Quehl Joseph O, Phillips Lindsey M, Johnson Vincent M, Harper Craig A, Clark Joseph D, Shields Roger D, Buehler David A
University of Tennessee-Knoxville Knoxville Tennessee USA.
Present address: Pheasants Forever Aitkin Minnesota USA.
Ecol Evol. 2024 May 20;14(5):e11390. doi: 10.1002/ece3.11390. eCollection 2024 May.
Ten state wildlife management agencies in the United States, including six within the Southeast, have delayed their spring wild turkey () hunting seasons since 2017 by five or more days to address concerns related to the potential effects of hunting on wild turkey seasonal productivity. One hypothesis posits that if the spring hunting season is too early, there may be insufficient time for males to breed hens before being harvested, thus leading to reduced seasonal productivity. We conducted an experiment to determine whether delaying the wild turkey hunting season by 2 weeks in south-middle Tennessee would affect various reproductive rates. In 2021 and 2022, the Tennessee Fish and Wildlife Commission experimentally delayed the spring hunting season to open 14 days later than the traditional date (the Saturday closest to 1 April) in Giles, Lawrence, and Wayne counties. We monitored reproductive rates from 2017 to 2022 in these three counties as well as two adjacent counties, Bedford and Maury, that were not delayed. We used a Before-After-Control-Impact design to analyze the proportion of hens nesting, clutch size, hatchability, nest success, poult survival and hen survival with linear mixed-effect models and AIC model selection to detect relationships between the 14-day delay and reproductive parameters. We detected no relationship ( > .05) between the 14-day delay and any individual reproductive parameter. In addition, recruitment (hen poults per hen that survived until the next breeding season) was very low (<0.5) and did not increase because of the 14-day delay. The traditional Tennessee start date had been in place since 1986 while the turkey harvest increased markedly until about 2006 and more recently stabilized. Our data indicate that moving the start of the hunting season from a period just prior to peak nest initiation to 2 weeks later, to coincide with a period just prior to peak nest incubation initiation, resulted in no change to productivity or populations in wild turkey flocks in south-middle Tennessee.
美国十个州的野生动物管理机构，其中包括东南部的六个机构，自2017年以来已将春季野生火鸡狩猎季节推迟了五天或更长时间，以应对与狩猎对野生火鸡季节性繁殖力的潜在影响相关的担忧。一种假设认为，如果春季狩猎季节太早，雄性火鸡在被猎杀之前可能没有足够的时间与雌性交配，从而导致季节性繁殖力下降。我们进行了一项实验，以确定在田纳西州中南部将野生火鸡狩猎季节推迟两周是否会影响各种繁殖率。在2021年和2022年，田纳西州鱼类和野生动物委员会进行了实验，将春季狩猎季节推迟，使其比传统日期（最接近4月1日的星期六）晚14天开放，涉及 Giles、Lawrence 和 Wayne 县。我们监测了这三个县以及两个相邻未推迟的县 Bedford 和 Maury 在2017年至2022年期间的繁殖率。我们采用前后对照影响设计，通过线性混合效应模型和AIC模型选择来分析产蛋母鸡的比例、窝卵数、孵化率、窝成功率、雏鸟存活率和母鸡存活率，以检测14天的推迟与繁殖参数之间的关系。我们未检测到14天的推迟与任何单个繁殖参数之间存在关联（P>0.05）。此外，补充率（存活到下一个繁殖季节的每只母鸡的雏鸟数）非常低（<0.5），并且没有因为14天的推迟而增加。田纳西州的传统开始日期自1986年以来一直存在，而火鸡收获量直到2006年左右显著增加，最近趋于稳定。我们的数据表明，将狩猎季节的开始时间从巢开始高峰期之前的一段时间推迟到两周后，与巢孵化开始高峰期之前的一段时间一致，田纳西州中南部野生火鸡群的繁殖力或数量没有变化。
