Turkeys in East Texas are struggling. Alligator gar in Falcon Reservoir aren't. The dynamics of these two pieces of Texas' rich tapestry of wildlife and fisheries resources are reflected in a pair of proposed changes to the state's hunting and fishing regulations.
A recommendation to suspend the spring turkey hunting season in almost half of the East Texas counties where a limited season for eastern-subspecies wild turkeys has been allowed. Another recommendation to significantly increase the number of alligator gar anglers fishing Falcon Reservoir can take each day were among the handful of modifications to rules governing hunting and fishing Texas Parks and Wildlife Department staff recently presented to the agency's nine-member commission.
If approved by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, which will consider the proposals for adoption at its March 26 meeting, the changes would take effect Sept. 1.
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The proposal to close the spring turkey hunting season in all or part of 14 of the 28 East Texas counties where a month-long spring season currently is allowed comes as wildlife managers try to address what has been a frustrating, decades-long and mostly failed attempt to re-establish eastern-subspecies turkeys in the bird's former range.
Since the late 1970s, TPWD, working in cooperation with U.S. Forest Service, other government agencies, universities, landowners and the National Wild Turkey Federation, have stocked approximately 10,000 wild eastern turkeys, trapped in other states and transported to Texas, into East Texas. The effort is aimed at re-establishing the subspecies of turkey native to as much as 10 million acres in the eastern third of the state, but which had been extirpated by the 1940s through a combination of over-hunting and habitat loss.
Landscape changes
The multimillion-dollar project, funded with hunter's license/stamp revenue and grants from the National Wild Turkey Federation, focused stockings on properties holding what biologists deemed the diverse matrix of habitat needed by the big, ground-nesting birds. And, early on, the program had limited success, with modest, self-sustaining populations of eastern turkey establishing themselves in pockets of East Texas.
But, with a few exceptions such as populations along the Red River, the flocks, started from releases of a dozen or so birds per site, struggled to increase. Because of extensive changes to East Texas' landscape over the past century - conversion of mixed hardwood/pine forest to pine monoculture, conversion of native grasslands to "improved" pastures of non-native grasses such as Bermuda grass, loss of bottomland hardwood forests to reservoirs and other uses - most of the flocks were isolated in pockets of habitat surrounded by expanses of land on which turkeys could not survive.
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Trapped on these "islands" of habitat, without corridors connecting them to other suitable habitat and other turkey populations, the isolated flocks saw low reproduction, low survival of poults and slowly evaporated.
Program reassessed
While eastern turkey numbers in East Texas during the 1990s and early 2000s were never more than perhaps 10,000 and were restricted to smallish pockets of the region, populations in some counties were judged high enough to allow a limited spring hunting season. But because of the limited numbers of areas holding turkeys and limited interest from hunters in a region that had not seen a turkey season in a couple of generations, hunting pressure was light.
Most years between the early 1990s and 2011, fewer than 200 turkeys were recorded at the mandatory check-stations where successful East Texas hunters were required to bring their birds.
In 2010, a one-month spring eastern turkey season with a one-gobbler season limit, was allowed in 43 East Texas counties. In more than a dozen of those counties, the average number of turkeys taken in the county over the previous three season was less than one bird per season. That year, TPWD staff recommended, and the TPW Commission approved, closing the spring season in 15 counties; there were just not enough turkeys in those counties to justify a hunting season.
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Using the same criteria - the average number of eastern turkeys reported to mandatory check stations over the past three years - TPWD staff this year proposed closing the spring eastern turkey season in 13 counties and a portion of another. The counties affected would be: Angelina, Brazoria, Camp, Fort Bend, Franklin, Harrison, Hopkins, Matagorda, Morris, Titus, Trinity, Wharton and Wood. The season also would be closed in National Forest lands in Jasper County.
TPWD has not given up on re-establishing eastern wild turkeys in East Texas. But the agency is reassessing the program, focusing on a limited number of large areas holding what the agency's considerable research using turkeys fit with GPS trackers has shown to be the best mix of habitat for the birds. Also, the agency is using "super stockings," in which large numbers of turkeys (as many as 70 or 80) are released at a single site.
Jason Hardin, upland game bird program coordinator for TPWD, told the commission the agency has such a project on a large property in Rusk and Anderson counties and will focus other efforts on large swaths of suitable habitat along the Sulphur and Neches rivers which hold some of the region's largest remaining mostly-intact tracts of bottomland habitat.
It may be a decade or more before Texans see results of using the latest research to help restore eastern turkeys to Texas. But anglers in South Texas could see results of research on Falcon Lakes's alligator gar population as soon as this autumn.
Spurred by increasingly vocal concern from Falcon Lake anglers convinced the Rio Grande reservoir's largemouth bass were being devastated by alligator gar and the anglers' outright outraged that the agency had, in 2009, imposed a statewide, one-fish-per-day limit on the big, toothy, armor-scaled fish, TPWD in 2014 conducted a comprehensive study of the lake's gar and the anglers who fish for them.
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The results of that study included surprise for Falcon anglers and fisheries biologists.
Turned out, largemouth bass were not a big part of the diet of Falcon's gar. Biologists checked the stomach contents of almost 400 alligator gar taken from the reservoir. Largemouth bass accounted for only 8 percent of the fish found in those stomachs. Carp and tilapia, two non-native fish, accounted for more than two-thirds of gar stomach contents.
But biologists were surprised at the health of the lake's gar population, the number of truly large alligator gar in the fishery (some more than seven-feet long and weighing well over 200 pounds) and, especially, how fast the gar grew.
Alligator gar thriving
Alligator gar in Falcon grew faster and matured earlier than alligator gar from other parts of Texas such as the Trinity River. And much of the biological and angling data used by TPWD to support its move to set a one-fish daily limit on alligator gar came from those Trinity River fish.
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The survey of the angling community also proved illuminating. Where anglers targeting gar in places such as the Trinity are focused on "trophy" fish, anglers on Falcon were catching gar to eat; 77 percent of gar landed by rod-and-reel anglers on Falcon were kept, TPWD learned.
Even with that focus on catching fish to eat, anglers on Falcon were not having an impact on the overall population. Currently, anglers are annually removing less than 1 percent of the gar in the lake. TPWD fisheries managers estimate anglers could harvest almost 7 percent of the gar population each year and the population would not be adversely affected.
Based on that information, TPWD proposes exempting Falcon Lake from the one-gar daily bag limit, allowing anglers on the reservoir to take as many as five alligator gar per day.