LITTLE ROCK — Using the Little Rock meeting as a yardstick, Central Arkansas turkey hunters want the 2010 spring turkey season to start on a Monday.
On Tuesday, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission held a series of meetings statewide to get input for regulations regarding the 2010 spring turkey season. A total of 22 hunters attended the Little Rock meeting. Mike Widner, the AGFC's turkey biologist, conducted the meeting. The proceedings were congenial, and those who voiced an opinion seemed to support the conservative seasons and limits the AGFC has prescribed since 2007 to help stabilize the spring turkey kill.
All 10 people who spoke from the podium advocated opening the 2010 season on a Monday instead of a Saturday. A show of hands revealed unanimous support for the idea.
Surprisingly, most of the speakers said they would accept an even shorter season next year, but they want it to open earlier. The few who mentioned fall turkey hunting said they were opposed to closing the fall turkey season.
Recapping the 2009 spring season, Widner said that hunters killed 11,122 turkeys, a 339-bird decrease, or 3 percent, from 2008. That's also a 44-percent decrease, 8,825 birds, from our record year in 2003. Of that total, only 18 percent were jakes, an all-time low. However, youth hunters killed 981 turkeys, a record. That's nearly double the number killed in the fall. Hunters in Sharp County led the state by killing 421 birds.
Arkansas isn't the only state in the region experiencing declining turkey kills. Widner said that Missouri reported a 25 percent decrease from its record year of 2003, and that Tennessee had an 11 percent decrease since 2005. In Mississippi, numbers are down 58 percent from 1987, and 36 percent in Louisiana from 2002-2006. Texas and Oklahoma have small populations of eastern wild turkeys, the subspecies that inhabits Arkansas. In Texas, last year's reported take of eastern birds was down 1,200, despite a stocked influx of 7,000 birds in east Texas by the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife. Oklahoma, which has eastern birds in eight counties, experienced a 39 percent decline from its record year in 2003.
Widner cited three main reasons to explain declining turkey kills in Arkansas.
"One reason is we have reduced the spring season length," he said. "In theory, that's going to reduce the kill. Every day of legal hunting adds turkeys to the kill. When you take days away, you reduce the potential harvest."
In 2004, the season was 39 days, including the two-day special youth season. In 2003, the record year, it was 37 days. Last year, it was 23 days, including the youth season. The main reason, however, is poor reproduction. Turkey populations don't seem to be growing.
"We think the primary reason is that we have gone through a series of below average hatches," Widner said. "Most of the states around us have gone through the same thing."
Third, Widner said hunters have killed too many gobblers.
"When we finally got to the top, the bubble burst, and we started down rather dramatically," Widner said. "It's pretty easy to see that the liberalization that we had at the time definitely contributed to the upward kill, but it also contributed to the rapid decline we saw later on."
Widner said he expects hunters will kill slightly fewer birds in 2010, and that he will present three proposals to the commission at its September meeting.
One proposal will subdivideZone 17, which contains lands under Arkansas jurisdiction on the east bank of the Mississippi River. The new proposal will make turkey season concurrent with that of the adjacent state. Roy Hill, who serves on the board of directors for the National Wild Turkey Federation, opposed this change.
"I don't know if that's big money talking to you, but the people in those big clubs want that because the season opens earlier in those states," he said.
The other proposals would allow all-day turkey hunting on Cutoff Creek WMA and open an archery-only hunt on Dr. Lester Sitzes III Bois D'Arc WMA after the quota turkey hunts have ended. Another proposal would close the Wedington WMA (Benton County) youth turkey hunt.
Bobby Castille of Jacksonville said reducing the annual bag limit to one bird would help the turkey population, and that the AGFC cannot justify allowing a two-bird limit while turkey numbers are depressed. He seemed to capture the crowd's mood by adding, "I hunted out of state for the first time this year because Arkansas sucks. I hunted in Kansas, which is wonderful, but I can't do that every year. Shorten it up. Give us two weeks in the middle of where we can kill a turkey and give us one bird."
Sports, Pages 20 on 08/27/2009