I saw a hen turkey in an open field last week heading in a panic toward a timber edge a hundred yards away, with seven poults behind her. They were only about five or six weeks old, about the size of a grouse. That means they were hatched perhaps at the beginning of July. Then yesterday here on my ridge, I saw an adult quail hustling across the trail, followed by about nine or ten young chicks about three weeks to four weeks old.
I scared them and a bunch of them took to a flight of a few yards. It always surprises me to see quail that young fly. They didn’t seem to be much larger than a sparrow. They too were hatched in July, and it may surprise folks to know that some turkeys and quail will be hatched about now even, mid to late August.
In another column sometime before fall I will explain the reason for those late hatches. Those that are hatched this late have two strikes against them. The survival rate of those chicks and poults is about half what it is for the birds hatched from late May to mid June and maybe less than that.
Late summer quail, turkey and pheasant broods are not common, but they occur every summer. An early winter really cuts down the survival rate of those young birds. Predators do much better after them in September, as cover and food recedes for those too- young-for-the-season game birds.
I got my college degree in ‘wildlife management’ but I don’t use that term often. I think I could have done just as well without college. “Management” of wildlife is a dumb term. There is no such thing. You can manage the land and to some extent the hunters, but not wildlife. No way.
I have lived through lots of decades and from the time I was a boy to today, everything has changed so much that biologists who ‘manage’ according to what their predecessors saw and learned are making big mistakes. The wildlife and the Ozarks ecology of 50 years ago was a horse of a different color from today. Young biologists of today are by and large also a horse of a different color. Most of them grew up in small towns or suburbs. Few come from the rural areas which trained country boys in the ways of the outdoors and wild creatures decades back, before they ever heard the words, ‘biologist’ or ‘management’.
The evolution of a tremendous number of wild species has occurred in that small advance of time. I could write a book about that, and the changes I have seen. But in this short column I will only say the mating seasons of game birds is changing, and has been, slowly but surely for at least 25 years, becoming later and later.
When the dove season opens on September 1, there will be numbers of non-migrating doves with nests holding a pair of squabs that cannot survive if the parents are killed. If we had the kind of biologists and game agencies today that we had in the sixties, the season would be set back from15 to 20 days, much because migration times have changed that much too.
As for me, I once hunted doves a lot, but now I will not subject my Labrador to the kind of heat we see in early September. When temperatures are above the low 80’s, no hunting dog should be out there in the heavy dust and pollen and heat. Sweating and swatting mosquitoes and gnats is not what I want any part of. Nowadays cool late September or October days give me the best time for dove hunting. And I can find very good dove hunting a lot closer to October than the end of August.
The special teal season in the Midwest is also too early. It wasn’t, 40 or 50 years ago, but it is now. No one can convince any young biologist of that unless he spends time with me out on the marshes and rivers for years, and none have done that, none can do that… office work calls.
On September first, you can come up here with me and we can find nesting doves on Lightnin’ Ridge. There will be hundreds of doves arriving here in a few weeks, but not early September. There is a stretch of bare-bank on a portion of my pond a hundred yards behind my office where we could easily kill a limit of doves in the evening when they come to water there. I have seen a hundred doves come to that pond in late October and much of November. Those are the true migrators from the north. But the ones that are there in September are not made up of the bulk of migrators, they are the doves I feed here all summer, and the young birds they have raised.
I will have more to write about waterfowl. The changes I have seen in wood-ducks and mallards are something I would have once never believed.
But it is the truth that changes in the wild turkey mating seasons and the birds changing habits is a big part in their decline. It is a decline that is serious, and reminds me how once we believed that quail would make a comeback. Those inevitable changes that are a part of the natural world may do to the wild turkey what they did to the quail and woodcock. Some drastic hunting changes need to be made and quickly. But the modern-day game department’s devotion to making more money every year makes that impossible.
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