Excitable gobblers mean exciting turkey hunting season | The Courier-Journal

By Gary Garth • Special to The Courier-Journal

Kentucky’s spring turkey season will open Saturday, and the state’s 90,000 or so gobbler hunters probably can look forward to one of their best seasons ever.

Steven Dobey practically guarantees it.

“Well, no, there’s no guarantee,” said Dobey, the turkey specialist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “But I think this could be the most exciting season we’ve had.”

Exciting?

“Yes. It should be a really exciting time to hunt.”

Turkeys are flourishing across the state. Dobey estimates the flock at about 220,000, including an extra-large crop of 2-year-old gobblers. That’s the reason for the excitement.

Two-year-old gobblers are the testosterone-fueled teenagers of the turkey woods — physically mature but blundering through a serious case of lovesickness. The want of female companionship can make these normally secretive and shy birds somewhat careless. Consequently, they fill the most tags.

“Their hormones are telling them what they need to do,” Dobey said, “but experience hasn’t caught up with them yet.”

This year’s anticipated good times can be traced to the summer of 2008. Summertime is when Dobey and a few colleagues spend about eight weeks counting recently hatched turkey poults. Dobey then comes up with a fairly accurate estimate of the average number of turkey chicks per hen that were produced that year.

In 2008 it was an astounding 3.7 chicks per hen, the most in the 26-year history of the summer surveys.

“It was just a great hatch,” Dobey said, “so there are a lot of 2-year-old birds this year, and 2-year-old birds are exciting to hunt.”

The record hatch of 2008 manifested itself somewhat last spring, when hunters tagged a record 29,007 turkeys, 24percent of them 1-year-old gobblers (called jakes). The previous season only 14percent of the birds tagged were jakes. A juvenile bird is legal if it has a visible beard, as nearly all jakes do.

Dobey wasn’t surprised at the spike in juvenile kills last year, saying, “If they’re on the ground, people tend to take them.”

Kentucky’s turkey hunting success rate hovers around 33percent. Dobey says hunters are becoming more selective, but even those determined to wait for an older bird will enjoy being in the woods with young gobblers on the prowl.

“There should be a lot of calling and a lot of bird movement,” he said.

Those 2-year-old gobblers can boost hunting opportunities during the often-lax midday hours and especially later in the season, which runs through May9.

“There’s going to be a lot of hens that are with gobblers, but there’s going to be a lot of (young) gobblers, especially, that don’t make the cut,” Dobey said. “They’ll be out looking for hens.”

Midday success is likely to go up as the season moves into May. By then many hens will have been bred, and after an early-morning feed they will have returned to their nests. That will leave plenty of young gobblers who haven’t found a receptive hen searching for one.

“They’re out looking for hens, and sometimes they’ll come in without making a sound,” Dobey said. “They’ll just appear. It’s exciting.”

Kentucky’s statewide youth turkey hunt (ages 15 and under) was last weekend. Hunters checked more than 1,800 birds.

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