Setterman":1cxarseu said:
For that data to be usable and relevant you'd need to know how many hunters and how many hours were spent during each portion.
I agree... the data is just that... data.... It only states that half of the birds killed are in the first 7 days of a 44 day long season. My inferences are just that... inferences based on 28 years of extensively hunting only a small area of middle TN.
I've unfortunately only had one spring where I was able to take the entire month off and hunt 28 days in the 30 day month of April (almost all day, every day, except for a few days where I took a break midday to fish for stripers and smallmouth). And that was way back in 1997. We only had a 2 bird limit back then, and we had 10x the number of birds back then, so I just called in bird after bird after bird scouting until I found the biggest bird on the farms on about the 6th day of the season. He is still the biggest bird I've personally ever killed (26lbs, 1.5" spurs, 11" beard- although others have killed others bigger on my farms), and IIRC he was the 12th or 13th gobbler I called into gun range that season. It took me most of the rest of the season to kill #2, as I had already called him in twice before without killing him (he was 25lbs, 1.3" spurs, 10.5" beard). The last week of April I took 4 or 5 others to get them birds. Point being is that my experience is just anectodal and very limited to that one season where I was able to hunt the entire season. Years before that, I was able to only hunt weekends and just a few occasional weekdays. But I learned a LOT during that season.... back then there weren't many turkey hunters... in fact, there were a couple of gobblers I called in 4 or 5 times during the season, and they were never killed due to lack of pressure on surrounding properties.
I learned that the the only way to kill a 4 or 5 year old gobbler in the first week of the season was to get in CLOSE to his hens, act like one of them, then MAYBE he'll come into range checking to see if you are the first hen in his harem to allow him to breed. The 2y/o's that didn't have hens were just plain stupid. They fell over themselves coming to a call.
The second week of the season the very first hens started ovulating and allowing the dominant gobblers to breed them. Dominant birds were still unkillable unless you were willing to sneak in on them or get within 75 yards of his hens. The 2 y/o's were still suicidal, though, and provided a LOT of fun.
By the third week of the season, my pressure on the birds was starting to become evident. A few birds that I had called in close in days prior then passed up had become spooky, and only a handful would come within gun range. A few would even go from full strut and all alone in fields, to deflating and running the opposite direction at the first note of a 3-note yelp. But the big birds were starting to lose their hens during the middle of the day, and they started to run to a call if you were in their home range and they had finished breeding each of their receptive hens that day.
The fourth week of the season was starting to get tough. Even though I had 20-25 gobblers left on the farms at this time, most had been called in and passed on several times already and had become woods-wise. I learned that birds had individual personalities, and those personalities changed throughout the day. Some birds that would run away from a call in the morning would run straight to a call later in the day. A few older gobblers started to bunch back up into bachelor groups, as most hens had started setting. 'home range' territories of the older birds started to expand, and some birds that I had worked earlier in the season started shifting to other parts of the farm (the young gobblers were always shifting... desperately searching for their own harem).
5th and 6th weeks I have no experience hunting... only cutting hay... from observational experience only, gobblers seem to have grouped back up into bachelor groups, and they have started to wander... sometimes 2-4 miles away from where they were during April.
As I've said before, that season taught me a LOT... I learned the best balance between number of birds that were educated to calling and finding fully mature trophy birds that were huntable (without sneaking) was the 2nd week of the season. I took that week off to hunt for the next 15 years. But when the population began to decline in 2005 or so, I started to realize that there were so many fewer birds available to call in that the hunting experience itself began to decline. I shifted my time off to hunt the opener in 2009, and just accepted the fact that I was trading off most chances at trophy birds for the hunting experience itself of calling in more birds that were available. There just weren't enough birds making it to the 2nd week of the season to provide the experience I was used to.
), but all the longbeards were gone with the hens. I ran a spin feeder up until mid March.... and the hens and gobblers stayed (around 50 hens and 12 longbeards, IIRC). I pulled the feeder and removed all the corn 12 or 13 days prior to the season to be completely legal and expected it to be a slam dunk for me and my guests come opener...
