Great weather, opportunity don't deliver better turkey hunting results
While highs in the 80s and nighttime lows around 60 sent flocks of people outdoors last weekend, what it did for wild turkeys and their hunters can only be guessed from results that weren’t so remarkably hot.
Hunters checked 3,315 bearded birds during the first two days of the spring wild turkey season, which began April 23 and continues in 83 South Zone counties, including all of central Ohio, through May 22. A year ago, hunters reported taking 3,875, making this year’s total, at 560 fewer, a decline of about 14.5%.
One goal of the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s shift last year from the traditional Monday opener to Saturday was to increase the opportunities for hunters, who presumably had more free time on the weekend to pursue their game bird passion.
Yet, numbers instead have dropped. The take averaged 3,974 birds during the first two days of the previous three seasons, as reported by the division last week.
On a Monday opening day of the South Zone season in 2020, hunters checked 2,430 bearded turkeys, a decline of 549 from the 2,979 reported in 2019. Most birds are taken early in the season.
Variables, nonetheless, shape results. Because of that, it’s difficult to pin down a single cause why great weather and opportunity didn’t deliver better results. While COVID was a wild card when decisions were made to shift the season-opening date, the pandemic actually triggered a spurt in license sales in some states.
Some kind of normalcy is starting to be reestablished on the human social level, but normal includes some pretty wild swings on the natural level.
Ohio, nonetheless, has been in the throes of turkey decline linked to a string of springs a few years ago during which cool, wet weather cut the survival of newly hatched turkeys, known as poults. Not being especially long-lived birds, turkey numbers are subject to fairly quick shrinkage without annual replenishment.
The wild turkey population has yet to fully bounce back from the lean years, said wildlife biologist Mark Wiley, the division’s turkey specialist.
“Even though poult numbers improved in 2020 and improved more in 2021,” he said, “it is unlikely the population has fully rebounded from three consecutive years of poor poult numbers during 2017-2019.”
So there’s that.
Also not easy to answer are questions about hunter participation and effort, particularly during a season in which, for the first time in years, only a single bearded bird may be taken.
“I do not know how the one-bird bag limit might impact hunter selectivity or decisions about harvest," Wiley said. "We hope to ask a question or two about that on the postseason spring turkey hunter survey.”
Unquestionably shrinking, at least for the present, is the number of turkey hunters.
Permit sales are likely to “drop considerably” from 2021 to 2022 because of the limit tightening, Wiley said.
“This is due in part,” he said, “to the one-bird bag limit, but we have also observed a fairly steady decline in spring permit sales for two decades.”
Hunting hours, which end at noon during the initial stretch of the season, after Sunday conclude at sunset in the South Zone.
Guernsey led open counties last weekend with 110 birds, followed by Harrison and Tuscarawas, each with 104, Carroll with 101, Belmont 93 and Meigs 92.
Licking led central Ohio counties with 65, followed by Fairfield with 32, Delaware 21, Union 15, and Madison, Franklin and Pickaway, each with one.
The spring season opened Saturday in five northeastern counties, where it will run through May 29.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Outdoors: Turkey hunting results in Ohio show decline
