More recently, problems have cropped up in WMU 2F. This wildlife management unit straddles the border of the Northwest Region and the North Central Region, primarily covering Allegheny National forest, but also extending southward to Interstate Route 80 and eastward to U.S. Route 219 in McKean County.

“In Wildlife Management Unit 2F, we reduced hunting opportunities to a two-week fall season last year,” Casalena said. “This summer, we lucked out and had good brooding success. We’d been seeing a declining population trend in WMU 2F, and so we’ll have a shorter fall season this year. If that is accompanied by good reproduction, those two factors will help us have a higher breeding population in the spring.”

SCIENCE & LUCK
Luck -- and the weather -- plays a big part in the ups and downs of managing any wild turkey population.

Being ready to take advantage of good luck is largely the role of good science. The Pennsylvania Game Commission has long played a leading role in the study of wild turkeys. Good science determined that pen-raising turkeys was not the way to reestablish our gobbler population.

Good science used the trap-and-transfer system to reestablish wild turkeys throughout the Commonwealth, and elsewhere. The challenge continues.

“We have the Gobbler Harvest and Survival Rate Study that we’re about halfway through,” Casalena said. “That’s a four-year, multi-state study primarily funded by the National Wild Turkey Federation.

“We’re determining the actual harvest rate of jakes and adult gobblers in Pennsylvania,” she explained. “We don’t have actual harvest-rate information for our state, so we use harvest-rate information from other states in our population model.

“We’ve also been very broadly estimating our own turkey population, and now have the ability to have our own harvest-rate information for Pennsylvania.

“The other neat thing about this study is a cooperative study with New York and Ohio. We’ll soon be able to compare our harvest rates with those states,” Casalena concluded.

Turkey habitat in Ohio is very different from that of Pennsylvania. With the exception of southeast Ohio’s Wayne National Forest, most of Ohio is open habitat with large fields and relatively small, scattered wood lots.

New York’s wild turkey habitat in is quite similar to Pennsylvania’s, but hunter density is much lower.

Casalena calls this an opportunity to develop some “great information for Pennsylvania.” The study will be a tremendous help in managing Pennsylvania’s wild turkeys. It will compare our gobbler harvests with other states’, and we’ll learn the percentage of gobblers being harvested.

That information will let biologists make adjustments in seasons and bag limits that should help maintain the great wild turkey hunting we’ve enjoyed for the past several years.

“If we see that we are actually low in terms of harvest rates, then we can increase our bag limits without harming the population,” she noted.

This study consists of trapping turkeys during winter and leg-banding them. The percentage of tagged birds that get harvested provides an estimate of the percentage of all birds that are harvested. A minimum of 300 gobblers will be banded each winter. Last winter, that goal was exceeded.

Incentives are provided for hunters to report these bands. Some 150 of the bands offer a $100 reward.

At this point in the study, it is too early to draw any conclusions.

For the past few years, Pennsylvania’s spring gobbler hunters have been able to purchase second turkey tags. That opportunity will continue. A few hunters suggested that this would bring about the demise of turkey hunting, but so far, the number of gobblers taken with second tags has been insignificant.