Good class of jakes coming of age this season

When turkey season opens April 20, hunters will have genuine reasons to be optimistic.

After nearly a decade of poor reproduction, turkeys had good to average hatches in some regions in 2011-2012. Young gobblers, or jakes, that were not legal for adult hunters to kill last year will be legal this year, with another good class behind them.

Hunters around the state reported seeing big flocks of jakes during the 2012 modern gun deer season, and many have lately reported seeing and hearing good numbers of mature gobblers. The best reports have come from the eastern Ozarks, but turkeys also seem to be abundant in the Ouachita Mountains, in the Arkansas River Valley and in portions of the Gulf Coastal Plain.

On Tuesday, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission held a turkey season preview at the Central Arkansas Nature Center in Little Rock. Jason Honey, the AGFC’s turkey biologist, briefed the 14 sportsmen who attended the event. He said the statewide poult-tohen index was 2.80, and that observers had recorded seeing nearly 4,000 poults during the 2012 Arkansas Wild Turkey Population Summer Survey. Those numbers resemble the indices of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Honey said.

“In general, anything above 2.2 to 2.4 poults per hen indicates a growing population,” he said. “Between 4,000 and 5,000 poults were reported during the above-average reproductive years of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The poult-to-hen index for 2012 is close to the long-term average of 3.02 poults per hen.

Gobbler carryover, the number of gobblers that survived the 2012 spring season, was rated good in Zone 2 (the Ozarks) and Zone 7 (the Ouachita Mountains). It was above average in Zone 6, the Arkansas River Valley.

While encouraging, Honey said it’s unreasonable to expect turkey numbers to return to the levels of the 1990s and 2000s. Hunters legally killed more than 19,947 turkeys that year, a record.

“I don’t think Arkansas is going to harvest 19,000 turkeys again,” Honey said. “I don’t think our population will be able to rebound to that number in 2003 when our estimated population was 200,000 birds.”

Honey added that hunters generally kill about 10 percent of the total population of turkeys in the spring. Last year, hunters killed about 9,000 turkeys, which Honey said corresponds roughly to a statewide population of 100,000.

The decreased kill isn’t entirely because of fewer turkeys, though. It’s by design. In 2003, the spring season lasted 39 days and started in early April. In 2012, the season lasted 16 days and opened on the third Saturday in April, as will the 2013 season. The commission has progressively shortened the spring season since 2004 to reduce hunting pressure, which in turn produced a smaller kill.

Weather figures heavily in hunter success. In 2012, an early spring and pleasant weather encouraged hunters to spend more hours in the woods. Honey said this is a more typical April. If it remains cold and wet, Honey added, it might produce another bad hatch.

As in 2012, hunters in most zones will be allowed to kill no more than two bearded gobblers. They may not kill jakes, but hunters ages 6-15 may kill one jake. The season limit is one bearded gobbler in zones 4, 4A, 5A and 9A.

In most zones, the season runs April 20-May 5. It runs April 20-28 in zones 4, 4A, 5A and 9A. The season will be closed in zone 1A, the far northwest corner.

The special youth turkey hunting season will run statewide April 13-14, except in Zone 1A, where the season will be closed.

In 2012, hunters were most successful in the eastern Ozarks. Hunters in Fulton County led the state by killing 337 gobblers. They killed 294 gobblers in Sharp County, 270 in Izard County and 250 in Stone County.

Hunters also killed to 269 gobblers in Van Buren County and 250 in Union County.