Ohio’s fall wild turkey hunting season remains a thin shadow of its more popular spring counterpart with the taking of a bird often being one of opportunity instead of design.
Ohio’s fall season begins October 10th and runs through November 29th. However, also unlike the spring season in which hunting is allowed in of the state’s 88 counties, the fall wild turkey season is closed in 18 counties: primarily in northwest and west-central Ohio.
Also, in the fall, hunters can shoot any bird with no restrictions as to sex nor if the bird is sporting a “beard.” Plus hunting is allowed from thirty minutes before sunrise until sunset every day of the season verses the spring season’s until noon restriction during its first several days.
And only one bird can be killed in the fall whereas in the spring a properly licensed person can shoot up to two birds.
As for how things are shaping up for 2020, well, expect pretty much what was encountered in 2019, says Mark Wiley, the Ohio Division of Wildlife biologist in charge of the agency’s wild turkey research program.
“To some degree, annual trends in fall wild turkey harvest mirror the trends of Ohio’s summer poult index. When poult numbers are up, quite often fall harvest is up and vice versa,” Wiley says.
“In 2020, the poult index was 2.2 poults per hen, slightly below the long-term average of 2.6 poults per hen. Therefore, we expect the 2020 fall harvest total to be slightly below average, likely in the range of 1,000 to 1,200 birds.”
Wiley’s analysis of data shows that the fall turkey kill has continued to slide along with the sale of fall turkey tags. Last year’s fall take of turkeys was 1,054 birds: down from the 1,121 birds taken in 2018 and a significant drop from the 1,537 birds that hunters killed in 2015.
An anomaly was in 2016 when hunters shot 2,168 turkeys. There’s an explanation for this momentary blip, too.
“In some of the years that we saw high fall harvests we also saw high poult survival rates – and those are the years with high cicada brood emergence,” Wiley said, going on to explain that turkey poults relish eating and thriving on the insects.
Perhaps of some noteworthiness is the take of wild turkeys during the fall season by archery hunters; significantly more so than by bowmen during the spring season.
Based on the data supplied by Wiley, last year hunters using so-called “vertical bows” shot 15 percent of the fall season’s total turkey kill – a figure relatively unchanged since 2015.
However, those hunters utilizing crossbows shot a whopping 30.8 percent of Ohio’s total 2020 fall turkey kill: Up astoundingly from the 21.7 percent recorded in 2015.
These figures are polar opposite of what’s seen during the spring season. For this past Ohio spring wild turkey hunting season, those persons using the so-called “vertical bows” took just 1.3 percent of the total 2020 spring kill.
And the numbers shrank even more for those hunters employing crossbows. Here only 0.9 percent of Ohio’s total 2020 spring wild turkey kill were taken by crossbow hunters.
Obviously then says Wiley, “we also expect patterns of hunter activity to have considerable influence on the fall harvest total.”
“Unlike the spring season when hunters are afield solely in pursuit of turkey, many hunters pursue turkey opportunistically in the fall,” Wiley says. “Approximately 39 percent of fall turkey permit buyers claimed to hunt turkey while in pursuit of deer during the 2019 season.”
Also, the daily take of birds was greatest on opening day of the season and more evenly distributed throughout the remainder of the season. Daily bird kills spiked on weekends and showed lulls mid-week, Wiley’s annual report on the fall turkey season notes.
Still, interest appears waning in fall turkey hunting in Ohio. That detail is firmed up in the number of fall season licenses that are sold. In Ohio, a person who hunts turkeys in the fall must by a tag separate from the one required for the spring season.
Last year, reports the Wildlife Division, the agency issued 9,441 fall season permits; down from the 9,825 permits issued in 2018 and significantly lower than the 11,689 permits the agency issued in 2015.
- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net
JFrischk4@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment