You guys are just counting the honest hunters who report every bird. For every hunter who uses game check there’s 3 who never report anything for deer and turkey. More people are hunting turkey than ever before in Alabama and predation is on the rise in most counties due to lack of trapping and predator hunting.
If they are already outlaws, they aren’t going to magically start following the law. So no reason to count them. Use some logic man.
I am, logic says that unfortunately the honest folks have to account for the dishonest folks even if that means killing less. Dead turkeys killed by dishonest hunters still amount to dead turkeys. So you agree with a 5 bird limit?
I actually would like the limit to be 1 bird a day. Decoys go back to being outlawed, and a few other things.
I don’t know about one a day but decoys outlawed, amen.
..... Why would something that worked for 50 years, all the sudden not work?
Not saying I know this is the reason, but it’s a reason it might be different. Hunters are way more effective today than in the previous 50 years. Hunters have better calls to sound more like a turkey. Youtube and the internet have allowed new Hunters to obtain decades worth of experience in a single offseason. I still remember being 11 or 12 years old sitting in Hardee’s in Lee county on an April morning in 1999 or 2000 telling an old timer in there about how a pasture turkey was kicking my butt over and over and over again. He finally pulled me aside and got real quiet and said don’t tell anybody else this, but here’s how you kill that turkey. Take a fan off a turkey you’ve killed, get there early, lay down behind a terrace and as soon as that turkey lands in the pasture, you put that fan up and stick your gun barrel beside it. Sure enough, it worked. Blew my mind. I never would’ve dreamed of doing that. Now almost everybody crawls behind a fan or strutter because they’ve seen videos of it. Don’t get me started on remote control decoys or cellphone-linked trail cams.
I will never believe that hunter numbers are at an all time low, yet they are the reason that such a successful system suddenly quit working.
Anybody that says hunter numbers are at an all time low isn’t giving it to you straight. We have just as many or more hunters today as we did any year in the 90s. And while we don’t have as many as we did in the 70s, I can guarantee you hunter- hours afield is way higher than it was in the 70s with how affluent our society has become allowing people to travel all over to hunt.
https://www.fws.gov/wsfrprograms/Subpages/LicenseInfo/Hunting.htm
