David W. Turner

A telephone survey of mourning dove hunting in the Eastern Management Unit covering eight seasons (1966-1973) was carried Ollt for the Southeastern Cooperative Dove Study. The sampling frame, the survey procedures, and the precision of the results are described, and certain comparisons are made with mail surveys. Of the 210,000 randomly selected households, approximately 85 percent were contacted and information on about 12,800 dove hunters was obtained. The number of dove hunters in Management Unit households having listed telephones, the Dumber of their trips and their harvest of doves...

Several Southeastern states using mail surveys currently apply an estimation procedure to adjust for non-response bias. Efficient planning of these surveys requires an idea of the precision obtainable for a specified number of questionnaires mailed, i.e. an idea of the sample size required. This paper graphically describes the empirical relation between sample size and relative precision of estimates of hunters, effort, and harvest for three game species, deer, turkey and dove. The data were selected from records on hand from six states and over the period from 1964-1969.