Weather not cooperative for youth turkey hunts

For the third year in a row, the youth hunters were treated to some hor­ri­ble weather for the youth spring turkey season.

Tem­per­a­tures in the thir­ties and wet, gray skies greeted the young­sters for the two day event. Despite the nasty con­di­tions, my son Zane was able to har­vest his first bird. It was a whop­per with a ten inch beard. If you aren’t a par­ent, it’s hard to describe the pride and excite­ment one goes through watch­ing their child har­vest their first tro­phy like that.

I have killed some mon­ster birds in my day but not one of those birds comes close to match­ing the joy I felt when both my sons har­vested their first birds.

As I write this, it is the eve of the reg­u­lar spring wild turkey sea­son which opens in all 88 Ohio coun­ties on Mon­day, April 23 and con­tin­ues through Sun­day, May 20.

With the extreme warm weather we had in March, I think a lot of the breed­ing sea­son is done already. I say this because I called in four large toms that had no hens with them dur­ing the youth sea­son and I talked to sev­eral other youth hunters that saw the same thing.

Many of the toms are run­ning in bach­e­lor groups and that usu­ally doesn’t hap­pen until the breed­ing sea­son is over or wind­ing down. I don’t think all the hens are nested up com­pletely yet, but I believe a lot of them are. That is a rare occur­rence for these parts this early in the year, so it could make the toms be on the move more for the open­ing week.

Another chal­lenge we found is that things are much greener than they usu­ally are for this time of the year and that can impact your see­ing and hear­ing the turkeys. Accord­ing to ODNR biol­o­gists, last spring again expe­ri­enced a record low wild turkey hatch, with last year’s nest­ing sea­son neg­a­tively impacted by rain­fall and flooding.

Wild turkey breed­ing activ­ity is largely con­trolled by the increas­ing amount of day­light.　In a typ­i­cal year in south­east Ohio, hens start incu­bat­ing nests on May 1 but we are obvi­ously are way ahead of sched­ule for that.

Hunters har­vested 18,162 wild turkeys dur­ing last year’s youth and spring turkey sea­sons. Ohio’s cur­rent wild turkey pop­u­la­tion is more than 180,000. ODNR antic­i­pates as many as 70,000 licensed hunters, not count­ing pri­vate landown­ers hunt­ing on their own prop­erty, will enjoy Ohio’s pop­u­lar spring wild turkey season.

All hunters must report their har­vest of turkeys, but they are no longer required to take their turkey to a check sta­tion for phys­i­cal inspec­tion. Hunters will have three options to com­plete the auto­mated game check: Online at www.wildohio.com or www.ohiogamecheck.com; By tele­phone at 877-TAG-ITOH (877–824-4864); At all license agents. A list of agents can be found at wildohio.com or by call­ing 800-WILDLIFE.

Game-check trans­ac­tions will be avail­able online and by tele­phone seven days a week and dur­ing hol­i­days. Landowner hunters who are not required to pur­chase a fall turkey per­mit must use the web­site or a license agent to check their turkey, but can­not use the phone-in method.

Legal hunt­ing hours are one-half hour before sun­rise until noon from April 23 to May 6.　Hunt­ing hours from May 7–20 will be a half-hour before sun­rise to sun­set.　An incor­rect start date for the all day turkey hunt­ing hours was printed in the 2011-12 Hunt­ing Reg­u­la­tions book­let. The first day for all day hunt­ing is May 7.

Hunters are required to have a hunt­ing license and a spring turkey-hunting per­mit. They can also take one bearded turkey per day. A sec­ond spring turkey per­mit can be pur­chased allow­ing hunters to take a limit of two bearded wild turkeys. Turkeys must be checked by 11:30 p.m. the day of harvest.

Hunters may use shot­guns, long­bows and cross­bows to hunt wild turkeys; how­ever, it is unlaw­ful to hunt turkeys using bait, live decoys or elec­tronic call­ing devices or to shoot a wild turkey while it is in a tree. The Divi­sion of Wildlife advises turkey hunters to wear hunter orange cloth­ing when enter­ing, leav­ing or mov­ing through hunt­ing areas in order to remain vis­i­ble to others.

Until next time, Good Hunt­ing and Good Fishing!

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Apr 25 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.