With hunting season around the corner, Quantico’s favorite game bird is in nearly unprecedented abundance aboard the base.

“This fall, the opportunities for turkey hunting should be better than average,” said Tim Stamps, head of the base Natural Resources Section.

For more than 40 years, base naturalists have kept track of the turkey hens and poults — as the young are called — that they encounter in the course of their routine summer activities, Stamps said. This summer, he said, workers recorded 88 hens with 657 poults, for a ratio of about seven and a half poults for every hen, “which is very good. Anything above five poults per hen is considered very good.”

The raw poult count is also the highest ever on record for the base, with the next highest being in 1996, when 575 were spotted. Stamps emphasized that the count is not scientifically controlled, but he said it is nonetheless a good indicator of population numbers.

Turkeys grow rapidly, and the young that hatched in late spring will be about adult size by the time hunting season starts in early October.

Numbers appear to be up among older birds on the base as well. In the spring, volunteers carry out a “gobbler count,” traveling specified routes and attempting to elicit responses from nearby turkeys, most often by imitating a barred owl call.

John Rohm, head of the base Fish, Wildlife and Agronomy Program, said 130 gobbles were recorded in the spring, the highest number on record.

“So there are two good signs that there are more birds out there,” Rohm said.

However, he said limits on bird takes will not be altered, with hunters allowed to take no more than two turkeys in the fall and no more than two in the spring, with an overall limit of three gobblers.

Stamps said a couple of factors likely played into the high poult population. Very young turkeys are susceptible to disease, so every year, the weather in late May and early spring, around the time of the hatch, has a major impact on the number of young who survive, he said. “During the hatch, if there’s cold, wet, nasty weather a lot of the poults will die.”

This year, another factor came into play, as the region was overrun by the thronging, 17-year cicadas of Brood II, providing a surplus of protein for the young birds and their potential predators.

“There was this tremendous resource in late May to early June,” Stamps said.

The same cannot be said for the coming fall and winter, when a failed acorn crop will likely drive turkeys out of the deep forest, making them easier to hunt, he said. “We believe, in those conditions, the turkeys will spend more time foraging in open fields than back in the woods.”

Archery season for turkeys, as well as deer, black bear and bobcat, begins Oct. 5, and the Game Check Station opened Sept. 3 for hunter orientation classes and the sale of base hunting licenses.

The orientation is required for anyone who hasn’t hunted aboard the base before and will be available from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Base licenses will be available for sale for $20 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., daily, except Sundays, when the Game Check Station will be closed, and there will be no hunting. A trip license, valid for three consecutive hunting days, costs $5.

Hunters are also required to carry a state hunting license, a state archery hunting license and big game tags, all of which can be obtained from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

A youth deer hunting day will precede the regular hunting season on Sept. 28, allowing children 15 and younger to hunt with firearms or archery equipment under adult supervision. A youth turkey hunting day is scheduled for Oct. 19.

Firearms season for turkey hunting starts Oct. 26 and runs intermittently until Jan. 25, and the deer firearms hunting season runs from Nov. 16 through Jan. 4. While the first deer archery season is basewide and allows the taking of either sex, most of the firearms season is buck-only, and a later deer archery season runs from Jan. 8 to 25, only on the mainside of base, and only allows the taking of antlerless deer.

To hunt on the mainside, archers need to pass an archery orientation and qualification, which is offered at 2 p.m., every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at the Game Check Station.

Beginning Oct. 5, the station will move its opening time up from 8 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. Throughout hunting season, the station is open until 90 minutes after sunset.

All hunters must check in and out of the station each time they enter the base to hunt, as different areas are open or closed each day, depending on the live-fire training schedule.

A base bulletin with all the details of the hunting season will soon be available at the Game Check Station and on the base website, although Stamps said he’s not sure when it will be signed. Meanwhile, hunters can call the Game Check Station for details.

For those who want to warm up their hunting skills or are simply annoyed by the other abundant bird on the base — the Canada geese — their season is already open and runs through Sept. 25. Daily bag limit: 10.

For more information about hunting aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico, call the Game Check Station at 703-784-5523 or 703-784-5329. This year’s hunting bulletin should be available sometime soon at the Quantico Sportsmen website, at www.quantico.usmc.mil/activities/?Section=QSM.

—Writer: mdicicco@quanticosentryonline.com