Turkey coordinator wants to fix data deficiencies

Jeremy Woods is the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s new turkey program coordinator.

Woods previously was the assistant turkey program coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission. He also worked on turkey research projects in Georgia and Louisiana. He’s a dedicated turkey guy, as opposed to a generic wildlife biologist who’d rather work on something else being assigned to manage turkeys. He’s also a passionate turkey hunter.

So why in heavens did he come to a state where turkeys have been steadily declining since 2012 in spite of short seasons, starting the spring turkey season on Mondays and making it illegal for adult hunters to kill juvenile gobblers?

“Coming here in a period of downturn, I think I’ve got a lot of room to put

some positive direction in this program,” Woods said. “Arkansas has seen a steady decline in reproduction over the past several decades, but we’re not alone. That trend is echoed throughout the Southeast. The southeastern states are aware of a decline, and they’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”

To summarize the 2018 Turkey Brood Survey, it won’t get better soon.

“Turkey harvests will continue to be depressed in 2019 and 2020,” Woods said.

Woods said one thing that

caught my ear. The Turkey Brood Survey relies on observations by people in the field. The scientific value of such informally collected data is dubious, but as Steve DeMaso once said, “It’s all we’ve got.”

DeMaso was the former quail biologist for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation and a wildlife supervisor for the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife before taking a position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We hunted during our time together in Oklahoma, and I challenged him about the validity of the ODWC’s annual quail survey, which is compiled in a similar fashion to the Arkansas Turkey Brood Survey.

You have to work off some kind of data, DeMaso said, and you get it however you can. In Oklahoma’s case, quail counts were recorded by rural mail carriers, utility meter readers

and other people that ran frequent and consistent routes.

The more eyes you have in the field, the larger amount of data you can accumulate.

In Arkansas, only 150 observers participated in the 2018 Turkey Brood Survey. That also is a steady decline, about 50 percent from recent years.

The configuration of the observations is problematic, too.

“We’ve seen a steady decline in observations, but the observations are clusters,” Woods said, adding that 47.2 percent of the observations in the 2018 survey came from seven counties.

“In half of the state we received only a few observations,” Woods said. “That’s going to drive the statewide reproduction index, and it will drive the reproduction index in the state’s eco-regions.”

Therefore, one of Woods’

first goals is to rebuild the network of observers for the program.

Holes in the data explain a lot. In the Gulf Coastal Plain (Turkey Management Zone 9), for example, the number of poults per hen, gobblers per hen and data that project adult gobbler carryover to the next year is, at best, average.

Yet those of us that hunt in the Gulf Coastal Plain frequently encounter big flocks every autumn and winter that contain many young turkeys. We see a lot of adult gobblers, and our trail cameras photograph a lot of adult gobblers and jakes.

What we see with our eyes doesn’t match the data. Mike Knoedl, a former Game and Fish director, is an avid turkey hunter who has come to the same conclusion in Dallas County.

Zone 9 is a unique situation, though. In addition

to insufficient numbers of observers, vast amounts of land in Zone 9 is leased and behind locked gates, so it’s hard for observers to gain access. Most of our birds are in pine thickets and cutovers, so they’re harder to see than those in fields and utility rights of way.

And frankly, turkey hunters in our part of the state are pretty secretive. We keep our observations to ourselves, and we don’t talk about our turkey hunting success until we see each other at deer club meetings in September.

Arkansas once attracted turkey hunters from around the nation. Nowadays, as commissioner Ford Overton said, many Arkansans don’t bother to hunt in their home state anymore.

Godspeed, Mr. Woods. You are very important to a lot of discouraged turkey hunters.