MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Hunters will find wildlife where they find mast and this year, they may have to search a bit. The 2016 mast survey overall finds mast production was down.
“It’s 25 percent below the long term average, but that’s primarily because the soft mast was so bad,” said Chris Ryan, Biologist at the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources and one of the authors of the annual report. “The red oak, black oak, and scarlet oak are much better than last year and the white oak is what we’ve determined as ‘spotty.'”
‘Spotty’ would mean hunters will need to pay closer attention and do plenty of pre-season scouting. Hunters may find abundant mast in one spot, but 500 yards away on the other side of the ridge, trees may be barren.
“It helps a hunter if they have access to large areas of ground, but it could hinder them if they don’t have large areas,” said Ryan. “They have to scout. You can’t just go up to the same tree stand you’ve sat in for the last 30 years and expect the mast and deer to be there.”
The agency has published the mast survey for the past 45 years, which gives a strong bank of data to compare the conditions over the years. Along with the report on mast, there is also the hunting forecast for each species based on the availability of food.
“The traditional buck season probably won’t be quite as high as it was last year,” said Ryan. “Last year we had a bad oak mast year and that typically pushes animals out in the field making it easier for hunters to find them. With some oak across the landscape and definitely up from last year it should push the harvest down a little bit.”
Last year’s deer season featured one of the best years in recent memory for antler size. Ryan said he didn’t expect that to change a lot.
“If anybody looks at trail cam pics people are posting to social media, there are still some great bucks out there,” he explained. “It takes a little time to find them and I’m not going to say we’re going to see as many as we did last year, but there’s still a lot of good bucks out there.”
Bear hunters are expected to have great success. Last year was a record kill for black bears and Ryan expects that will be close to the same.
“We had over 3,000 black bears killed last year and we expect it to be similar,” he said. “It’s a unique situation with the bear season that it will benefit a lot of hunters. The bow harvest will probably decrease a little bit, but there’s still a lot of mast that should keep the bears out well into December.”
The fall wild turkey harvest is predicted to be up as well. There are two key reasons turkey hunting is expected to improve, one is every county in West Virginia, for the first time in a generation, will have a fall season of some length. The second reason, according to Ryan, has been the rare opportunity for turkeys in parts of the state to feast on a 17 year delicacy over the summer.
“This is one of the highest brood years we’ve had since 1999, especially in those places where the cicadas hit,” he said. “There was a lot of extra protein out there on the landscape this year.”
The cicada hatch was also a benefit to grouse. It’s probably good to have the cicada hatch since the soft mast, which included things like greenbrier and hawthorne, was a near total failure.
You can read the DNR’s 2016 Mast Survey published here.