Good wild turkey hunting season in the offing

Jason Hardin noticed a connection over the years he has spent crisscrossing rural Texas, working as a wildlife scientist focusing on upland game birds, especially wild turkeys.

"When we have a great spring for bluebonnets, Rio Grande turkeys almost always have a good nesting season and good production," Hardin, turkey program leader for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's wildlife division, said earlier this week. "Right now, from what I'm seeing driving around the state, this is looking like a really good spring for bluebonnets."

That's good news for Texas' wild turkeys and Texas' turkey hunters looking forward to the annual spring turkey hunting season that opens Saturday in the state's 54-county South Zone, April 1 in Bastrop, Caldwell, Colorado, Fayette, Jackson, Lavaca, Lee and Milam counties, and April 4 in the 101 counties in Texas' North Zone.

The same conditions that portend a riot of wildflowers across Texas in coming weeks promise to fuel a concurrent strong mating season and better-than-average nesting effort by the state's wild turkeys.

"It's almost all tied to rainfall and timing of that rainfall," Hardin said of turkey behavior during the spring mating/nesting season. "If you can get good or at least adequate rains through winter and early spring, you get that flush of forbs and other vegetation birds need to build body condition ahead of the breeding season."

Timely rains

And for much of Texas, with a couple exceptions, the gobblers that are heading into spring and the spring turkey season are in good or great shape.

"Things are looking better for turkeys and turkey hunters around here than they've looked in a couple of years," said Skipper Duncan, who runs Adobe Lodge, a hunting outfitter based near San Angelo on the far-western edge of the turkey-rich Edwards Plateau. "The past two seasons, we've been really dry, and that's made it tough.

"If we don't have winter and spring rains and get some green stuff growing, those hens know they aren't going to have much success in nesting, so they basically go on strike during the mating season. If they aren't in the mood to mate, the gobblers lose interest, and it's hard to call a bird."

That's not likely to be the situation this spring, Duncan said.

"We got good rains in January that really helped," he said. "We could use more rain, for sure. But the outlook for this turkey season is a whole lot better than it has been."

Similar optimistic reports come from most of the state's top Rio Grande turkey regions.

"We've been steadily climbing out of the hole that we fell into in 2011," said David Veale, district leader for TPWD wildlife division programs in South Texas, referring to that year's record-setting drought/heat that resulted in an almost complete failure of turkey nesting efforts across the state. "This year, we're looking pretty good. We've had decent rains, so we've got some soil moisture and a really good push of forbs. Birds will be going into the season in good condition."

Perhaps the most encouraging prospects are in the Edwards Plateau. The "Hill Country," which is home to the largest number of Texas' 600,000-plus Rio Grande turkeys and annually tops all other regions in the number of gobblers taken by hunters, has seen enough rainfall over the past few months to put a green veneer on most of the landscape and set the stage for a good spring for turkeys and hunters.

"Turkeys in the Hill Country look really good," said Rufus Stevens, Kerrville-based district leader for TPWD's wildlife division programs in the Edwards Plateau. "We're haven't had as much rain as we'd like - there's still a lot of dry (stock) tanks and creeks out there. But we've had enough moisture to get some good forb growth. And we have good numbers of turkeys. This should be a really good hunting season."

Jakes aplenty

In the Hill Country, as in the rest of Texas' Rio Grande turkey range, spring-season hunters could have a chance at taking some really large, long-bearded, adult gobblers.

"We had a great hatch - the last really good turkey hatch we had statewide - in 2012, and those birds are now 3-year-old long-beards," Hardin said. "There are some boss gobblers out there."

Those older, more wary toms are going to be harder for turkey hunters to attract with hen-imitation yelps, clucks and cackles than younger gobblers. And that supply of younger gobblers, especially 2-year-old birds entering their first mating season as adults and usually the most "cooperative" when called, is likely to be spotty across the Rio Grande turkey range. The 2013 turkey hatch was modest.

Hunters might see a fair number of stub-bearded, year-old "jakes," thanks to a fairly successful turkey nesting season in 2014, especially in parts of the Hill Country. Stevens said biologists in his region have been trying to bait hen turkeys to sites where they planned to use nets to trap the female birds and fit them with GPS tracking units as part of a research project to learn more about turkey behavior and nesting success. They monitor the baited sites with remote sensing cameras.

"Jakes have been the bane of our turkey-trapping plans," he said. "They've tried to get hens coming to the bait, but jakes are what's showing up. That's bad when you're trying to trap hens, but a good sign that we had at least fair reproduction last year."

It's all in the timing

The good range conditions and good body conditions of Texas turkeys could be a double-edged sword for turkey hunters heading afield this season. Texas sets its spring turkey hunting season to begin after the peak of the birds' mating effort. This benefits the birds and hunters. With most hens bred before the season opens, the female birds pay relatively little attention to gobblers and spend much of their time in nesting-related business. Gobblers, who have seen their harems of hens evaporate as the hens drift off to nesting duties, are much more prone to answer hunters' calls and come looking for the "hen."

But if timing of the turkey mating season is a little late, as it often is because it's driven more by the birds' body condition and habitat conditions than by the calendar, the hunting season could fall during the peak of the mating season. That can hurt hunters' chances, as the largest, most dominant gobblers will spend the day in the company of their collection of hens. These "henned up" gobblers are all but immune to hunters' blandishments, often gobbling their heads off at hunters' hen calls but refusing to leave several hens in hand for one in the bushes.

But Texas' spring season is long, running through May 3 in the South Zone and May 17 in the North Zone. Sometime during the season, gobblers will lose their constant escort of willing hens and go looking for new conquests. And that's when hunters likely are to have their best chances of success.

But even if Texas turkey hunters are afield when gobblers are less than cooperative, they almost certainly will not regret the time spent wandering Texas' landscape this spring. It should be awash in wildflowers.

"We're on track for a great (wildflower) year based on the soaking rains that have occurred in many places every two to four weeks," Dr. Mark Simmons, program director at the University of Texas at Austin's Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, said in a news release issued Wednesday. "I suspect early spring bloomers like Texas bluebonnets and pink evening primrose are going to be stunning."

This is great news, even if your not a Texas turkey or Texas turkey hunter.