I’m still seeing prescribed burns going on, which is good…..but turkeys on my place are nesting….. I wonder how many nests are getting destroyed.

You gotta stop looking at it from an individual nest perspective, and look at it from a total population and landscape level impact perspective. The benefits from prescribed fire outweigh the few nests losts. Ted Devos has kept up with average fire timing on large properties he manages, and although most burns occur during nesting season, those properties have some of the strongest turkey populations. I’ve seen very similar results, although I’m not keeping up with it that way. Are you going to lose some? Yes.

You will loose more nest from hogs and other predators. Fire does minimal

Can they not just do the burns earlier, before nesting?

Burning isn’t always that easy. You are completely at the mercy of the weather and local conditions. Burn practitioners don’t have the luxury of scheduling burns to specific days or even weeks in most cases. You get them done when you can. For a private landowner with the ability to burn themselves, sure. They don’t have as much to do. For someone with 25-30 burns on the schedule for a burn season, no. It gets done when it gets done.


And, timing of burns helps achieve other objectives too. Turkeys are not always the forefront of those decisions. For deer browse and hardwood control, growing season fires are the best. Dormant season fires really don’t accomplish much for wildlife. They reduce fuels. Growing season fires however, promote herbaceous growth and help control unwanted species. I’ve NEVER once seen turkey populations suffer from growing season fires on the landscape, unless it was an uncontrolled intense fire that destroyed everything living over a vast amount of acreage.

As soon as my forester tells me my place is ready to burn, we will burn, nest or no nest. Its just good for most everything.

So why are populations decreasing? I’m not blaming burning at all, but I’d like to hear your thoughts.

You must not be a turkey hunter

It's good for them too.

I've already made a trip to Texas, hunted everyday but Sunday and Today in Alabama and leave Wednesday for Florida to hunt. So yeah, I hunt them a little, haha. Burning is one of the best things you can do for your turkeys, I promise you.

If a property is burning different units on a 3 year interval.....Which stage of growth will the turkeys most likely nest in?....Year 1, 2, or 3??.....I believe studies found that it was year 2 of growth with less nesting occurring in year 3 that was being burned

I would guess year 2 or 3 I've seen them nest in a pasture around a grown up stump

I used a leaf blower to make breaks in bottomland hardwood and blew around all the trees I wanted to keep on about 3 acres Wednesday afternoon and there have been turkeys in there every day since.
I also burned about 80 acres of pine that haven’t been burned since the fall of 2022 and I expect turkeys will start using it now and if they don’t it will definitely be excellent brood cover this summer and great nesting habitat next year.

Do you have any evidence turkeys are declining? They’re not declining anywhere I’m familiar with. Have they cycled up and down over the last 20 years? Yes indeed, including some lean years. However, they have seemingly done very well in areas the perceived declines were occurring. I think we had several years of bad hatches and ppl jumped the gun on what was happening.

Turkeys are doing fine in areas with proper habitat management. There’s a lot of areas in this state with terribly managed forests. Overstocked, lack of understory vegetation, no fire, no predator management, etc.

Year 1 is excellent brood rearing habitat. Year 2 is excellent nesting. That’s why I prefer to have everything on an alternating 2 year cycle adjacent to each other. That way brood rearing and nesting cover are always close to one another.

Do you have any evidence turkeys are declining? They’re not declining anywhere I’m familiar with. Have they cycled up and down over the last 20 years? Yes indeed, including some lean years. However, they have seemingly done very well in areas the perceived declines were occurring. I think we had several years of bad hatches and ppl jumped the gun on what was happening.

Turkeys are doing fine in areas with proper habitat management. There’s a lot of areas in this state with terribly managed forests. Overstocked, lack of understory vegetation, no fire, no predator management, etc.

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Been hunting them 50 years. All I know is areas that once held turkeys no longer do. I hunted 3000 acres of Tallapoosa River bottoms for 8 years recently. First 3 years the place was over-run with turkeys. Last 5 years you couldn't see or hear a bird. In areas I've hunted since the 70s and 80s there are way fewer turkeys.

A lot of places up here went through that same scenario from the early 2010s until the early 2020s. Now they seem to be doing fine again. There was a 10-12 year stretch things got very slim. It would’ve been easy to blame any number of things, and I think it was a combination of several factors. My thoughts are that turkeys are extremely sensitive to stagnate habitat. They require disturbance and fire is one way to do that. They love to forage in old growth forests too, but they must have edges and openings to thrive.

I believe it just about all has to do with predators and their ups and downs……There’s plenty of places where turkeys exist that don’t have primo habitat…..I went and hunted Cleburne Co this past weekend on land with pitiful habitat but a decent population of birds….Why?.......My guess is the pitiful habitat doesn’t support many predators

Give me the burn every single day. I don’t care what time of year it is. The benefits FAR outweigh the negatives and it makes for some great turkey hunting woods.

Could be. Areas that I hunt haven't been the same since the early 90's. I've got a picture of 21 longbeards and around 50 hens in a hayfield from 1986. Since 2000 I haven't seen or heard a turkey there. Used to hear 4-6 gobblers and chose which one to go to............Now you're lucky to hear a bird.