This week on Kentucky Afield spring is in the air and the white bars are biting.

We're making a trip to the Nolan River to try our luck next.

We're tagging along with a deer biologist as he collects data that will help both hunters and the department to better manage the resource.

Then we're taking a look back through time at Turkey restoration efforts that were taking place in the late 1980s.

It's all next on Kentucky Afield Hello and welcome to Kentucky Afield.

I'm your host, Chad Miles.

Join us as we journey the commonwealth in search of outdoor adventure.

Are you looking for an incredible bank fishing opportunity?

Well, try focusing on the white bass on the Nolan River.

It will not disappoint.

I”ll tell you what, for me, it doesn't get any better than late March hitting the Nolin River in search of white bass.

Just got down here today, and apparently the fish must be starting to bite because I see a lot of people up and down the bank.

You have any luck today?

Just one.

One.

I'm going to walk up and down the bank today, see if anybody's having any luck.

It looks like some of them are catching some fish.

It's all about catching the water at the right time, and usually in March is the time to start checking it.

But you really want to get that water if it's slightly rising after a warm rain, that's when it can be gangbusters.

What do you know, fellas?

Good man.

Doing alright?

Yeah.

You█ve grown up a little bit in the last four or five months.

My buddy Evan and his dad, Dan, are down here.

It looks like they've found the honey hole, and they're catch some white bass too.

Let me get a stringer.

Those white bass fight don't they bud?

Yeah.

There's one.

Got one?

Oh, it's a white bass.

That's a good one too.

Good job, buddy.

That's a big female.

That's what we want right there.

Here we go.

Man, I was barely, barely, barely moving that bait.

Barely moving that bait.

A small one here.

I tell you, these things they fight so incredibly well.

It's just so much fun to catch.

You know, and the great thing is, I'm looking up and down these banks and there's so many people that get down, and enjoy this style of fishing.

You can go in a boat.

We got some guys here doing that.

But also just grab you a couple of little lures.

Really, anything you can catch a crappie on, you can catch a white bass on.

Either spinners, hair jigs, and when the water gets staind like this, I like throwing something with some pink or something with some chartreuse.

It seems to work really, really well.

But man, this little fish right here doesn't look like much.

Had this rod bent around.

They fight so incredibly well.

Just so much fun.

We're gonna let this one grow up another year.

Evan is the same young man that got a house right down from my place on Nolin Lake and picked him up last year for a surprise fishing trip.

White bass.

White bass.

That's what we been looking for.

Nice job, buddy.

You've been catching big fish?

Yeah.

You can't beat that.

I'll tell you what, Evan, I know you play baseball, and your family likes to get out and spend time outdoors.

I have to think that a spring break, an entire week at the lake when the fishing is really good is probably a perfect spring break for you, isn't it?

Yeah.

I like being out here just catching white bass and just the thought of being out here and the nature.

It's just really fun and peaceful.

I love it.

So what's your favorite thing about white bass fishing?

The fight.

Yeah.

They fight like crazy for their size.

Sometimes they'll trick you.

You'll be fighting the thing to the bank and you be like, oh my gosh, this thing is huge.

And you get it in and you█re like, that is what was pulling my line that hard.

That fish ain█t six inches long.

They're fun to fight.

You like eating them?

I love eating them.

I'll tell you what I know me and my kids, we love eating them, too.

My wife, they.

You know how to clean them and get that red meat out.

They are hard to beat.

They█re fantastic to eat.

That's right.

I love them.

You know, I know that you have a boat and you fish from a boat quite a bit.

A lot of times you go find the fish.

But when these fish are making a run up the river like this, you can kind of stay in the same place and let the fish come to you and you might have 20 and 30 minute stretches without getting a bite and then you may catch three or four in three cast.

Oh.

Got him?

Yeah, I got him.

Nice.

There you go.

You're on the other side again.

You know, if you look at this water, it's kind of got a mud line it's out there.

By the bank is kind of clean.

You're making long enough cast that you're able to fish both that mud line and this mud line.

What have we got?

Seems pretty nice.

He█s pulling drag.

Another beautiful white bass.

Nice job, buddy.

Thank you.

That's a pretty good one.

Dan, you know, you and I spoke before about catching white bass.

I've always said that March and April down here on the river was really the best time to catch them.

Yeah, I'm glad you told me about this, and I'm glad it worked out.

We could be down here at the same time and catching fish together.

Yeah.

You know, you and I get to hang out a lot in the summertime, and then, you know, you got a house right down the road from us.

We became lake-time friends.

But March is kind of the time I don't get to spend a whole lot of time at the lake.

So this is bonus days for us to kind of get out here and do this and catch fish.

Yeah, it's a bonus.

The weather's beautiful and the fish are biting.

So that's where we want to be.

Now that's a fish.

That fish there█s got an attitude.

I've probably thrown back more than I've kept and that I would not throw that one back.

I believe I would keep that one.

Dan, that's a great fish, man.

That's a good looking guy there.

How█d that one hit?

He just smoke it?

Oh, he smoked it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They sure are pretty too.

I like to appreciate how pretty they are.

Dan, I guess we met about four or five years ago.

I noticed that your son Evan had an extreme interest in fishing.

He wanted to fish, and I was able to fish with him a couple of times, but we were trying to catch bass in the jumps and that's a lot of fun.

But, you know, to do that, you almost need a boat.

You actually are here for a week for kid█s Spring break, have your boat at your dock, hopped in the car and ran out here just to try this out.

You know, there's less to deal with as far as the boat and the trolling motor.

Just walk down the bank with a handful of jigs and catch fish like that.

Can't beat that.

No can't beat it at all.

I'm glad you told me about it.

And we were able to work it out to where we could be here together.

How old were you when you kind of got into fishing?

Probably about Evan's age.

Ten or twelve, thirteen years old.

When my grandmother used to take me fishing out in eastern Indiana, Brookville Lake.

And we used to catch a lot of channel cat and bluegill and crappie and everything we could out there.

It was a good time.

Kind of got me started.

I'm glad I've been able to pass that on to Evan.

As a dad, you got to love when he gets out here and wants to do this as much as he█s doing it because you don█t have to worry about him being in any trouble.

He's eat up with it.

Oh, he is.

He definitely ate up with it.

It was a pleasure getting down here and seeing you.

We█ll be spending a lot of time together this summer with our entire families together.

Yeah.

But hey, these fish will be doing this tomorrow too.

You and Evan got choices.

You can run back up here and catch them again.

Yeah, I think so.

Wildlife biologist gathered tons of data to make informed decisions on season dates and bag limits, including studying roadkill.

My name is Tommy Apostopoulos I am a biologist in the Deer program here at Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And today we are going out to check on a road kill doe to hopefully pull some fetal data off of it.

Getting this fetal data also tells us when these fawns are being conceived, when the deer are actually breeding on the landscape now varies a little bit throughout the state.

So we do it region by region.

All right.

So we're coming up on our deer and we█re going to throw our flashers on and go ahead, pull off on the side of the road here.

So today is the 8th of March.

She's definitely been here about a week.

So give her March the first was a road kill deer.

So the next thing we're going to do is age her.

All right.

So this is a two and a half year old doe.

All right.

So the next thing we're going to do is see if she's pregnant.

This is when it gets a little stinky.

Here's one.

Here's another.

She was pregnant and she's got two fetuses.

So we'll go back up to the tailgate and measure these and sex them, and then we'll be finished.

All right, so we've got this.

It's called a fetal scale.

We're going to put these fetuses on the scale.

It's going to give us a value.

And then we do a little bit of math with this chart, and it'll give us our date of conception.

So first thing is, we're going to sex them.

We've got a female right here.

So fetus, number one is a female.

And then we will put this right here.

So we're at about 114.

So that's 114 days since this fawn was conceived.

Same thing with the second one.

So it's a male and we've got 113.

All righty.

And that's all we do with these fetuses.

We're going to put them back with the carcass.

Hopefully, they'll all be scavenged.

Hey so just did a quick double check to make sure that there were only two and here is a third.

So that Doe was pregnant with triplets.

This is a female and she is at 113 as well.

This is all we do with these fetuses.

Now, we just plug these numbers in to a quick equation and we'll have all the data that we need from this DOE.

All righty.

So we have our days since conception.

So now we're going to use this little chart and figure out when these fawns were conceived.

So date of kill, March 1st.

So March 1st in Julian days is day number 60.

So we're going to add that to 365.

We've got 425 days now.

We're going to subtract these numbers from 425.

All right.

So now we have these numbers.

We can take these numbers and they correspond to dates just like that March 1st did.

So day 311 is the 7th of November 2022.

So this fetus was conceived on the 7th of November 312.

It's the 8th of November.

So we'll average all that together.

It's going to end up being right around the 8th of November 2022, when that DOE was bred and she had triplets, which is pretty cool to see, especially in this part of the world, in this part of Kentucky.

All righty.

So we're back in the office.

We're going to take these numbers, plug them in to a big Excel sheet with all of the data from the last two years, we'll average all of that out with physical graphic regions, and it's going to show us that peak of the rut, pretty much the peak of when breeding is happening throughout the state.

Historically, that's been about mid-November and that doesn't really change.

That's a pretty common misconception that the rut is kind of contingent on the weather of right around November.

But a DOE is going to go into estrus, it's going to go into heat around the same time every single year throughout her life.

So on top of being able to give that information to hunters for us, we're able to determine are all the does being bred right around the same time?

And if not, you know, there's everybody kind of knows about the second rut.

And so if does are not bred in that first time that they go into estrus, a few weeks later, they'll go back into estrus, they'll they'll drop another egg.

So if that's happening a lot and a lot of deer are being bred late, that tells us either there aren't enough bucks on the landscape to breed all of the does that are there.

Or in most of Kentucky's case, there are too many does on the landscape and the Bucks just aren't able to get to all of them during that first Estrus cycle.

And from there we'll be able to determine how healthy the herd is around here.

This year, Kentucky Afield is celebrating its 70th year on air.

And in this month's throwback segment, we're going to take a look back at the Turkey restoration.

We've put out corn at the bait site to draw and to lure these birds into this area.

And we're using a cannon net.

It shoots the net up over the turkeys and traps them that way.

What we've got right here, we've got an adult hen.

Okay.

We'll take a look at her.

And then we've got an immature gobbler right here is what we call a Jake.

Then we've got a gob mounted right here.

That's an adult gobbler.

The best way.

Well, there are several ways you can differentiate between the hens and gobblers.

But the best way is by the beard.

You know, our turkey spring season.

We've got a spring hunting season.

It█s gobblers with visible beards actually I think the reg says turkeys with visible beards that you can see right here.

Hens do not have beards.

Jakes.

They do have little short beards.

But mature gobblers.

You can see they have a long beards.

There's several ways Gary tell a little more about how to tell a difference between a gob and a hen.

One of the easiest ways to tell if you just watching birds is gobblers are a lot bigger than hens generally.

Additionally, a gobbler is almost black in color because if you can get a good close up on the feathers, the gobbler feathers are black tip and the hen feathers are buff or dark brown tipped.

So at a distance, when you just visualize an entire bird, the gobblers always look real dark and the hens always look kind of a light color.

You can look at their heads.

Now, this isn't, like I say, immature, Jake.

If you look at this mature, mature gobbler here, you can see the waddles.

The head is so much bigger.

But look at this.

Look at the color difference in this adult hen You see, you've got feathers running all the way up to the back or neck, all the way to the top of her head.

Jake's have somewhat feathers.

Of course, the waddle would start right along in here.

But look at the adult gob.

You have no feathers running up to the running all the way up to the top of the head.

An adult gobbler normally will have a white head in the spring of the year.

He'll be he'll have a red waddle and you'll also have some blue in the side of his head.

Normally, the adult hen will just the head will be kind of brownish, sometimes a little reddish, but it will not have that white cap on it like the adult gob.

But what the turkey hunters need to be aware of the regulations, says turkey with visible beard.

What you need to be saying in your mind if you're turkey hunting, has that turkey got a beard?

This must have a beard to be a legal turkey.

Every year, especially last year, within 30 miles of this location right here.

We apprehended people off three different bait sites.

It is illegal to bait wild turkeys, individuals baiting wild turkeys and hunting wild turkeys are taking a chance.

The penalty is up to $1,000 six months in jail.

If they do harvest a bird over bait restitution to the department of $563, plus loss of hunting privileges for two years.

So it is it is very serious.

But a lot of people actually in the wintertime go out and think they're really helping the birds by putting out bait.

These are a very hearty bird.

They do not need any additional food from humans When you're normally hunting turkey right after daylight, opportunity to shoot arrive at times when there's very little light and you have to be absolutely sure of your target.

Regulations require that you use small shot when turkey hunting.

This is primarily to reduce the opportunity for injuries to humans in case a human is shot.

Additionally, it's to protect the birds.

Large shot are notorious for crippling birds and causing losses in that method.

When you are hunting birds, if you hear a bird calling, if you feel like there is another hunter in the area, you have to be extremely careful that you don't shoot at a bird that is between you and another hunter, you have to be extremely careful that you don't shoot a bird with for example, have been gobbling slightly out of sight and perhaps another hunter has been coming to the bird and you don't know it.

And then all of a sudden you see a movement.

You have to be sure that the movement you see is a turkey.

And don't be prepared to shoot at someone that you cannot positively identify as a gobbling turkey.

The clothing plays a big part of turkey hunting.

Most people, they hunt in full camo, but after they've worked a while, they haven't got on a bird.

They climb several hills, they get hot and they'll open up their camouflage jacket and they'll have a white shirt on just like what we've got right here.

That's extremely dangerous.

A lot of people, the first thing they see when a gobbler is approaching them is that very white tip of that gobblers head.

Whenever they see this white T-shirt, that's an accident looking for a place to happen.

So if you do see another hunter or if you see a hunter that's approaching you, don't wave at him.

Like say, the movement attracts a hunter.

He may be right on the edge.

You never know.

Make sure that you sound off to him.

You say “hey, over here” or something like that.

You need to be extremely cautious about using the gobbling call.

Any call that imitates the sound of a gobbler.

Instead of a normal yelping plucking of a hen, you have to be extremely careful with that because if you're in a situation where there are a lot of hunters in the woods and there's a chance that someone might be close to you, you may lure a hunter up on you instead of another turkey.

A lot of people say, well, how do you all decide where you release a bird?

The conservation officer does most of the legwork with the going out and locating the release sites and then working with the wildlife biologist.

We decide what would be the best sites.

Years and years ago, we were told that it took 15,000 acres of forest to release turkeys.

Then we were told that it took 70% forest and 30% agriculture.

But now we found out that some of the densest wild turkey numbers are in northern Missouri, where they actually have 30% forest and 70% agriculture.

So basically here in Kentucky, as long as we've got the cooperation with the landowners and you can see two or three landowners here today, that if we've got some suitable habitat being a good hardwood forest, good agriculture and a good water supply and show them a little bit, afford them a little bit of protection, they will make it.

We started the restoration program in 1978.

And at that time they were very few.

You know, maybe I don't even think a couple thousand turkeys in the whole state.

And of course, we started stocking birds at that time, getting most of them from other states in various trades where we trade back in the early years, we were trading white tailed deer to Mississippi for turkeys.

And then we started and really the backbone, the restoration program, trading river otter that we pick up and in Louisiana and taken to the different states and trade those for wild Turkey.

And so over the years we've really done a lot this year we've stocked over 600 turkeys this year on 40 sites.

Since we started, we've stocked almost 3700 turkeys.

We have well over 20,000 turkeys in the state today.

And it's rapidly increasing with all these birds that we've stocked.

And we do have turkeys in every county in the state.

The scout habitat of course Fayette and Bourbon County, just not enough trees are there to support turkeys.

So everybody's got some turkeys now and they're doing good.

And we're still going to be doing continue stocking.

As you saw, over in the third district, Turkey trapping has picked up.

We now have enough where we can trap in-state we've got a total of about 250 in the state this year.

Well, this is a lot more than we caught before.

I think 180 is the best we've done in the past, so it's picking up.

Just really looking good.

People are enthusiastic about wild turkeys, even people they don't care about hunting them enjoy seeing them.

Check out this nice largemouth bass that was caught by Riley Stamper from Richmond, Kentucky.

This was caught in a farm pond on a spinner bait.

Great fish.

Here we have nine year old Bryce Cantrell from Harrison County with a nice springtime gobbler.

Here we have 14 year old Iris pageant who went to Fort Knox in search of Turkey.

Nice job.

Check out Jackson Doural with a nice yellow bass that he caught on Lake Brashear.

This was his first yellow bass ever, but it won't be his last.

Here we have saw your camera.

And he caught this nice crappie at Kentucky Lake.

Nice job.

Here's the young man after my heart.

Liam Hefley went on the very last day of rabbit season in Marin County, and it looks like he got to the limit.

Nice job.

Kara McIntosh hit Eastern Kentucky for the spring youth Turkey season and bagged this nice bird.

Congratulations.

Check out this beautiful black crop that was caught by eight year old Jackson Ham.

This fish was caught on Easter at his Paul Paul's Lake Compton.

Payne needed a little bit of help holding this big blue cat caught on barren River Lake.

This fish was caught and released.

Nice job.

Caitlin Reese here with her very first squirrel She got on her grandparents farm in Campbell County.

Check out these beautiful black crop we caught by Braden Davis on Lake Cumberland.

Great fish.

Check out these two beautiful 20 inch saw guys that were caught by Jonathan Hurst on Taylorsville Lake.

He caught these wild trolling crank baits.

Great job.

Right now, we are right in the middle of our Kentucky Turkey season and I hope all of our hunters out there are having a safe and productive season.

And remember, hunting and fishing on private property is a privilege.

Always ask permission and thank the landowner.

Until next week.

I'm your host, Chad.

Miles, and I hope to see you in the woods or on the water.