Just because something makes it past the peer review process doesn't mean it is gospel. Experiential knowledge and local knowledge would help greatly in these efforts. One issue is that "the experts" are often the ones that have learned the scientific method and not the ones with the most knowledge on the subject.
And look carefully at all the 5 points that he made. The first 4 aren't even controversial; any turkey hunter could have told him that. But there is no evidence that those things affect reproduction. So there are fewer gobbles per day when turkeys are hunted - so what? A hen only needs to be bred once to be fertile. And then the way he worded his conclusion in point 5 starts out with "it's plausible". That is one heck of a long way from the idea that it's proven. But the way they repeat it over and over makes most people ignore all his qualifiers.
He is one of the guys who wrote the letter during the last turkey season warning that Covid was gonna have disastrous effects on reproduction because so many gobblers were being killed. Instead, we've had the greatest hatch of the modern era. I think you would have to go back to the Indian days to find a year when this many poults were produced in Alabama.
