Assessing the relationship between spring wild turkey hunting season
dates and wild turkey productivity
Abstract
Ten state wildlife management agencies in the United States, including
six within the Southeast, have delayed their spring wild turkey
(Meleagris gallopavo) hunting season since 2017 by five or more days to
address concerns related to the potential effects of hunting on wild
turkey seasonal productivity. One hypothesis posits that if the spring
hunting season is too early, there may be insufficient time for males to
breed hens before being harvested, thus leading to reduced seasonal
productivity. We conducted an experiment to determine if delaying the
wild turkey hunting season by two weeks in south-middle Tennessee would
affect various reproductive rates. In 2021 and 2022, the Tennessee Fish
and Wildlife Commission experimentally delayed the spring hunting season
to open 14 days later than the traditional date (the Saturday closest to
1 April) in Giles, Lawrence, and Wayne counties. We monitored
reproductive rates from 2017 to 2022 in these three counties as well as
two adjacent counties, Bedford and Maury, that were not delayed. We used
a Before-After-Control-Impact design to analyze the proportion of hens
nesting, clutch size, hatchability, nest success, poult survival, and
hen survival with linear mixed-effect models and AIC model selection to
detect relationships between the 14-day delay and reproductive
parameters. We detected no relationship (P > 0.05) between
the 14-day delay and any individual reproductive parameter. The
traditional Tennessee start date had been in place since 1986 while the
turkey harvest increased exponentially and more recently stabilized. Our
data indicate that moving the start of the hunting season from a period
prior to peak nest initiation to two weeks later to coincide with peak
nest initiation and the onset of incubation resulted in similar levels
of productivity in wild turkey flocks in south-middle Tennessee.