Hunting News

Turkey harvest sees slight increase

Turkey harvest sees slight increase

By Arkansas Game and Fish Commission

Turkey hunters saw an uptick in checked birds during this spring’s three-week turkey hunting season, which ran from April 18 to May 8. Hunters checked 7,578 turkeys, an 8% increase from last year’s 7,013-bird total.

That number also includes harvest totals from the preseason youth hunt April 9-10. Despite high winds and a cold snap in most of the state, youth hunters set the tone for the upcoming season for a weekend harvest of 887 birds, an increase of 8% over the previous year’s youth hunt total of 821.

Only 253 jakes (immature gobblers) were checked, roughly 3.3% of the overall harvest. (Youth hunters are allowed one jake in their two-bird bag limit.) This is in line with the average of 4% jake harvest since the No Jakes Rule was put in place. From 2000-2010, all hunters had been allowed one jake as part of their harvest, which resulted in up to 25% of the harvest being immature birds. Before that, jakes could make up a hunter’s entire bag limit for the season, and 40 to 60% of the annual harvest was made up of these first-year gobblers.

This year’s uptick was expected, according to Jeremy Wood, Turkey Program coordinator, and other biologists who track turkey reproduction through annual brood surveys and observation surveys. The news comes as a pleasant surprise to many turkey hunters who saw lower success rates last year. Wood said the decrease and rebound can be explained by a few factors.

“We put a lot of conservative regulations in place in 2021, which were designed to balance hunting pressure with the turkey population and help turkeys get some breeding done before people entered the woods and disturbed breeding activity,” Wood said. “But there were other factors that likely had greater contributions to last year’s decline.”

Another factor that played into last season’s drop off was poor reproduction in 2019 due to rainfall during the peak of hatching season. “Turkey poults can’t thermoregulate for their first few weeks of life, so they are dependent on the hen to keep them out of the elements,” Wood said

The large increase in hunters and hunting effort during 2020 as a result of COVID-19 likely compounded the issue. Wood is hopeful that this year’s stabilization of turkey numbers continues into next season as well.

“This year’s hatch will be peaking from now through early June, and weather conditions during these next few weeks will be critical,” Wood said. “One of the best ways the public can help is by contributing to the annual turkey and quail population survey. They can visit the online survey and record sightings.

Hunters can also download the app Survey123 to their phone. When they see a turkey, whether it’s a gobbler, single hen or hen with poults, simply add it to the survey. This helps fill the gaps in data and enables biologists to continue making informed decisions on the state’s turkey management.

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