Turkey harvest accelerates

[Lee Borgersen]

  Pace of 2018 Minnesota wild turkey harvest accelerates with better weather.


May 7, 2018

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St. Paul — Minnesota spring  kill numbers appear to be down a bit, now that statewide data has become available.

A data request showed that the turkey take was preliminarily at about 5,300 birds through April 30. That’s about 18 percent fewer than last year’s roughly 6,450 turkeys taken during the same time period.

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Leslie McInenly, the Minnesota DNR’s acting wildlife regulations and populations manager, said the “A” season, which ran April 18-24, was about 20 percent down from the previous year.
It was hard for her to say with certainty what caused the decline, but snow and cold during the opening week likely had something to do with it.

“At this point, I can’t really speculate other than to say I would guess weather had an impact on our first week,” she said. “I anticipate we’ll pick up over time.”
During the “B” season, which still had one more day of data that was not yet available, there were 2,400 dead birds tallied, compared with 2,650 turkeys for the first six days last year. That represents roughly a 9-percent decrease from 2017.

The numbers surprised Tom Glines, the National Wild Turkey Federation’s regional director for Minnesota.
“This is anecdotal, but the weather has been absolutely beautiful,” he said. “I didn’t think the A season was that bad. Birds have been there.”
He participated in Minnesota’s first season as a mentor.

“It’s all over the map whether it’s good or bad,” he said. “I don’t think that has much to do with the state of the turkey population. To me, the weather was decent. Spring came for the right hunt. It wasn’t that bad.”

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The hunt he was on was near Alexandria.
“We had very little snow,” he said. “Fields were very open, but the woods were open, too. My youth shot his first turkey with a bow. He was pretty happy with that.”
Of the group of mentored youth hunters, four of seven killed birds during the opening weekend, Glines said.
“That is better than the state average,” he said.
Glines is still pondering which season he might hunt, or whether to take up a bow instead, which opens all periods to him.

“I was trying to get my wife out there,” he said. “But the warmer it gets, the less likely she is to go. She doesn’t like to see snakes.”
Glines acknowledged that there was a bit of snow in parts of the state where breeding activity already had gotten under way when that snow fell.
“With the snow (melting), birds had to start making eggs again,” he said, noting the lack of rain since the blizzard that walloped the state in mid-April, as well as sun and a little wind to greet turkey hunters since then.

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“All of those nests with eight to 10 inches of snow had to start over.”
Glines pointed out that turkey breeding is brought on by photoperiodism (the length of daylight), and is not timed by how a spring may or may not be progressing from a weather or precipitation standpoint. That being said, the weather has been awfully spring-like as of late, with buds starting to pop, among other signs of the season.