and 1960s, when stocking programs were going on. How good could it get, biologists wondered. Would those men, most of them passed away now, have been surprised to see a harvest of 60,000 turkeys in 2005? That year it was unbelievable! I heard two gobblers fighting only a 100 yards into the woods behind my home in the spring and in the fall of 2004 I watched a flock of 30 to 40 young turkeys feed across my back yard, just a few yards from my back porch.
Within a couple of years a decline began, and it has continued until it came to the situation we have now. It isn’t that we have only half the wild turkeys now that we had 12 years ago, I believe we have a little less than half. I was happy to see some young poults in the fall, but there were so few compared to what there have been. And mature gobblers, the 2 and 3-year-old toms which make up the bulk of the spring hunter kill, were just as scarce as I have seen them in many decades. The same thing could be said of jakes, and that is what I think should worry us the most.
According to telecheck numbers, from a harvest of 60,000 gobblers in 2005 the last few years has given numbers of 44, 43 and then 42,000. This spring that number really crashed, down to about 35,000. Missouri Department of Conservation people aren’t going to do anything about this, but one answer would be to cut the season to two weeks instead of three, and delay it at least a week to ensure a greater degree of mating.
Oh yes, that would make it a little harder to get a gobbler, but it no doubt would create a better hatch, even if the weather hurts it, as it has for two or three successive springs. And as for me, I would readily accept cutting the limit from two gobblers to one.
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