Originally Posted by CNC
Originally Posted by Fishduck
The difference is financial. Check in of coon tails can be accomplished in one day by the already existing personnel. Checking 20 acre tracts that were burned would require a lot of driving time and new hires. No argument that burning provides a lot of benefit for the turkey population..


Yep.......That just wouldn’t be feasible or effective for a number of reasons……Not to mention it is heavily biased toward private landowners and would in no way have the ability to impact most hunting club properties. At best you would get a bunch of guys scrambling to help someone conduct a burn that was already occurring anyways and you would get very little if any significant new burn acres created.

For the record I’m in no way against creating habitat …….These discussions tend to pit one solution versus the other as if it has to be either/or. We need to be doing both…….At some point though we have to be realistic about the potential to make any significant change with such tactics. If we’re talking about changing how we raise cattle then that has the potential for major landscape change…….If you’re talking about just trying to talk more people into burning for turkeys…..then you’re potential impact is very limited.


I can't believe that any idea could be rejected in this thread for not being "feasible.". smile

You have gotta know that we are just talking about what we would like to see happen and there is nothing "realistic" about any of this. The state is looking for opportunities to shorten the season and make it later, not earlier. It would be a breathtaking reversal of direction for them to even talk about this as a real possibility.

But IF they did, I would argue that giving the incentive to burn has the potential to do far more in producing turkeys than collecting coon tails could ever hope to do. Getting even smaller tracts of land focused on producing poults will benefit all the land in the area. Provide the habitat and you will have turkeys.


All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.