The 2020 spring gobbler season harvest dropped by 8% from last year, but it wasn’t from lack of effort by hunters.
The 2020 gobbler harvest was 34,500, continuing a downward trend from 37,300 in 2019 and 40,300 in 2018. According to Pennsylvania Game Commission wild turkey biologist Mary Jo Casalena, the 2020 gobbler harvest was 11% lower than the previous three-year average, despite the fact that hunter numbers last season increased.
Casalena said approximately 190,000 hunters participated in the 2020 spring season, a 10% increase over the 2019 figure of 172,400. Still, the number trails the 230,000 hunters who pursued gobblers in 2014.
Casalena attributed the spike in hunter participation this spring partly to the COVID-19 pandemic as many people had time to hit the woods. But why didn’t more hunters equate to an increase in the gobbler harvest as well?
“The spring gobbler harvest depends on the turkey recruitment from two years prior. Most gobbler hunters are after bearded birds as opposed to jakes, and those are the mature toms two years old or older,” she said. “In the spring, 85% of the harvest is adult birds.”
The two-year recruitment for the 2020 season would’ve occurred in 2018, and Casalena said significant rainfall that year had an impact. Average recruitment is 2.5 poults-per-hen, but in 2018 the figure was 1.7 due to the rain impacting survivability.
Plus, Casalena said, the turkey population is down in general and that also contributes to a decreased harvest.
Fewer birds also leads to more dissatisfied hunters, and Casalena said she’s hearing about it. Most of the concerns stem from the second gobbler tag, Casalena added, but she doesn’t believe it’s impacting the population.
“In Pennsylvania we can harvest additional adult birds with the second tag as long as we open the season during the peak of nest incubation. We always open it the Saturday closest to May 1, and our research shows the average date of nest incubation occurs May 2-4,” Casalena said.
That means the majority of the hens are already bred and on nests during the first week of the spring season so the gobblers have already done their job, she added.
Still, Casalena said there’s another aspect of the second gobbler tag that needs to be considered.
“There’s the problem of hunter satisfaction, which is what I’m hearing now. Do hunters not want the second tag option because they haven’t gotten their first gobbler yet and others are going for their second? I don’t know, but I hear a lot of hunter complaints about the second tag,” she said.
To get a handle on hunter consensus about both the spring and fall turkey seasons, the PGC will be sending out surveys beginning in mid-September. Casalena believed the survey would be sent to approximately 5,000 hunters, and it could be taken either online or on a paper form and mailed back to the agency. The deadline for completing the surveys will be the end of October, just before the start of the fall season.
“The last turkey hunter survey we did was in 2008, so it’s been a while,” Casalena said. “It’s important to know what our turkey hunters think.”
