Apply for controlled WMA turkey hunting permit

If you want a high-quality turkey hunting experience on a wildlife management area, you can apply for a controlled WMA turkey hunting permit until Feb. 15.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission offers a small number of permits for controlled turkey hunts on 20 wildlife management areas.

Apply online at agfc.com. Click on the first banner, which is titled, "Get Your Gobbler This Year" to enter the application portal. A separate tab will show all of the controlled hunt WMAs and the number of permits available. The application period will end Feb. 15. The AGFC will hold the drawing and notify applicants about their status Feb. 20.

I have participated in several controlled WMA turkey hunts. My last, in 2016, gave me a trophy gobbler in one of my most memorable hunts.

I also drew a highly coveted controlled turkey hunting permit in Oklahoma at the famous Cross Timbers WMA in south-central Oklahoma. A friend and I applied for a South Dakota turkey hunting permit in our quest to bag a Merriam's gobbler. That would give me the third leg of the Grand Slam, which is the successful taking of an Eastern, Rio Grande, Merriam and Osceola gobbler.

South Dakota has a unique way of managing turkey hunting. The South Dakota Game and Parks Department issues a set number of permits for its spring prairie turkey season in 31 units. Most are awarded to residents, with some reserved for non-residents.

Residents must prove they own land on which to hunt by providing a legal description of their property on their applications. Non-residents must have permission to hunt on private land. Turkey hunting permits for public land, of which South Dakota has little, are distributed through distinct, separate draws.

Kansas, the preferred destination for many Arkansas hunters over the past 15-20 years, reduced its spring turkey bag limit to one gobbler for 2020.

As with many places, Kansas's turkey population has experienced a significant decline in recent years. The key factor is poor reproduction due to drought and poor habitat conditions.

The cumulative effect of chronic over-harvest cannot be discounted. Wildlife biologists say you can't stockpile short-lived game animals like birds. On the other hand, short-lived game animals also cannot indefinitely sustain excessive losses.

Properly managed, hunting is a tool that allows the public to shave off an excess portion of an abundant resource. Wildlife management agencies base bag limits on normal hunting pressure. However, hunting pressure spikes when commercial hunting services concentrate and intensify hunting pressure far above sustainable levels.

Consider a typical hunting lease in Arkansas. Most lease members hunt deer. Only a few hunt turkeys, and they only kill three to four mature gobblers annually on, say, 4,000 acres. That is a sustainable loss that easily replenishes while enabling the flock to grow and expand into neighboring areas of lesser concentration.

Kansas, Oklahoma and other turkey hot spots don't have large swaths of industrial forest land that corporate landowners lease to clubs. Commercial outfitters lease farm land and sell hunts to as many people as will come. If they kill every gobbler on the property, then so be it. It is a form of market hunting. Under the American model of wildlife management, game always suffers when exposed to free market excesses.

In 15 years on this beat, I can't tell you how many photos I've seen of happy groups of 3-7 hunters posing with two and three gobblers apiece. I've seen it firsthand in western Oklahoma where turkeys were once so plentiful that the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation didn't require turkeys taken west of Interstate 35 to be checked.

Last year, I saw or heard only one gobbler, no jakes and less than half a dozen hens. Friends that hunt there much more frequently report the same observations over the past several years.

When poor reproduction intersects with over-harvest, the result is a net, compounding loss.

We learned that lesson the hard way in Arkansas. Our turkeys are recovering, and I don't want to relive the hard times.

Sports on 02/02/2020

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