Andy S.":2io8826a said:
If I could develop TSS that evaporated after 50 yards, I would; to reduce the amount of turkey sniping.
My biggest concern is protecting the resource (turkeys) STATEWIDE for years to come, so our grand kids can enjoy them too.
Same here.
To add to what I believe has been happening over the past many years . . . . . . .
For many years I believe the TWRA turkey managers were putting too much emphasis on checked-in harvest numbers as an indicator of turkey populations. The old assumption was that if the "harvest" was up, we had more turkeys; if the harvest was down, we had fewer. At the same time, population fluctuations were viewed to be more dependent on factors other than hunter kills.
Now we find that annual hunter harvests (of male birds, particularly the 3-yr-old & older ones) may have a much bigger impact on populations than previously thought. The effect is even worse when most of the birds are killed before mid-April.
We also see the folly of not picking up on that hunters may have been killing a progressively higher percentage of each year's available male birds, thus via the old "harvest population models", the old management experts could proclaim all is well, since we're killing about the same number of birds each year.
Never mind
we have been killing a higher percentage of the resource each year as the population has been dwindling?
At the same time, the checked-in harvest numbers may have become less accurate in terms of how many birds hunters are actually causing to die.
IMO, there has been a huge increase in long-range sniping, along with a huge increase in wounded (non-recovered, not checked in) birds that later die from their wounds. All it takes for a bird to die is a single pellet in its gut, and typically, the hunter might assume a total miss as he watched that bird fly away.
Think about this:
Then energy required for a single pellet to penetrate a bird's intestinal lining is much less than what is required to penetrate a bird's skull, and much, much less than what is required to break a wing or leg bone.
Many of those birds fired upon at 75 to 100 yards by the facebook crowds are taking pellets to their guts, yet running & flying away as the shooter may be thinking he did no harm, but more likely not thinking and not caring.
Now
seeing what appears to be dramatic drops in turkey harvests over the past couple years,
maybe
even the old harvest models will instruct the turkey managers to now make some dramatic reg changes?
But by all appearances, they may be way behind the curve, and whatever will be too little, too late.
