Photo by Steve Gulledge.

If you know what to listen for, you can hear it by mid-February. By the first day of March it’ll have reached a fever pitch; almost anyone who pauses for a moment can usually detect it.

“It” is the collective quickening of pulses among Mississippi’s turkey hunters as they anticipate the arrival of the spring wild turkey season. The onset of this fever is manifested in a number of different ways: pickups parked on back roads at dawn, turkey hunters driving their families crazy as they tune up their favorite turkey calls, lies being swapped about the gobblers heard when two or more turkey hunters run into one another.

If you’re suffering from this malady but haven’t nailed down your plans for dropping the hammer on a Mississippi gobbler, it’s not too late. If you’d like to find out what to expect this season, the wildlife biologists of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks are good sources for a region by region forecast. Also, it never hurts to talk with some veteran turkey hunters across the state to get their perspective as well.

Of course, sometimes it pays to glance over your shoulder to see where you have been. Talking to turkey hunters after the 2007 season ended revealed that results were highly variable: Some hunters were disappointed in their season, more than one said it was a “strange season,” and yet others had a great year.

WILD TURKEYS
IN MISSISSIPPI
Who better to ask about the outlook for the upcoming season than the turkey program coordinator Dave Godwin of the MDWFP? Besides being a wildlife biologist, Godwin is an avid hunter as well as an accomplished turkey call maker.

Godwin pointed to the 2007 wild turkey report (aptly titled “Spittin’ & Drummin’”). This annual is a comprehensive summary of the MDWFP Wild Turkey Program. A big part of the report is the summary of data collected the previous spring by volunteers who participate in the Spring Gobbler Hunting Survey. Participants in the survey record information regarding gobbling activity, turkey observations, harvest information and time spent hunting. Those data provide the MDWFP with a substantial database that’s used to monitor turkey numbers and to make management decisions. Currently, only data from private land is shown in the report.

The results are presented for the entire state and then broken down by the five MDWFP turkey regions. A hunter or wildlife manger can pick up a copy of the report and quickly determine what week of the spring season the most gobbles were heard on a statewide basis or in any of the turkey regions, and can also determine which region had the highest harvest rate. In other words it is when to go and where to go -- invaluable information for any turkey hunter.

The MDWFP biologists also use another important source of information to manage the turkey program, the Annual Wild Turkey Brood Survey. That project is conducted by MDWFP personnel during June, July, and August each year and gives an indication about the turkey hatch. Observers tally the number of hens, poults, and gobblers they see by county. Hens without poults typically do not flock with the ones that have young during the brood rearing season. Thus hens observed without poults are considered unsuccessful while hens with at least one poult are considered successful nesters.