Gobble, gobble

Missouri hunters have shifting tastes.

That means more deer in the fall and more turkeys in the spring. Hunters checked just 8,355 turkeys in the season that ended Saturday, a jump of 970 – 13 percent – from last year’s all-time low. It was still the second lowest harvest in the 32 years the state has had a fall season. The number of fall turkey licenses sold is less than half of what it was a generation ago.

So what’s going on? For one thing, the turkey population was a little higher this year. That’s a biological factor, and it can vary year to year.

A second biological factor is more and more deer, and that’s where game management and hunter preferences – call it the cultural factor – come into play. The days of a nine-day deer season and a bag limit of one are long gone. The firearms season alone covers 42 days with various restrictions and rules, and there’s no limit on antlerless (mostly female) deer. Suffice it to say we have more than we need – a great conservation success story in a sense – and hunters are encouraged to keep things in check.

Good duck and goose populations also might be getting the attention of some hunters who otherwise would try to bag a fall gobbler. The biggest thing, however, might be a shift in preference to the spring turkey hunt. Many consider it a more exciting hunt, and in 2006 the harvest exceeded 54,000, a jump of about 50 percent in just less than 20 years.

So that image of bagging the Thanksgiving bird on a crisp fall morning isn’t unrealistic – a freezer would be involved because the season is Oct. 1-31 – but it is fading. Things change. In this case, it seems to be a reflection of more and better choices. That’s another game management success story.