On Monday, Oct. 1, several small game seasons open, including turkey, grouse, cottontail rabbit and coyote. Squirrel season opened September 1 and remains open until February 29, 2008. As I write this, the temperatures are in the mid-80s, and I find it somewhat of a stretch just imaging what it would be like to be hunting on a day like today. It also makes me glad I don't live in Florida, Georgia, or those other Gulf states where autumn hunting often means sweat and mosquitoes. Oh yes, and snakes and gators.
If the weather prognosticators are correct, cooler, more seasonable weather is due in by the weekend, probably much to the delight of the hunters who plan to go forth on Monday. What they'll be hunting will vary with each hunter's personal taste, habits and habitat they most frequent. Decades ago, the primary small game in our area were cottontails and pheasant, with maybe grouse thrown in. Not so today. Habitat has changed drastically in the past few decades, thereby causing these three species to experience a major decline in numbers. Wild turkeys have become a primary target for many of today's hunters, and that is true in both the spring and the autumn.
Last spring was a good season for ground-nesting birds such as turkey and grouse. It was seasonably warm and rainy, but without the mid-spring week or so of cool, wet conditions that hit our area in 2004 and 2005, decimating freshly hatched poults. But even with the near-ideal nesting and poulting conditions this year, the abundance of predators such as coyote, fox and raccoon, along with egg-eaters such as skunk and opossum, took a toll on nests and poults. This accounts for the smaller-than-normal young turkeys and grouse that have been seen this summer, the result of hens that lost their first nest, nesting for a second time this year. Scouting reveals a good population of wild turkeys this year, and a better-than-average number of grouse in the limited habitat we have today. Turkeys are more adaptable in their habitat needs, while grouse are primarily birds that require an abundance of edge cover habitat, where emerging young growth borders on more mature growth such as evergreens. As our local grouse habitat has matured, much of it to forestland heights, the birds simply aren't there in the numbers they were in the 1950s and '60s, when habitat was nearly ideal for them.
There was an abundance of cottontail rabbits throughout the summer, the result of multiple litters, the first occurring in early April. But again, due to habitat changes, the rabbits were and are primarily concentrated in lowland areas with an abundance of low-growth, dense cover. There aren't the avid rabbit hunters there used to be, especially those hunting with beagles. One factor is probably because the best rabbit habitat is usually found in valley lowland areas, where paved roads and traffic are more numerous now, hunters worry about the safety of their rabbit hounds.
The early September squirrel season never caught on as well as the DEC probably hoped it would, and most are taken in October and early November. I suspect the reason more don't hunt the early season is twofold. First is there are so many leaves on trees, squirrels are difficult to spot. The second is the daytime temperatures are normally so warm that the bushytails are only active the first and last hour of the day, when it's more comfortable. Come cooler daytime temperatures in October and fewer leaves on trees, and the squirrels are more active for longer periods and easier to spot.
Probably more coyotes are taken by hunters incidentally when the hunter is after other game, such as turkey and (later) deer. But a few specifically target the big canids, either via predator calling or running them with hounds. That said, most of this occurs later in the fall or winter when it's colder and snow makes the 'yotes more visible and susceptible to calling, and also keeps the hounds cooler when tracking them.
