April 18, 2012

This WSI Play-By-Play Report comes to you as we are beginning to wind down much of our normal spring hunting activities. What a beautiful spring it has been around much of the Lone Star State, as the generous rainfall that many areas continue to receive has cast an artistry of colors across the landscape that would make Lady Bird Johnson proud. As some of the old timers say, "The pasture has her Sunday britches on." And for those folks who have not been as fortunate in receiving this much needed drink of water, well here's to praying and hoping that your relief comes soon.

By design, we scaled back our turkey hunts on some of our country this year. Due to lack of good hatches in recent years, we were concerned about making sure that we moderated our harvest pressure to ensure adequate carry-over into next year. As it has turned out, though bird numbers are down in some areas by a significant amount, we are finding more birds than we anticipated, especially in South Texas. Thus far, all of our hunters have taken at least one bird, and on those turkey hunts where we have allowed hunters to shoot additional birds, our batting percentage has been high, as well.

One surprising feature of this year's turkey harvest is the number of 3 and 4 year-old birds we have been taking. Considering the great hatch of 2010, we fully expected a disproportionate harvest to be made up of that cohort, but the reality is that we have had a good sprinkling of birds of various ages classes from 2 years on up. Good news for future turkey prospects is the fact that we are poised to have a great hatch this year in most traditional turkey regions of the state.

We had a huge March with our exotic hunts. Changes that have been made with the ESA listing and permitting requirements for scimitar horned oryx fueled a flurry of bookings for those animals. Sprinkle in some nilgai and aoudad hunts, along with a few other exotic game species, we had a busy run there for a while.

It is not too late to schedule a last minute nilgai hunt before we close that camp down on May 1, which will reopen in September. We also have about a month of good aoudad sheep hunting left before it gets awfully hot. And, we always stand ready to visit about a possible fall hunt.

Please give us a shout or drop us a line if we can assist in any way.

Click here to download our April 18, 2012 Play By Play Newsletter

Cheers,

Greg Simons, Proprietor