Squirrel Hunt Follows End of Soaked Turkey Season | local sports

The biological basis for the spring squirrel hunting period is one of two annual blooms in the squirrel population. Squirrels breed twice a year and consequently produce litters during two periods. One such time when the squirrel population grows noticeably is now when young squirrels from spring litters, the results of the winter breeding cycle, join their elders in forests across the state.

It is a very different environment than the one that awaits hunters in the traditional season that begins in late summer. Temperatures tend to be cooler and spring forests, while full of foliage, have a different look and feel.

For squirrel hunting purposes, one of the main variations on the traditional season is that spring squirrels are much more spread out in their search for food sources. Spring hunting lacks a central food focus, while late summer hunting generally concentrates on early maturing hickory nuts.

Without the ability to find squirrels by concentrating on chosen hickory trees, spring hunters must generally generalize to areas where squirrels are abundant in other seasons. Bushytails are more widely dispersed and feed on a variety of foods, including buds, flowers, fruit, fungi, and even insects. If there’s any special draw for spring squirrels, it might be the occasional productive mulberry tree. Spring squirrel hunting has, in fact, been labeled a blackberry season.

Spring squirrels can be hunted with the usual variety of legal weaponry, but shotguns and cartridges with #5 or #6 cartridges are most popular due to compromised target visibility in heavy woods. Rimfire rifles remain the choice of some despite the deterioration of sighting longer targets in full foliage.

Squirrel hunting regulations are the same in the spring season as they are in the traditional season. Those include a daily limit of six squirrels and shooting hours from 30 minutes before official sunrise to 30 minutes after official sunset. The same goes for using dogs for tree squirrels, a different hunting approach that has become more popular in recent years.

• Kentucky’s spring turkey season recently started to get wet and cold.

The traditional gobbler season concluded with last weekend’s shutdown, coming out after a stretch of unusually cool, frequently rainy and breezy weather that likely reduced gobbler vocalization and responses to hunter calls. And there is no doubt that the harsh and generally repulsive conditions reduced both the participation of hunters and, if they disappeared, the effectiveness of hunters.

Despite observations that increased survival rates in earlier turkey breeding had provided a better 2-year-old gobbler crop this spring, the turkey harvest decreased this season rather than increased.

During the season from April 17 to May 9, hunters reported the catch of 29,196 turkeys through the Telecheck tabulation system. That compares with 31,364 birds caught in last year’s season. It is also the second lowest harvest in the last 10 years, undermined only by the harvest of 27,210 turkeys in 2018.

The top gobbler catching county in the recently concluded season was a consistent favorite, Muhlenberg, with 622 birds. Only one other country exceeded 600 gobblers taken, Logan County with 606.

In far western Kentucky, Graves County led the turkey harvest with 516 birds reportedly taken. That harvest made Graves County sixth highest in the state for gobblers earned.

Turkey hunting is now off the table until the start of Kentucky’s archery season for turkeys of either sex (and deer, too) on September 4.

• If you’ve been waiting or dreading this year’s anticipated appearance of Brood X of periodical cicadas, wait for the moment. They’re running late, but they’re still coming.

In fact, this month is on nature’s timetable for the appearance of 17-year-old cicadas for their brief career as adults. They must emerge from the ground as mature nymphs, leave their nymphal shells as winged adults, and fly toward the trees, whose roots have been feeding them for the past 17 years.

The adults will have a career of about three weeks during which they will mate and the fertilized females will lay eggs. These will later hatch and the tiny new nymphs will drop to the ground and burrow to produce the next generation which will appear again in 2038.

This year’s surge could have started in late April and, most likely, could be happening now. However, this spring’s unusually cold temperatures have stopped the subterranean nymphs.

Entomologists say the appearance of red-eyed periodical cicadas depends on the nymphs getting the right natural signal to burrow into the soil around older trees where they hatched 17 years ago. That signal is the soil temperature at an average depth of 8 inches in the ground reaching 64 degrees.

With recent air temperatures barely reaching that mark, as high and low temperatures dipped into the 40s of late, ground temperatures have remained below what is necessary to indicate that periodic cicadas are becoming animated.

Officials say the appearance of Brood X, which will also cover much of the Midwest and Kentucky, could be delayed by a few days, maybe several days, depending on weather in the immediate future.

Warmer days with sun exposure and milder low-temperature nights should raise soil temperatures in no time. A triggering event, entomologists say, is often torrential rain when the air temperature is 80 degrees or higher.

When that happens with soil temperatures already near 64, Brood X should sprout within 24 hours. With the buzzing chorus of massive numbers of adult males, we should know when it happens.

Steve Vantreese is a freelance outdoor writer. Email outdoor news to outdoors@paducahsun.com or call 270-575-8650.