Rather than looking at this 1,500 saved gobblers, I think you might find it easier to digest a more dialed down scale for an example. As PCP and many others have stated for years, gobblers are insignificant to general turkey populations as long as there is at least a bird or two to breed hens. I personally have never seen a property in Alabama that did not have at least one or two gobblers in the vicinity to take care of the breeding.

So, on to an example. Say I have 1,000 acres and I have 10 gobblers and 30 hens that transition in and out and through my property. I feel like these numbers are very realistic for Alabama, and on a lot of properties (like Jackson county), it is very conservative. Now let's suppose turkey season rolls around and two scenarios happen. First, I go out and kill a limit of 5 birds throughout the season. That leaves 5 gobblers to take care of servicing the 30 hens. They are more than capable, and I would assume happy to oblige to taking on those responsibilities. I would just about guarantee you every hen would be bred with 5 suitors in the vicinity.

The next scenario is Chuck in his infinite wisdom reduces the limit to 3. So now 2 gobblers are spared, and there are 7 gobblers remaining to take care of the breeding. Obviously they would be equally successful in breeding the 30 hens.

I think folks get tied up on this idea that those two spared gobblers will carry forward to next year, and somehow that is going to grow the population, when in reality, they are missing the forest for the trees. So back to this example. Those 30 hens are all bred and for simplicity, let's conservatively assume that they all lay 8 eggs. Now let's assume that 1/3 of those nests are successful and hatch, so you are left with 10 clutches of 8 turkeys, so 80 new birds on 1,000 acres. Next, let's assume that 1/4 of those survive the first 6 months of life to a point where they are fairly competent to survive in the wild, so you are left with 20 new birds on this 1,000 acres. Of course throughout this example you will have natural attrition to predation and other factors, but the addition of 20 birds a year should be enough to sustain and maintain a steady population.

Now this whole nesting success and survival of poults bit is the most important thing to maintaining healthy turkey populations. To me, it makes a lot more sense to be worried about the 60 birds who did not survive to adulthood, or the 20 nests that were unsuccessful in hatching (20X8=160 lost poults) than to worry about 2 gobblers that I enjoyed shooting back in the Spring. Do you see how insignificant they really are to the big picture?

The answer to the turkey population "problem" has nothing to do with hunter harvest in my opinion. It's a habitat and predation issue, and both of those can be managed by landowners and lease holders. The problem is most are too lazy to spend the time and money to address these issues. Probably the most important factor to nesting success, which I haven't even mentioned yet is weather. This is obviously an uncontrollable factor, but several wet Springs back to back to back can obviously be detrimental to turkey populations. Fortunately, we have had very good hatches the last two Springs and a large part of that is due to good weather. That has been observed throughout the state from most everyone I've talked to. I think the limit reduction / shortening the season BS is just a cop-out for Chuckie, and he's failing to address the real issue. I don't think a limit reduction or a shortened season will have any impact whatsoever on overall turkey populations. If anything, I think it will have a negative impact because landowners and lease holders will be less motivated to spend the time and money on habitat improvements and predator control due to the reductions in bag limits / season length.