This spring turkey season Mississippi will take a step forward in turkey conservation and management through a mandatory harvest reporting system. Mississippi will now join many states in requiring hunters to report their turkey harvests that will allow for a more detailed look at our turkey populations.
There will be three ways to report your turkey: the MDWFP Hunting & Fishing app, www.mdwfp.com, and by telephone. Of these ways to report your harvest, we strongly encourage hunters to take advantage of the app because it will be the quickest and easiest. Once you have a profile set up in the app, you will be able to complete the reporting process in under a minute.
Mandatory harvest reporting of turkeys allow for more precise resource management. It would:
- Monitor populations and harvest data more effectively than an annual hunter survey. The details gathered will improve regulatory decisions and allow for adaptive approaches to management.
- More thoroughly evaluate the impact of season frameworks on turkeys, hunters, and hunting success.
- Provide - for the first time - timely and efficient county level harvest data, allowing MDWFP to identify areas with low harvest rates that we could target as areas that need to be improved.
- Identify Mississippi's turkey hunters, which would allow for directed polls and surveys to understand the desires of this hunting group.
- Demonstrate to the hunting community that harvest management and bag limits are important and especially critical to those species that have a season limit.
Please look forward to more information about turkey harvest reporting as we approach the spring turkey season.
Wildlife and Hunting