Sort of. There were still 5,163 turkeys reported from May 4 to May 31 last year. 556 being jakes and 46 being hens.
May 15 - May 31, only 1,828.
Take away the 2nd half of May, yeah basically irrelevant. But take away those first 2 weeks and you are saving a lot of turkey. And gobbler carryover drastically helps hunting quality on those lean years without many 2 year old birds.
Exactly...
in 2023, there were 23,651 birds killed April 15 thru 30 (the first 16 days of season). Of which 1958 were jakes and 103 were hens. That works out to 79.7% of the ENTIRE 6 week season (29,661) in the first 16 days.
Now I full agree male carryover is critical. But not for improved hunting opportunity the following season, but rather to ensure males are available to breed jennies and renesting hens in June and July. No males in June and July... no fertilized eggs. So IF we are killing too many males (and I'm not saying we are in most locales... we definitely are in others), the simple solution would be to outlaw the killing of jakes. That almost makes up for all the birds killed in the entire month of May!
Now when you get to the last weekend of the season... May 27, 28th last year.... a whopping 432 birds were killed (44 of which were jakes) in the entire state, or 1.5% of the entire 6 week season in the last weekend.
I guess my point is you are all about hunter opportunity. How do you increase availability without harming the resource? I would argue that all the harming of the resource occurs in the first 16 days of the season, regardless of what those dates are. And based on nest initiation data (which is becoming exhaustive), full correlation in TN is showing that average peak nest initiation doesn't even occur until the last week of April. Knowing that hens initially mate 7 to 10 days prior to initiating nests, and mate repeatedly throughout the breeding season if males are available, it just makes sense that removal of males prior to breeding has the potential to be counterproductive.
The delay in the season opening last year certainly didn't decrease hunter success (which actually increased from years prior, despite decreasing from a 3 bird to 2 bird limit!!!!!). Has it been proven yet to improve poult recruitment? Too early to say... maybe just a coincidence TN had one of it's best hatches in decades last year. But if it DOESNT hurt hunting, and might help nesting success... why not leave it as is???