A Trapping Incentive

So what are the arguments against creating a trapping incentive??

It costs money. That automatically makes it a no go for Chuckie. He's more interested in devising new fees and licenses to increase revenue, than he is spending money to help wildlife and hunters.

Then again he's probably considering it. His proposal will be something like this. For $1000 you could buy a trapping incentive license to participate in the plan. Annual license for $1000 bucks and you get paid $5 for every coon caught. Limit will be one coon per day and you can only submit your catch between the hours of midnight and 2AM, on every 5th Wednesday, and if you live in north AL, you have to submit yours in Mobile and if you live in south AL, you've got to submit yours in Huntsville. Should be a winner. You've only got to catch and turn in 200 coons a year, to breakeven on the license cost. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. There will be a limited number of permits available. Application fee is a non-refundable $200, but in an effort to be fair, Chuckie will insist that if you dont get drawn, that you get preference points for future drawings.

I’m thinking a privilege license to hunt with decoys for 500 and 450 go to habitat restoration.

Lol, that's a good one!

I have a better idea to produce more turkeys - let turkey season run March 15 to April 30 with a 5 bird limit. The opportunity for that much hunting will give landowners and lease holders all the incentive they need to carry out ALL the management practices that will lead to more turkeys.

It's Reaganomics applied to wildlife management, and it's nothing new. Alabama did it for over 50 years and it worked great.

Except it stopped working great or more hunters showed up or something but Turkey hunting in yhe areas I hunt is not what it was 10-30yrs ago

I dont think one bird and few days shift of the season will realistically change anything on the supply side of the equation PCP......That isnt gonna to be the catalyst for thousands of acres suddenly changing from what it is now

How much new revenue are they generating with the stupid "baiting privilege"? There's your funding for a trapping bounties. Although I'm sure he'd come up with some BS excuse why those funds are already vital to the day-to-day operations of the DCNR even though they've only been generating those funds for 2 years...

I have become decent friends with a local game warden (I think he is really a supervisor over several game wardens), what he has told me is that his entire budget comes from license sales, permit sales, and fines (I think the fines count, not positive). His area is and has been several people short staffed. They just don't have the funding to do much more. He told me that now the water patrol is part of the trooper funding (maybe comes from the general fund), though the game wardens still have to police the water ways too. Basically, if we are to have any more/different enforcement the $ has to come from somewhere. With that in mind I doubt they have $ to offer any incentives, unless if comes from a grant or something.

The incentive I suggested in another thread was to allow any resident hunter to start turkey season a week early in exchange for sending in 20 coon tails…….The only cost associated with that on the DCNR’s end would be the “processing” cost…….

That would be a great idea, and super attainable for anyone that half tried. It should be more like 50 tails.

I like mr Steve’s idea

Twenty is plenty enough and it may even be better to go with 15……..If 5,000 people participated at that twenty rate it would equal 100,000 coons being taken out…….That’s close to what was being taken at the height of the fur trapping era. If you jack it up to something unattainable then few will participate……It will also keep there from being any kind of secondary market establish where folks trap for the purpose of selling coon tails to others…..If you reduce the value of a coon tail down to $5-$10 then it wont be worth it for anyone to do. Keep it at $25 or higher and it becomes more attractive……Twenty coon tails at $25 would cost someone $500 to buy which may be pushing people’s willingness to pay for the extra week. That’s the equation you’re dealing with though…….If you don’t set the numbers at something reasonable then it will only end up being mildly effective at best

We are taxed into almost poverty. Funding is there at all levels. They just choose to keep stealing it.

We have lost the best 10 days of the season, in addition to the lower limit, but far more important than that is the trajectory of restrictions. Is there anyone here who believes this is all they are going to do? How long do you think it will be before March hunting is completely eliminated? How long before the limit is 3? 2? 1? Lottery to draw a tag?

With a regulatory climate like this, how many landowners are going to be willing to make the long term commitment it takes to manage land for turkeys instead of money? I'm happy to see people wanting to catch coons, but turkeys are produced when you provide the habitat to grow them, and that costs money.

I don't know what to tell you on that; your place is something of a mystery to me. I've spent the day working on mine about 10 miles from you and there is turkey sign everywhere. Come over in the morning and I will show you the things that I'm doing, and we might even hear a gobbler. Send me a PM if interested.

Where are these additional acres going to come from??.....Timber company land??......Ag land??......Suburban habitat?.......How many additional acres will you burn if they increase the bag limit to 5?

First, I like PCP's idea best!
Second, Lets say I own a couple hundred acres. What if I am a coon/coon hound hunter and manage my land for coons. Maybe I keep hollow den trees, grow lots of corn, hope any turkeys nesting on my place feed the coons with their eggs and poults. Why would I want my hunting license money to be spent by the State for something that goes against what I am managing for on my own land?
Third, I hate the Government spending my hard earned money on what they think is good management. I am generally against ANY incentive programs for what the Government thinks is good. If someone wants more turkeys and thinks predator control is a good investment, let them have at it... Year round.... with no license.

Thanks for the invite. But got to coach soccer tomorrow morning and evening.

The only incentive you’ll ever see is the one inside you that wants a better habitat for turkeys by eliminating predators
If you’re hoping to see anything from this current regime then your living a miserable existence

Clubs needs to add trapping to the list of rules. You must trap xxx to be allowed to kill a buck or turkey. I know folks don’t have time to run traps but seem to have time to belly ache about it. I can’t see the state starting an incentive. Deadeye48 is on it you want predators gone get after them. Social media the photos.

There’s the potential to lose a bunch of acres of habitat but there isnt the potential to add much……Again, show me these acres that we are going to convert over to turkey habitat. How many thousands are there?? At best it’s a minor drop in the bucket overall. You could make the season start on March 1 with an unlimited bag limit and the habitat would change very little. Its just wishful thinking that sounds good on paper.

stick to dog tracking and composting please

We could convert 335,488 acres of land over to turkey habitat over the next 10 years and we would be impacting a grand total of 1% of Alabama’s land area……….What 335,488 acres do we convert?? What about a million to get us up to impacting 3%.......Sure, there’s a little bit of additional land that is waiting to be burned but you’re not making any wholesale changes by adding a bird to the bag limit……You only have the real potential to negatively impact things by continuing to take them away…..Creating a trapping incentive actually has the potential to make changes in every county in the state next year.

True.




Too many damn rules as it is in most clubs. SSS. Social media is part of our existing problems.

>>>Thanks for the invite. But got to coach soccer tomorrow morning and evening.<<<

I understand, holler at me any time.

The only way I see that you could make any significant change to the habitat on a landscape level is to change the way we raise cattle……

CNC, I think you are underestimating the potential for turkey habitat improvement. The timber company land that is managed for nothing except timber production is never likely to produce a whole lot of turkeys, but the majority of the land in AL is still owned by private individuals, and very few of them are really managing for turkeys. I believe that it's enough land to make a real difference in the overall turkey population.

I've seen the results on our land in Perry county, but I've also seen it happen in other places. I have posted here before about how much the turkey population has increased the past few years around my house in Coosa, and it's not happening because of anything I've done. It's mostly due to a neighbor who bought 80 acres and has managed it well. He's burned it twice in 3 years and that one small practice made a drastic difference in the turkeys.

I could list you 25 names of aldeer members who own several hundred to several thousand acres and are interested in improving their turkey habitat. One of the biggest reasons I hang around here is to learn about new things to try. One thing I will mention is the Central Alabama Prescribed Burn Association. They just got started up and already have 70 members and want to get to 200 before August. Their primary goal is to help small landowners burn their land. Check them out:

https://alabamapba.org/

I'm afraid our entire discussion is a moot point. The dcnr is not going back to the old system, and I don't believe that they will be willing to pit coon hunters against turkey hunters with a coon bounty. You probably don't remember the CAB meetings from the early 80s with the trappers vs the coon hunters, but those were some contentious meetings.

Well, I will do my best to get my 20 coons if you get this done, but I would have to scramble for them. I don't feed corn and I don't think I have 20 coons on the place. The last time I trapped I only got 5 or 6. So I will be in the market to buy some coon tails.

Gotta make coon hunting cool again.

We had a trickle of a coolness factor a few years ago but the kids didn’t have anywhere to hunt. Thy were riding around with their dogs name on their back window representing and all. Big siganage and artwork.
Just like that it was gone. A few of them remain, very few.

Honestly I was surprised who some of those guys were. Never hunter anything in their lives till they got some coon dogs. But it was fleeting when they ran out of land to hunt.

Carter, do Coon hunters actually kill coons?

I doubt it will ever be formally acknowledged but lets not forget the fact that legalized baiting has very likely helped to inflate coon populations. If a trapping incentive were created, at least a portion of what would be taken out would simply be offsetting some of that population growth.

I think its probably worth pointing out as well that these things are not either/or choices when its comes to trapping and habitat management……There is nothing about creating a trapping incentive that prevents habitat creation from occurring just the same.

It would be nice if it was as simple as habitat and trapping, but it ain’t always that simple. I’ve talked to several folks that have been managing for turkeys for years and are seeing a decline in their population.

The obvious answer is to limit hunting enjoyment to a bare minimum with as many restrictions as governmentally possible. It’s worked so well in other places. Actually, most TRUE conservatives and hunters that LOVE wild turkey - should stop hunting them altogether. This is obviously a very fragile species with NO ability to adapt to changes around them. I fully expect them to be extinct at some point in my lifetime.

I imagine quail hunters thought the same 30 years ago.

One of our biggest issues is that we suck at adapting to change over time.......

Nah ,,,,, some busy some lazy . You wanna clean out a few coons and possums go squirrel hunting while they are out . Put a 22 thru ever nest you can find .

You hit one ,, give it a few if he sticks his over the side headshots him and he'll flop out of the nest

How many I don’t know of but yea they like to shootem out of the tree for the dogs to get. Keeps the dogs fired up. At least the videos I’ve seen from the guys

Most I ever hunted with didn’t shoot the coons.

How many coon hunters are there in Alabama???......How much of a "footprint" do they have when it comes to land use across the state??.......I dont know of many hunting clubs that allow coon hunting......It would have to be a fraction of the land that gets deer and turkey hunted.

[quote=CNC]The only way I see that you could make any significant change to the habitat on a landscape level is to change the way we raise cattle……

What do you think we should change when it comes to raising cattle? Just curious, I think these conversations are the right ones to be having. It’s all about having the best nesting ground from what I’ve ever seen. The gobblers are gonna be where the hens are at, like a revolving door for the most part. The big timber company tracts that never burn and only spray are the tracts are where I never see turkeys. If you’re stepping on a 10” deep mat of pine needles it isn’t where you wanna be from my experience. A lot has changed around here over the last decade or so, we don’t plant chufas here anymore because all it has done here recently is concentrate the hogs on a place. The key to killing/seeing/hearing turkeys is always have another place to hunt. You can never have too much turkey land. I have tracts that I used to limit on 15 years ago but they aren’t in the right cycle now, they will have birds again when it’s right though. I’ve hunted a tract before where I hadn’t seen a bird in 6 years have a tornado run through it and all of a sudden it’s an absolute zoo

I don’t think I know of anyone who really even coon hunts anymore. The trainers I know that do are the field trial types and don’t shoot them out. My uncle Albert and Mr John C Martin used to take me when I was a young buck. Mr John raised up and won the world championship with Radar at least once that I know of. My buddies from Echo always had coon and deer dogs before the state outlawed buckshot in dale co. Man those were some good times. We’d load 1 dog in the houndsman deluxe and a few cases of beer in the other stall, stay out all night “looking for the dogs” with whatever chicks we corralled into “coon hunting” that particular weekend

Basically the stuff we talked about in this thread........

http://www.aldeer.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=3849006#Post3849006

Yeah and we’re talking about managing coon populations on millions of acres of land across the state…..

When I ran dogs, that is how I got access to most of the properties I could hunt was to shoot every coon we treed. It was hard to get access to bigger chunks of land 20 years ago, so I can’t imagine how bad it would be now. Hides aren’t worth anything, and people are scared to death that running coon hounds are going to push all of their deer off. Hound hunting is a dying breed, but I would love to have a couple dogs right now to turn loose on places with feeders. I could thin the herd in a couple weeks.

I went around and around with the DCNR on this bounty/reward deal.

Good luck. I am 100% for it.

So to judge the situation fairly here’s the potential downside to such an idea……..Racoons occupy a broader area than do turkeys…..In other words, there’s a lot of places where coons exist that turkeys don’t …….So for example, coons being trapped in town are not going to be directly impacting any turkey nests……If we trap 100,000 coons then you may end up with only 50,000 that comes from turkey nesting areas…..or less.

Also, I believe studies have shown that trapping doesn’t have the same impact in lower level turkey populations like it does where turkeys are well established……..Therefore, that may cut your positively affected areas down a little bit more

Wish all you folks with all this extra money would stop raising the cost for others to hunt .

You want less predators worry about your on spot stop worrying about mine

There’s the potential for what I just mentioned to happen and it probably would to some degree……but I’d think the way it would actually play out is that a really high percentage….something like 60-70% of all properties where turkey hunting was taking place would have someone trapping on it…….That would mean that the vast majority of existing populations would be positively effected or affected… ..and there are already existing turkey populations in every county……So you should get some growth and possible expansion out of the current populations…….Also, even if all the coons may not directly impact a turkey nest…….If we start taking out something like 100,000+ coons per season statewide then we could potentially lower the overall base coon population and decrease immigration/dispersion rates…….which in turn should help the existing populations with any growth and expansion……

Of course this is assuming that the hawks don’t kill all of the excess chicks that you create……..I think that actually may happen on some years when their main prey sources are low…… but on the years when there are plenty of other prey, that’s when you’ll see bigger jumps in the population growth of the turkeys due to the incentive.

You also got ask, what is it costing in terms of extra birds being killed and does that cause any negative outcomes that offset the gains from the trapping. There’s really no way of saying definitively beforehand but I think that 20:1 rate would more than pay for itself in terms of producing way more birds than what gets killed. Like has previously been said…..if 5,000 people participated that would equal 100,000 coons……..If half of those people were successful at getting a bird during that early week it would only be 2,500 birds……and its safe to say that a portion of those were going to get killed anyways ……So I’m just guessing that the total net extra kills will not really be that many compared to boost in overall production.

Those are just some things to ponder about such an incentive.

They'll just issue a paper tag or form you can fill out, you can toss it, and print a new one...

Im with Frankie. Don't want a dollar of my license money spent on any bounty. Take care of your own land how you see fit.

I forgot to mention.........no decoys allowed during the early bonus week.

Could always ban them and then sell permits to use them . Lol

In essence that would be what the trapping incentive would do……give back the days they took away in exchange for folks doing a little trapping……Truth be told I think some of y’all are just worried that others are gonna be out hunting a week earlier than you.

Using my money to do it. I trap without government assistance, and burn, and thin and spray gums and privet......without uncle joe having to send me money

Dang, how much could it actually cost to have someone receive vacuum sealed coon tails through the mail and enter into the system who sent them?? Doesn’t seem like very much administrative cost to run such a system…… As much money as gets spent on other things that seems like a small drop in the bucket. Heck. if you could just figure out a use for a hundred thousand coon tails you’d be making money……Maybe use the fur to build sasquatch decoys and raffle them off.

Here’s something else that could potentially happen from such an incentive………There’s an estimated 70,000 turkey hunters in the state from what I looked up……correct me if that’s wrong. Now I’m guessing that’s overestimating when it comes to the number of serious turkey hunters who actually go numerous times per season……..But lets say there’s 40,000 serious hunters and of that half decide they want to take advantage of the trapping incentive…….20,000 hunters……..It would take 400,000 coon tails to fill that demand……..In a situation like that it wouldn’t take too long for folks to really have to branch out looking for coons to trap…..

That’s one of the things that leads me to believing that a high percentage of properties would start getting trapped…….Even if 10,000 hunters participated that would be 200,000 coons annually which I believe is higher than any of the top years during the fur era. That may be wishful thinking though for that many to participate……but if they did it might get interesting.

I think it would probably end up striking a pretty good balance when all was said and done……You’d have some folks on social media boasting about “getting their twenty!”……turkey season would roll around and other folks would be hatin on them for getting to go early and the guy that trapped his would be telling them folks to go out and trap their twenty if they wanted to start early too……..and it would make for good entertainment and a bunch of extra turkeys.

Follow me here and you’ll see why a lot of turkey hunting properties will get trapped…….


So lets say we have our 10,000 hunters, or whatever it is, who want to take advantage of the incentive…….A portion of those hunters are going to trap the coons themselves and will most likely do at least a portion of it on their hunting property.

Another portion of that 10,000 will pay someone else to trap the coon tails for them…..They’ll buy them from a guy who goes out and traps for that very purpose…….You’ll have numerous trappers spring up all over the state doing this and they’ll be looking for places to trap to get these tails to sell……And who is going to be the most likely people to advertise to them that “Hey you can come and trap my land!!!”…?????…..It’ll be turkey hunters. It may even get to a point where ALL turkey land is wrapped up with someone having the “trapping rights” permissioned to them. Ultimately the biggest risk might just be that the incentive will be far too successful.

No , if having more deer and turkeys in itself for a land owner isn't incentive enough to do his own trapping then screw him .

A trapper will be in it for the bounty money not for the good of turkeys . You got trappers in cities that catch coons as pest ,, what would keep them from claiming bounty money for coons that's never seen a turkey egg.

Hell, I stop at ever stream of water next to a high way and set a trap . I would only worry about bounty money and how fast I could make it . I'd pick up ever road kill I found too

https://youtu.be/rdKOKpXfcRw

Ze coons!!!!!......Ze coons!!!!!!............

That’s why were gonna make it 20 coons instead of 15………

It's all gonna boil down to a math equation in the end Frankie…….There is some ratio that exists that says for every “X” amount of coons that are taken out, 1 additional gobbler is created……For the sake of this thread lets call it 3 coons……That would seem reasonable if you think about how many nests those three coons will mess up and we’re talking about just netting one single additional gobbler from those nests……..Heck, let’s say 5 coons just to be even more conservative with our estimate.

So for every 5 coons taken out we produce 1 gobbler and our incentive is set at 20 coons per 1 hunter that gets to hunt the early week and have a chance at killing a bird. That means that for every 1 hunter that takes advantage of the incentive we are producing 4 extra gobblers……Keep in mind that every hunter who earns the incentive isnt going to kill a bird so we’re really talking about 4 gobblers being produced for every 0.5 additional gobblers being killed……or another way of saying that would be 8 additional gobblers for every 1 that gets killed…..

Like you say though, every coon isnt going to count so lets just say that only 50% do…….plug that back into to our equation and we’re still sitting at WAAAY more birds being produced than what is being taken…….

Now, I’m just using an educated guess to make up the numbers I’m using in this scenario…….The question is……”Would the “real” numbers work whatever they may be??.........What are the real numbers??”

Another way of looking at it Frankie is that its really just going back to the season dates we had before but making folks do some trapping to earn it……….Heck, some of y’all are wanting to go back to those dates and get nothing in return for it……

I have no doubt that you would get mixed reviews from the public with passing such an incentive. The guys who are willing to get out and trap to help the resource would love it……The guys who just want to show up on opening day to kill stuff would most likely be ones complaining.

I've a seen good many pay the fine no problem instead of doing work days .

Just out of curiosity what percentage of nests are lost due to coons..?
Do y'all really believe there are now thousands of more coons now then there were when trapping was profitable...? Every forum I visit its the same story. Coons, Coons, Coons. What about crows...?
What about some of the real reasons populations are down across this country...?

In the eighties when I believe most would agree was the hay day for the wild turkey, but then again most probably weren't even born. Were there pop up blinds..? Were there corn feeders there to help spread disease and make predators more successful...? Were there gobbler decoys...? Did we have cell cameras to let you know what food plot to sit on and when...?


Turkey hunting/ killing is now the cool thing to do. It's to the point that any yahoo that " Ive always wanted to try turkey hunting" can walk smooth out of Academy with a place that holds turkeys and be a instant Facebook/ Social media turkey killing Profesional.

Just my thoughts over what I've seen the last 38 years in the spring woods.

The great state of Alabama was the last southern state to allow the use of decoys and now one of the first to regulate its use. I'm not a resident of Alabama but I'm proud of their decision to do so.

You left out flying cats. They were shot on site.

We can jump around and talk about the myriad of things that effect turkey populations but none of that changes the fact that trapping will still create a positive impact across many areas of the state…….and were talking about a game where a 1% or 2% percent change may be all you need to see growth despite all of the other factors…….

Did you them on your cell camera....

KP, I agree with your general sentiments, but the 80s were not the "hay day" for me at all. We didn't kill a single turkey on our place from 84 to 89. There weren't any left because of so much timber being cut in the area. They started coming back in 90 and we haven't had a year without turkeys since then. Those turkeys started using the pine plantation when it was 11 years old; I seldom see that these days.

I seldom see it mentioned, but the big difference in habitat between now and then is that today the site prep work is done with herbicides; back then it was done with dozers. The dozers made a habitat that was very attractive to both quail and turkeys, and I think the loss of that method has had a more detrimental effect on both birds than any other factor.

There’s a number of factors impacting turkeys…… Which one do you think is the most realistic for us to be able to change though?

PCP. ,,,, timber cutting is what done it in around here. Only thing that changed .

Pop had his clear cut before he died and that was the last nail . That was 11 years ago it's starting to turn around .

It seem timber affect predators too . After pop his out timber cut our chickens caught hell. With in Few months after the we caught , trapped or killed 50 some thing possums and it was 30 some thing coons .

Theres a spring that starts behind the hose and runs a couple miles to a creek . I guess they fallow ed it to the pen .

Poorcountrypreacher my friend. Timber cutting has been around way longer then you are I. Yes, it has changed dramatically over the year's. I live in and hunt in Livingston parish Louisiana. I am part of a 12,000 acre hunting club in whch I've hunted since 94. In 1943 a census was done in Louisiana looking for what was left of the turkey population in our state. There were very few locations where they were found. One of the concentrations was the exact location of my club. These are native wild turkeys and have never been restocked. These birds have existed even though they have been poached since existence. They have survived the timber cutting changes and the rest that has been thrown at them.
There were many years where we killed approximately 30 a year on that place even though the habitat was being constantly lost. The timber company ( Weyhaueser) cut ditches and drained the hardwood flats so they could be cut and planted with pines. What habitat they haven't destroyed hurricane Ida took out the rest. I would bet we have less than 3,000 acres that would hold a turkey on 12,000 acres.

There are big differences from where you live compared to where I live. Our pines are planted in rows like corn and are so thick that they are not even penatratable until they are thinned. We have been blessed with Chinese Privit and Tallow.

That is one big difference I see in our two areas. I've hunted your central Alabama area for the last 3 years. I know the difference. Cental Alabama per acre has way more turkey habitat.

We lost a week are two a few years back to help the population. Do I think it was a good idea. Yes I do. We typically killed 80 percent of our birds the first 9 days of the season. We did have somewhat of a come back until this year. We killed 10 turkeys this year and everyone was killed in the first 9 days.
Several of those were killed due to the reasons I mentioned in my post above.

We had an extremely wet spring 2 years ago. So, I knew what we were facing. On a positive note I saw 27 jakes this spring.
I could go on and on.

Habitat is always key

While planting today I thought about this thread and all the critters I’ve seen at the farm the past 15-20 yrs I’ve hunted it. Plenty of coons and hawks along with a pair of bald eagles and immatures. Yesterday I saw a hen with poults that could barely fly. She had them out in the wide open. We’d burned it down a few weeks ago so there wasn’t anything out there worth eating I thought. 20 hrs ago Thai place was absolutely loaded with birds. Turkeys are making a comeback around here the past few years but I’m wondering why they kinda disappeared.

I just think it was perfect storm coming together caused by a variety and cumulative happenings.

I’m betting it is a myriad of things mentioned.

The one thing I can’t understand. Why do hunters get a pass as a predator?

Wellllllll,,,,,, we don't really since we have seasons and limits.

But nothing is better than self regulating. The state can help but it really comes down to the hunters.

We are the biggest predator by far.
What technology has done to turkey hunting/killing is to me the biggest problem, but most folks don't want to hear that. They want to blame on it everything else. In my mind we wouldn't be having to deal with lowered bag limits and time afield if it wasn't due to technology and the social media look at me ordeal.
Question is what can be done...? I have no clue other than at least what Alabama has done in terms of decoy limitations. Another big step would be getting rid of corn feeders.

cartervj   ,,,,,

Made me have a thought . We/most hunters don't take their place in nature as a predator, imo.

In nature a predator will hunt out any competitor and kill it .

Most hunters don't

Because we don't shoot hens. Shooting gobblers has near to zero effect on turkey populations in every area I've hunted in Alabama.

Nope , ,, we don't even come close to being top turkey killers.

You wanna help turkeys , thin out possum , skunk , coons .

You go hunting take some ant dust and kill a few fire ant hills on the way.

I disagree,

If gobblers die before hens are breed then yes there is a very big effect.

Yep……Frankie is right…….Hunters arent anywhere even close to being the top predator…….The number of birds being taken by hunters comes from the 5% that’s left over after everything else takes their share…..Nest predation takes 75-80% and then avian predators and bobcats, etc start thinning out what does hatch. By the time a hunter ever pulls the trigger on a grown gobbler, other critters have already taken out exponentially more turkeys than the one he’s killing

Who says. Hunters?

That’s a bit jaded wouldn’t you say.

Last research papers I was reading on whitetail and antler expression. They were studying social hierarchy and so forth. Interesting discussions on it and how submissive or otherwise may or may not occur due to changes in the hierarchy.

I remember when I was growing up, the chickens had a pecking order until something changed. I was always intrigued by this. I’ve always felt turkeys are no different.

There is an effect but how significant is questionable.

Then again one talk about the incidental hen killings. Seems to be more common that I thought.
I do bet that one hurts the population.

I haven’t had chickens in years but hear that you gotta have at least one rooster to make the hens lay. If there is not enough gobblers in the population will some hens therefore not participate? I do t know but wonder.
Like my friends pic. That gobbler has 9 hens now, back in March when he showed up he had three. Where’d they come from. David says he’s breeding them all. So if they’re laying and go to nest will the later hatches be less successful? I’ve always heard that to be the case.

Once again it’s kinda laughable that hunters say hunters killing gobblers have no effect on the population.
Of course that’s what they’d say. You may be spot on, but at least explore that
Personally I think there is a point of too many but I have no idea what that number is.

Read that one more time, replacement takes how long for that gobbler.

Turkeys in general are born looking for a way to feed something else.

Always heard that quail lose 70-80% of the population yearly.
What’s it for turkeys?

Who’s saying hunters are the top predator? Raptors probably account for the majority of turkey deaths yet there is no legal recourse. So now coons and or foxes and bobcats and the lowly opossum

Wow, some real discussion. That's unusual nowadays on forums and social media. I like it. We all have our own opinions on what the problems are.

I simply have more respect for the wild turkey than most people that hunt them.

I base my opinions on what I see and my own ideas. I know...I can't help it. In my comment above. We killed 10 on 12,000 acres in 9 days. No other gobblers were killed. In my simple mind technology made us more proficient hunters/ killers. Were all the hens breed at that point..? I sure hope so. I know that is not the only problem with our turkeys today. Yes, urban sprawl, loss of habitat, disease, predators and so on.

I just want to be able to sit on a gobbling longbeard in years to come with my grandkids with their back on the same tree with mine.

I’m not sure about turkey’s but I have a mallard that layer 15 eggs, 9 hatch, 1 dead in nest 10 days later which left 8. I watched that 8 for several weeks. Out of that 8 there are only 2 that have made it to almost full grown birds. So that’s 15% survival rate or 85% morality rate. She layed another 11 eggs which she never sat on. So I guess in reality it’s more like 7.6%.

I disagree that it's "laughable" that hunters say that. I have said that because it was the message put out by the wildlife biologists that I had heard all of my life. I guess I first heard it in 8th grade Ag class in 1967. It was very much reinforced by my time in Ag school at Auburn in the early 70s. But most of all it was reinforced by my own experience; I never saw the slightest evidence that the number of gobblers killed off the farm had any impact on poult production.

When they have documentation of a single gobbler breeding over 20 hens in a single day, common sense says it doesn't take a lot of gobblers to produce the next crop. And that was the "science" until Chamberlain came along with his FB page and a theory that still is just a theory. That hasn't stopped them from using it to destroy turkey hunting.

You "think" there is a point of too many being killed, but have no idea what it is. I think there is a point too, on places with very few turkeys. I have always thought that and I've always said to simply close the season in those places. That was the way the dcnr did it for decades, before they started managing by a theory.

I'm still shocked that you have 74 turkeys in a winter flock and aren't deliriously happy. I would be.

On FB, I think the Alabama Turkey hunters group was a post about studies being conducted and so far no nesting success. I think each nest had a camera on it and all were lost. Don’t recall if it was over the last few years or just this year. I just kinda glanced over it. Seems I read somewhere else some of the nest hatched but didn’t survive.

I wondered if human presence helped account for the failure rate.

Maybe someone with connections has access to the studies.

A friend owns some land in Lawrence county I hunt periodically. He won’t shoot the bobcats. He’s kinda fond of watching them while deer hunting. He doesn’t turkey hunt. Anyways the population has increased significantly on his and surrounding landowners. He called the other day, saw two hens with a lot of poults big as quail.

His property is surrounded by 5-7 yr old pine thickets and ag fields.

He doesn’t trap but hunts and shoots every yote he can yet lets bobcats walk. Yotes is the only targeted predator and he has birds around.


Does a new expanding flock of turkeys not have the predator pressure that an established flock might bring?

Do predators increase significantly as food sources (prey) are available. Driving pretbsoecies downward and predators follow suit creating cyclical swings

I am excited, that’s the most I’ve seen in years down there. I’m not happy where we’re at because that’s at most a third of what was there 15-30 yrs ago. I’ve heard as many as 25 birds gobbling in morning at Jerry’s place. Along that stretch of trace if one didn’t see 50-60 every trip they there something was wrong. Thousand plus acres cut along that stretch and extremely few birds seen along that stretch. The trace is closed thru there might explain another reason for the presence of the winter flock.

I could be wrong but that are is more of transition zone of where the hills meet the creek bottom. So that flock is shared over several miles and no other groups of that size are around. Wished I knew how far they travel.
One tagged gobbler was captured in GA and later killed this year in Alabama. The bird traveled 55 miles as the crow flies.

I believe what you say about flock size and stability. If they’re in trouble, anything and everything seems to matter.

As far as Chamberlain, I read a lot of his studies but always subscribe to them. Besides if you go back here, I was making these assertions long before I’d ever heard of him.

I’m just a guy that’s hunted turkeys for 30 plus years and unfortunately started during the heyday of gobbling and numbers.

I’m fortunate enough to be around and in the woods almost everyday. Places that turkeys and deer roam along with other wildlife. I’m nothing close to a biologist, just friends with a few but hunted lights out for years.

I’m kinda bird watcher these days, like one friend says they go to kill something you got to watch. LOL

Wife always called herself a hunting widow. LOL


ps. I agree with your theory on timber management. Mechanical versus chemical is way different.
Like our ag fields will be used by critters, turkeys especially. Burn down and everything leaves. There’s nothing left for them feed on.

I think that's exactly right that a reintroduced flock doesn't have the predator pressure as an established flock. I've heard over and over again the stories of turkeys being reintroduced to an area and the population exploding. I believe that must have been the situation when you started hunting, and I don't believe that hearing 25 a morning in AL can last. It probably was bad for you as a hunter to start out that way; dissatisfaction almost certainly has to follow that. I guess it's good that I have always gone turkey hunting just hoping to hear one.

I don't believe that closing hunting season completely would even help on returning you to those days.

Well, I have always thought that the fewer rules for hunting the better, and that idea shapes a lot of my views on turkey hunting too. I'm sure you remember how much I was against the buck limit, and I had no desire even back then to kill 3 of those stinking things. I expected that would be the beginning of a new day of regulating everything about hunting, and it's turned out as I expected. I guess it depends on your perspective if that's good or bad

You’re correct those days are long gone and I doubt ever will be seen again around here

I hate rules. I learned that running a QDM style deer club. The absurdity is real and rules never achieve the desired goals. The simplest are the best. It’s why I’ve always advocated for a 3 bird rule. I’d hated me back in the day for saying that. But not now

I’m only here because I’m not understanding how a hunter killing and or harassing turkeys daily doesn’t have an effect. I don’t get it

I’ve watched rule changes change bird behaviors. I won’t go in in further than that but will pm you

The stress of hunting does have an effect. I’ve watched the birds at the farm get hunted for one week in us yet get hunted moderately hard around us. I went from driving up on them in the truck 30 yards away to watching a few hens take out running and take flight from a 1/4 mile away while I was on the tractor

I’m pretty sure that is negative impact in some way.

I think we overcomplicate it………Just like RCHRR described with the ducks, at the end of the day there’s likely some number like 5% of all eggs that make it to being an adult……We don’t have to solve every problem in the world that a turkey faces in order to make a difference……All we have to do is effect change that brings that number up by a percent or two and we’ve made a big difference.

Not picking too much here - but if you believe humans are the “biggest predator by far” - then you may need a reset on this self righteous respect.

Maybe so,

Youtube and Facebook is full of videos of turkeys being killed disrespectful in MY eyes. I am against gobbler decoys, fans and firmly believe that is part of reason for the decline of the wild turkey across this country. Just my opinion. Maybe, I have it all wrong...?



Humans control habitat loss, corn feeders that spread disease and make predators more successful. I wasn't speaking specifically about humans killing turkeys.

Once again who his saying that. I’ve not read that as of yet. May have missed it. Hmmmmmmmm

All I’ve ever said was contributing factor. That is a fact whether you want to think it is or not.

Also as expressed it appears hens are killed accidentally by hunters That is no doubt a major factor.

I’m not advocating to reduce hunting dollars. Matter of fact more is needed to expand and keep habitat at the fore front. Burning and early successional habitats are key. But so is poult rearing habitat which is often overlooked. Preacher is the only one I’ve seen talk about having that at his place

We may be the biggest single predator - on gobblers - in spring - on public land .... Thats pretty much it in AL. Many private places and in the state overall, I doubt we are the biggest predator of gobblers - in spring..... I know we are not the biggest predator overall.



Show me ONE study - I have asked Chamberlain this as well - ONE study that show nesting is impacted by not enough gobblers breeding hens. Anything - lower nesting rates, lower fertility rates, lower hatch rates, anything that would indicate hens are not being bred. It does not exist.



That study was a small radio-telemetry sample of hens last year in central AL on private land. 20 hens, a couple nests hatcheds, no poults survived. Fluke data on a small sample. Gulsby told me that one of those hens was still transmitting this spring (the rest had radios die out or hens died) and she successfully hatched and is raising a brood - 100% success. I told him to make a social media post about it since it was just as valuable - 0% success last year, 100% success this year.

I thought it was taken down since I couldn’t find it

Thanks for the update

I’m curious how accurate studies can be since it’s all site specific
I’m guessing one can draw a trajectory so to speak

I think you and I have much different histories with turkeys.

I thought that hens taking flight from 1/4 mile away was just normal turkey behavior. The turkeys on our place in Perry county have never tolerated a vehicle being in sight at any distance. Let them see your truck and they will fly far away. This mystical place where you can hear 25 in a morning and turkeys aren't afraid of a truck is a place I would like to visit.

Maybe it's a good thing that I haven't experienced that, or I would want it to be that way all the time. I don't doubt your experience, and I have seen turkeys not show fear of moving vehicles when they are in fields beside a road. Places where they aren't used to seeing them means they will usually spook when they do see one.

This sentence is one I would address:

>>>’I’m only here because I’m not understanding how a hunter killing and or harassing turkeys daily doesn’t have an effect. I don’t get it<<<

An effect on what? Pressure surely affects the turkeys, and I have advised hunters for decades to follow Rule #1 - don't scare the turkey. If you scare the gobbler away you lose the opportunity to kill him. I wouldn't think that any experienced hunter would think that hunting pressure doesn't affect turkeys. It surely does, but the question I think we are discussing now is whether that hunting pressure results in a lower poult production.

My opinion, and that's all it is, would be that in most cases it doesn't. Much of my public land experience was on the Coosa WMA in the 70s and 80s. Some folks regard those as the good ole days, but I thought it was a zoo. I couldn't believe the amount of pressure put on those turkeys, but every season there seemed to be just as many gobbling as it was the year before. I continued to hunt it through around 2015 when most of the land was taken out, and never saw any population drop.

But if hunting pressure really can reduce the poult recruitment, it seems reasonable it would happen on the hard hunted WMAs. There is no way that my land is ever going to have anywhere close to that sort of pressure. So if there is real proof that hunting is hurting the 4% of public land, then by all means, do whatever is necessary. Just limit the cure to the places that might have a problem.

Well, I am headed to the farm to spend the next 2 days working on turkey habitat. A good day to all!

Agree that pressure shouldn't effect poult recruitment. Maybe hunters bumping nesting hens or, God forbid, disturbing young poult/hen groups. But pressure on gobblers effecting recruitment, I don't see it. That being said, your experience and Rule # 1 PCP is highly relevant in regards to public vs private. Again making new research on private land that much more important. On one of the small places I hunt (350 ac) I am the only hunter. Flushing a gobbler may make the place gobbler free for days-weeks. Even if bumped in the middle of the property, they may end up across the line in minutes. I hunted a pair (probably the same 2) for a week and they never knew I was on the place in several encounters. I slipped away from them 3 times when I saw them make it to a field with hens and I realized I was beat. I would have crawled up to the edge 10-20 years ago and killed one but I don't want to kill one that way anymore. I finally got them to the edge of a field before the hens showed up for a shot by my daughter. They finally realized they had been hunted. On private land you can hunt them carefully and they don't know you are there. On public land the mentality is "if I don't get him or try, someone else will" so they put pressure on them every day they gobble. Those turkeys KNOW they are being hunted.

"Just limit the cure to the places that might have a problem." I argued this since the delay in opener was proposed - to the CAB

"Well, I am headed to the farm to spend the next 2 days working on turkey habitat. A good day to all!" Ill be doing the same. Still have a few hundred acres to burn in Coosa, Bullock and Montgomery counties.

I cut and pasted these from last year at the farm. They literally walked out while we stood there talking. They were maybe 75 yard or so
The second pic I’m in my f250, stoped rolled the window down and took pic. I’d just drive past and turned around at the trace and came back and took their pic.

Beautiful pic

I got a theory and it could very well be wrong but it’s the only logical reason why I can come up with for why some folks would be against a trapping incentive…….

Right now everyone is clammering about “the turkey decline” and looking for a solution. This perceived decline, real or not, is driving a demand for someone to do something about it………and the main thing being preached for folks to do is “habitat management”…….If you were to create a trapping incentive and it was successful in creating a surplus of turkeys then the clammering stops and the demand declines.

Because people that do control thier predators don't want to pay for those that don't .

Or

Have the ones that do trap say heck with it and let a trapper come trap the bounty .

I call bullchit........

Everyone is going to all these great lengths to try and help the turkeys and suddenly pitching in a dollar to run a trapping incentive is just too much????……….yeah right.

Ain't the money , damn point of it .

For some things I got no problem throwing a dollar in , a bounty ain't one of them . Like yote bounty why pay a bounty when you got hunters thst won't shot them on sight .

Now you wanna talk about getting more wardens I'm all ears .

I don’t really see a point…….We’re currently shortening seasons and lowering bag limits as the answer……But some of y'all are saying that you don’t want to give a single dollar toward an alternate solution that would actually work (and also in the process bring back “trapping” to the main stream)…….. because the whole group or others might benefit from your one dollar???......


Once again........

Ok I'll put like this .

If they to damn lazy to put any thing into improveing the land they hunt then f'ckem.

If they got money to join a club then they can put in another dollar or 50 to hire a trapper.

No reason why we as a group should pay to improve the hunting for a few .

I give the state more money I want more wardens .

The state wastes enough of my money already, why would I want to give them more on a program I don't believe will make a difference. Show me the data

Because as of right now it’s a hell of a lot better idea than the alternative being put forth. In the meantime the whole group will continue to suffer and have further restrictions placed on season dates and bag limits………..Keep taking away too many of those and suddenly it’ll be just like PCP describes where there isnt the same incentive to do habitat management at all for turkeys…….

I bought a lifetime hunting/fishing license many years ago and I’m told now I have to pay for this and that when I was originally told I’d never have to pay for hunting/fishing again
So what makes you think they’ve all of a sudden seen the light of where problems can be solved
If money was the answer then all our problems would be solved because they get plenty
As I stated earlier The only incentive we will ever see is the one in our own imagination
If you’re waiting in hopes of this regime to incentivize anything you’re living a miserable existence

I understand what your promoting. I get it. More trapping dang sure wouldn't hurt. Just getting any agency on board I don't think will happen.

I do honor your thoughts on the subject and would never be little them.

I will oppose additional restrictions (since I don't think they will help turkey populations state wide). I will also oppose bounties on predators (since I don't think they will help turkey populations state wide). I have seen NO compelling evidence indicating any positive effect of either.

The state doesn’t have any issue creating baiting permits that exacerbate coon populations……..why should they get a pass on doing something to help alleviate some of it??

I couldn't agree more. I know your trying to come up with ways to help. I commend that.

Are you saying you wouldn’t support it because it wont produce extra turkeys in virtually every county?.....It wont bring back “trapping” and get more people involved??.......It wont give all hunters a way to have more skin in the game???.........It wont increase hunter satisfaction??.......Because I see it having a net positive effect on all of those……. What are the potential negative impacts or risks for trying?? Pretty low arent they???


How many days do y’all think they would have to take off of the season and birds off of the bag limit for that approach to actually make a positive change to the population???.......I’m guessing it’s fairly significant……Realistically like a 2 bird limit or something……or better yet, how far do you think they’ll decrease it before they quit trying??

What other solutions are there??......Its not like we’re gonna suddenly discover new means of creating turkeys…….We’ll still be sitting here talking about habitat 10 years from now and barely enough will have changed to balance out the amount being lost…….Where is it y’all plan on doing anything to make a difference???

Do you turkey hunt, CNC?

Whatever problem we MAY have with turkeys is NOT because of predators across the state. Therefore a bounty will not help. I don't see it having a net positive on any of those. I would be more inclined to pay a buck an acre for every acre burned. That might help.
I also don't think the dominant gobbler being killed in early season is the problem therefore lowering the limit and delaying season start date will not help either. Therefore limiting harvest or changing seasons will not help change the population as a whole.
These are the reasons I opposed the season changes in the first place. If we have a program or make a season or limit change we should damn well have some data to back it up. Something actually showing 1) we have a problem and 2) that the proposed solution will be impactful.

Why would someone get a bounty to improve their own land. Seems like incentive enough!

Well there’s likely not many turkeys dying from old age…….You’re basically saying that trapping has no impact and I think the majority of folks would disagree…….including yourself in the past on here.

This “data” thingy seems to just be something we use when its convenient.

Where was the data showing what we currently did would work??.......Where is the data showing 5 gobblers was the correct bag limit to begin with?........Where is the data showing the Feb deer extension wouldn’t hurt anything??............Where is the data showing the impacts of legalizing turkey decoys??...........Where the data showing we had too many does and needed to kill 2 per day??........ Where is the data showing the impacts that legalizing corn baiting would have and how many extra coons it would create?........But we need “data” before we can create a trapping incentive to counter it??......Again, sure seems like we pick and choose when we want to pull that stipulation out of the hat.


I don’t know that there’s any way to conduct a study that’s gonna tell you exactly how a state wide trapping incentive would work out in every county before you enact it……I feel like if you could though it would likely show varying degrees of impact from place to place with an overall net positive across the board…….Right now though, “show me the data” just seems to be the go to phrase that we pick and choose to throw out when its convenient to our arguement…..Just like already mentioned…..nobody needs data to pass a baiting law but suddenly we need it for a trapping incentive……That’s mighty convenient.

NOT what I am saying. If a property is well managed, trapping may have huge benefits. If is a crappy property, trapping may have no benefits. Killing a bunch of coons across vast portions of the state is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.



Just because those programs were instituted without founding data doesn't mean we should institute another because we "think it might help" I opposed the season changes, I asked Corky exactly the same question when he changed it arbitrarily from 6 to 5, Feb deer had some research to go with it, opposed decoys, doe limit freed up those that had too many does to kill them - pretty good data on that, opposed baiting. There have been plenty of bounty programs, show me one that worked and made a difference.

I think I could make a pretty strong case for any bounty program that has failed has likely done so due to the structure of the program and not the effectiveness of trapping…….In other words, if they are failing then its most likely due to a weak incentive that does not effectively take out enough predators. Take South Dakota’s situation for example…….They are paying out $10 per tail…….That minor rate of incentive will only get you “X” amount of tails being taken out and the structure of the program is likely setting it up for failure from the start….……Increase that rate to $20…….$30…….$40…….or offer a better incentive and the number of tails would dramatically increase. At some point or threshold you would definitely create significant change………OR…….in our case offer the incentive to start turkey season a week early which seems to be a very strong incentive to many. I think all of the controversy that follows such is what folks are wanting to avoid more than anything.

I hear you about data Gobbler and lord knows I like to play with it and analyze it as much as anyone…….But I think we’re going deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole where everyone is looking to some study nowadays to tell them “how to think”……Its slowly taking away the individuals ability to think outside of the box and think for himself……”Such and such study showed it didn’t work so therefore that must be true and I don’t have to think any further past that. I no longer have to use my brain, I can simply Google the answer and it tell me what my opinion should be”…….That feels like the road we’re on with all of these “show me the data” driven decisions.

The analogy that we are “dipping out of the ocean” is not really accurate………We have nearly eliminated numerous species of animals in the past during times when there were a lot less of us doing the eliminating……We DO have an impact and whether it be 50,000 coons……..100,000…….or 150,000………there IS a threshold where it creates change…….And if we’re going to get technical about it, a positive impact is defined as one more than we would have produced…….That is the threshold where positive change begins to occur and it goes up from there.

If we use our past history of fur trapping as a reference since everyone tends to agree that it mattered back in the day……..then it at least gives us a ball park figure for what kind of numbers we are talking about having to take out……..I will bet the farm that if you create the right incentive that takes out enough coons that it WILL create “positive change” over time……..(Dont forget that 100K coon tails caught in DP's will take out a lot of possums for free in the process). There is no way of knowing just how much though without enacting it……..You cant really measure just how much the incentive starting turkey season a week early will have until you do it…..I suppose you could survey some folks to get a sense of public support before hand to predict participation.

CNC,,,, thats right do just like the government if it don't work just throw more money at it

Forest land is WAY more expansive in Al now then in the trapping heyday. The few people who lived in AL in the 50's, 60's and 70's were rural. Now they all live in cities. By the late 70's - 90's when turkeys were inclining and predator trapping was starting to decline, we were way more attached to the land. One property I am familiar with in dallas co had 30 families living on it and share cropping in the 50's and 60's (3,000 ac). Now NONE. Much of the open land is now pines. They had quail then, now none. We were able to control coons easily when there was only 10 million acres of forest in Al and every high school kid trapped and half the rural people ate them. Now we are removed, fields have been planted to pines and coons are abundant from eating corn.

Lets say we have 23,000,000 acres of forest in AL and lets say we have a coon per 10 acres across that. That is 2,300,000 coons. If we killed close to your estimate and close to what we used to report in trapping, 100,000 coons, that is 4% of the coon population. And the cost would be $2,500,000 according to your plan. Lets say that we apply that to a 3,000 acre, well managed place, with 300 coons preying on turkey eggs. We kill 4% or 12 coons and are left with 288 coons. Do you really think that would not be emptying the ocean with a bucket? It would make NO difference at a high cost, paid by the taxpayer (or license buyer). I set it up this way because I have a 3,000 acre place we work on in Dallas co that has an exceptional turkey population that we kill 100-120 coons per year, every year, off the place. That, I would assume, would be about 40% of the coons on the place - enough to make a difference.

I would submit a $1 an acre, or even $10/acre, incentive to burn would get you 250,000 acres burned or 2,500,000 acres burned for the same cost - A far more beneficial program IMO.

All I can add to this thread is my small experience I have with managing land for turkeys. I joined a club that had very few turkeys on it about 3-4 years ago. 2,800 acres in Conecuh county. When I say very few I mean the deer hunters might see a few during deer season and you might hear
1 or 2 gobblers on a spring morning. Hardly any gobbling on the ground. Very few tracks. We started trapping coons. Killed something like 175 coons the first year. We’ve been trapping the last 3 years only around deer feeders and in patches. Not even hitting the creeks in the woods at all. Just the convenient spots we can drive the truck up to. Then 2 years ago I started trapping coyotes. Killed 8 the first year. Haven’t got to set this year but another guy has trapped a few already.
The Turkey population has grown every year and we had more turkeys this year than they have had in the last 25 years since they started hunting there. Usually 2-4 guys hunt it and they kill 1-2 gobblers a year. Last year we killed 3 and this year we killed 4 and had plenty more on camera strutting with hens after the season. I firmly believe if you want to affect the turkey population, trap coons and possums first, then coyotes. Also kill as many crows as you can.

That’s just my limited experience managing for turkeys.

All we had to do here was get chickens and pen them up . I never would have believed that there was that many possum and coons here . We killed over 70 of them from around that pen . That was a few years back . Since then I trap them around the feeders when I run them .

I've had about the same experience trapping my dads. We've had the place around 22 or 23 years. Used to never hear or see a turkey. I started trapping and turkeys started showing up. The way the government is escpecially now I don't want anything from them. Im sure they'd hit me with a 1099 after paying me.

I don't think the cost of an "earn a tag" or "earn the old start of March 15th" would be costly. Simply a check in day manned by the current wardens and whatever paperwork would be involved. There would be a market created for the predators trapped by turkey hunters that can't or won't trap. I personally think it would make a bigger difference in population than pushing the season back.

There has been a valid point that the enforcement of the game laws is lacking. The conservation officers cover an impossible area. Even worse, when someone is caught the fine is often a slap on the wrist. When the cost of the fines is less than a hunting club membership it makes sense for some to poach until they are caught.

You and PCP must have taken statistics together.

Yea, we went to the same school

You do realize that the FAR majority of turkey hunters hunt on private land right?

Yes sir. The check in day would be to turn in predator tails and issuance of a permit. The permit would be good for a "bonus bird" or a "bonus period" on private land. Cost would be negligible.

That’s a great idea and I agree about the cost being negligible…….I’m not sure where Gobbler pulled that 2.5 million figure from……Probably the same orifice where the rest of that post came from.

You know that $2.5 million number would actually be the potential amount that could be put into the pocket of Alabama hunters who wanted to get out and trap to make some extra money. In reality it would probably be something like half of that since a lot of folks would trap their own 20 coons but still, generating a million dollars to support trappers would be a big positive for the hunters of this state.

https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ru/ru_fs294.pdf

"Alabama has an estimated 23,093,930 acres of forest land"

https://www.researchgate.net/profil...n-Procyon-lotor-in-Western-Tennessee.pdf

Showing roughly 15 coons per KM 2. maybe a coon per 16 ac.

The biggest problem is finding enough willing to do it. It’s a full time job

We never could more than a few regulars who put in work at the club but they’d be there every time you turned around during hunting season.

The hunters I know, a trapping incentive wouldn’t make a difference. The ones who want to help turkeys trap and the ones who it’s not a priority to, don’t. $20 a Coon isn’t going to change that. I’m not saying it wouldn’t encourage a few, but none of the ones I know. They have other stuff to do and are too dang busy to drive 2 hours and run a trap line. The ones who care are already trapping.

I cant access that study for West Tennessee…….Isnt that area highly fertile farming country??

I think that you’re likely over estimating the coon population………I’ve trapped 40 coons and possums in ONE spot but it doesn’t mean I can take that number and extrapolate it out as if it were 40 to the acre…….The same goes for taking 3,000 acres and trying to extrapolate it out to 23,000,000…………Its overestimating to do that. You’re not trapping inside of a box. Young males travel and disperse and typically represent the biggest group in the population. Annual trapping numbers for a single property impact far more than just that property.

Also, coons mainly exist and spend the vast majority of their time in the watershed areas of the landscape and that’s also where most people trap. Taking the density inside of the watershed zones and applying it to every acre of forest land would be like counting deer in food plots and using that per acre density to extrapolate.

Furthermore, the way you take the 100K coons trapped and apply the 4% to each acre as an average is inaccurate for how coons would actually be taken out. Individual properties would be trapped no differently than the one you described in Dallas Co and it would look more like a GIS buffer map dotted with red hotspots where trapping occurred…….It would just play out a lot differently. You wouldn’t have a bunch of coons piling on corn feeders anymore without someone scooping up the extra $$$$......

The incentive is to get to start turkey season a week early…….How many folks do you know that would be interested in that???

I do think that whatever the actual coon population number may be……it’s being over inflated above normal carrying capacity due to large amounts of corn being fed during the winter months and suddenly ceasing in Feb………This should cause more overall coon movement and more spacial utilization of the landscape by coons……Meaning that they have to spread out more looking for food due to over population in their normal habitat zones and in doing so they stand a greater chance of increasing turkey nest predation rates. If we’re going to do this then give folks an incentive to moderate their numbers.

I already know a bunch that start the season a week early, some two weeks early. Their incentive seemed to be the turkeys were gobbling.

The State has changed the season and the limit of turkeys based on a supposition that killing the dominant gobbler may affect egg fertility. The undeniable truth that predators are eating a huge portion of eggs and poults is ignored. I tend to look at it as each coon/possum/fox/coyote/bobcat taken results in less eggs/poults/turkeys eaten. Small yearly increases in hens should result in more turkeys.

I stand against limiting opportunity and a "tails for tags" program would both increase opportunity and possibly increase the population.

I don't believe anyone at the state is willing to listen to any alternatives to the current path. Personally I will keep trapping coons and possums along with shooting every coyote, bobcat and crow that I can.

https://turkeysfortomorrow.org/howa...e-turkeys-raccoon-tournament-fayette-mo/

Reckon why there are more coons in Iowa than Virginia???


“A lot of the country might not have a raccoon problem. But, unfortunately, many people don’t consider that just because something isn’t happening in their area doesn’t mean it’s not happening elsewhere,” explained Chase Grubbs, TFT Director of Operations. “I grew up in Virginia, and we don’t have an overwhelming population of raccoons there. But I moved to Iowa after college, and there is a problem there. If you put a trail camera up on a cornfield, it’s common to have 20 raccoons in a photo. People in the Midwest probably see the same thing on their trail cameras. But I can see where people who don’t have a lot of raccoons may have a negative view of these hunts.”

You sir are correct
I’ve been doing this for many years and do not care if this regime offers a bounty on predators
I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing because it works

We just started trapping coons for the first time at my club/ We set out 13 traps beside 13 trough feeders and in three weeks we have caught 26. We moved the traps to the other side of the lease today and will run it for three weeks. If we can catch a total of 50 or more in six weeks we will be happy since again, this is our first time.
This time we set two traps beside each feeder.

One thing is for sure - the coon population is out of control. I’ve never seen anything close to the amount of coon tracks on woods roads. Not just around stream crossings and the usual places - they are everywhere - walking all over. Dead coons on bumpy county roads with very little traffic. Etc., etc. You get the point.

The ones that I know that are interested in starting the season early are already trapping. I think you would have to find a way for clubs to be able to afford hiring a trapper through a government program or something. The average hunter is just too busy to do it himself.

Every turkey hunter in Alabama is gonna be cutting coon tails off of roadkill through the year to get an extra week of hunting 🤣

Picking up roadkill wouldnt work out as well as you think…… Racoons arent that susceptible to road mortality like deer. They use culverts when crossing main roads. The number picked up would be negligible. Come to think of it I don’t know if I’ve ever run over a coon.

I could have picked up 10 this Spring, maybe more.

Me too. I guess our coons aren’t as street smart as CNCs.

No one else is looking to pick them up though.......Let every turkey hunter start scooping them up and you might be lucky to get 1 of them......which leaves you 19 more you have to trap.......IF you're already having to trap 19 then are you gonna even stop to mess with stinky road kill??? You're probably looking at less than 5% that would come from road kill.

I mentioned that I trapped 40 coons and possums in one spot……I actually have done that a few times and that one spot was less than 100 yards from where the drainage I was trapping crossed a highway. The number of coons that I caught in traps was way, WAY higher than the number that got hit by cars. It actually wasn’t all that common for one to get hit despite coons constantly crossing.

I'm talking about taking out 100,000 coons or better....plus another 50 or 75K possums....... and y'all are telling me about the 10 you saw on the side of the road over 3 or 4 month time period

I use to be able to kill 20-30 a year at the house just by waiting on my curs to tree them when they get out every night. We may kill 10-12 a year now. I could kill 20 in a couple of nights at the club turning them out on the corn piles. 30-40 wouldn’t be tuff for me in a year some would be a lot more difficult.

There may actually be more possums taken out than that......I've always caught them at about a 1:1 ratio with coons when I've trapped but other folks may have different results

I’m just telling you what I could have done. Nothing more. I believe the coon population is out of control and some serious thinning is needed.

In the majority of the state I agree. We probably have 30-40 on our 500 acre lease. That’s a lot and does major damage to a nesting season.

I'm not doubting you guys on the coon numbers you see, but I can tell you that we don't have anything like that on our place. I started trapping as a kid with my dad and grandfather back in the early 70s and just can't help but looking for critter sign when out on the farm. I don't see any more sign now than I did back then. The last time I set out traps a few years ago I think I caught 6 coons, along with various other varmints. That was running around 30 traps for 5 nights. I don't think I could catch 20 coons there if I kept out traps the whole season.

Of course, I don't feed deer and the coons have no reason to congregate on our place. Could it be that the corn is attracting the coons from a wide area around you?

CNC, if you are gonna dream, why not make the dream bigger? Why not include other management practices in the plan to earn an earlier turkey season? How about anyone who conducts a prescribed burn on 20 acres or more also qualifies? Let the landowner or leaseholder list a helper for every 20 acres so that folks not in a club or who don't own land could still participate? There will already be some documentation of the burns with the burn permits, so this would be an easier job for the dcnr than collecting coon tails.

You gotta know that there is no chance of getting any of this approved unless Chuck gets something out of the deal. Documenting either practice and issuing the permits would mean extra work for them, so it's gotta have a fee tied to it. The question is, how much would it have to be for the dcnr to consider it and would that be an amount that hunters would be willing to pay?

I don't know what it would take, but they have decided that an alligator is worth $250. Would an earlier week of turkey season be worth that? I don't know; a lot of people are enjoying the early season without paying anything. I guess you could also use that as a selling point - they would not only get the $250, but could also write a bunch of tickets for folks that hunt early without getting the permit.

You need a catchy name for it too. Maybe call it the Early Season Turkey Privilege License.

I think that what gobbler is mentioned would be better. Put fire on the ground and create habitat.

Then again there seems to be a bitterness about growing seasons burns so I give up.

What about……….”Special Opportunity Bird”……..stick with the theme they already have going……

Not that I think we need to have any more fees but there’s already the $25 fur trapping fee that is in place……Anyone that was getting paid to trap or getting paid for tails would have to buy one under the current setup

What's the plan to make that happen?

Let me ask you this question PCP……….Let’s just say hypothetically that the DCNR would actually implement such and let folks start a week early for 20 coons………What percentage of turkey hunters do you think would participate??

So best I could tell you would need about 9% of the turkey hunters to participate to get to 100,000 coons right? I guess that would be doable. I wouldn’t think you would get much more participation than that. I couldn’t find any info on the estimated Coon poplulation in Alabama. Any idea?

The info I found said 72,000 turkey hunters though that seems like a lot. You would need 5,000 hunters to participate to equal 100,000 coons and however many possums that got you for free.

As far as the total coon population……I think it would be tough to put a real number on that…..If you wanted something to measure to determine if the incentive was successful then monitoring any change in the avg nesting success rate over the next 5 or so years may be the easiest way.

From the things I’ve read I believe avg nesting success rates are around 25% give or take……of course fluctuating from year to year…….with coons typically ranking #1 for nest predation. If you increased that to an average of 30%........how much would that impact the turkey population over the next 5-10 years??

Y'all going to keep talking about all these raccoon population explosions and trapping, and before long there will be a BanditCheck and new permit privilege fee.

It wouldn’t help our area at all. We already trap so it would actually have the potential to hurt our population due to the extra week of hunting.

My research said 60k turkey hunters in 2021 but that was the only number I found in my quick look. I’m guessing most of those are not dedicated turkey hunters. Getting 5k hunters to trap 20 coons might be a stretch. I’m gonna trap my 20 and sell the other 40-50 to cover my cost and time for trapping. 😂

Like any "government incentive" program, I am probably against it. Just goes against my grain to have the government spending my $$ to get someone to do what they should be doing anyway. I used to be on several committees in reference to these incentive programs. I slowly got dis invited over time because I was always to one who asked "shouldn't the first question we ask is not HOW we do this program but SHOULD we do this program"?

Since CNC didn't like my first estimate, lets be conservative. Again, there is 23,000,000 acres of forest land in AL. Lets take a lower estimate of a coon per 15 acres. That's 1,533,333 coons. Killing 100,000 would be 6.5% of the coons - still a drop in the bucket.

That would be 43 coons per sq mile for every sq mile……….PCP said he caught 6 last time he trapped. You’re using numbers from studies done in farming country…….but lets go with your estimate anyways……If coons are responsible for 30% of nest mortality which is a low end estimate…..some studies show them as high as 50%.......and you take out 6.5% of the coon population……Then that would equate to a roughly 2% increase in average nesting success rate…….Let’s say we take 1000 hens that would give us an extra 20 successful nests……If we say that each nest had 10 eggs then that would produce an extra 200 birds per 1000 hens……. This doesn’t even take into account the fact we’ve likely taken out just as many possums with the incentive.

I’d still like to see more Prescribed Burn Associations set up. We need one in SW AL

I honestly have no idea now. Twenty years ago I thought I knew what was going on in the state, but now I don't have a clue. I think a very high % of the people interested enough to do it are already hunting early. And they are paying nothing and enjoying more without any competition. I don't think any of them will participate.

I don't believe there are that many hunters with the land and opportunity to catch 20 coons. I don't believe I could do it. Or maybe the only way I could would be to start feeding corn and draw a bunch in. I might give it a try, but feel sure I would fall short. I'd be all over it if I could qualify by prescribed burning and would be glad to help get others qualified too.


I think there is zero chance of getting it done without a hefty fee involved. You have gotta make it appeal to Chuck, and money is only thing that will do that. Maybe you can think of other ways to qualify besides burning or coons. The more money it will raise, the more likely it will work. Offer him a chance to make a lot of money and he might listen.

That works on paper CNC, but just because the coons don’t kill the nests, doesn’t mean that those nest will be successful. It would definitely help, but those aren’t real world results. The reduction in coons will result in less nests raised by coons, but that doesn’t mean the poults will survive.
I know that killing coons helps. I’ve seen the results. But you will still lose some of those poults to other things.

I don’t think we need a government incentive to trap, nor do I think we need a government incentive to manage property for timber production. Many of the NRCS programs are detrimental to turkey and wildlife production in general. Clear cut, establish fire breaks, burn, spray chemicals to suppress growth of anything that would compete with pines until they get established, plant pines close enough together that they shade out all undergrowth after just a few years. Let the landowner pay for trapping, burning and timber establishment if that’s what they want. Take the government out of the equation and there’ll be turkeys and timber scattered all over the state instead of thousands of acres of monoculture pine desert. Trapping helps, burning helps, thinning helps, food plots help as well as other things, but it needs to be done on a voluntary basis. I’m surprised no one has mentioned the huge increase in the last 20 years in the spreading of chicken litter on farm and pasture land across the state. Maybe we could get the government to incentivize Alabama farmers for not using chicken litter or force them to sell it to other states.

I agree……..What seems to happen is that avian predators have years where they have an abundance of primary prey (rodents) associated with heavier rain totals that results in less predation on turkey poults…….These are the years where additional nest success would have a greater impact. You would have to look at it at least over a 5 year time span.

Look, in reality trying throw out numbers like this to predict just how much impact such an incentive would have is pie in the sky bullchit at the best you can do. You can try and estimate it but you’re not truly gonna know until you implement it and even then it’ll be tough to isolate one variable and quantify its impact. At the end of the day though I think it would be highly likely that such an incentive would have positive impacts if there was enough participation and very, very unlikely for it to have any negative ones. Something it would do for sure is take away two less things people have to bitch about moving forward……starting the season earlier and trapping more predators. Anyone who complains about the season dates would have a way to solve that. We can talk about burning and creating habitat but there will still be hundreds of thousands of acres of land that will never see fire, such as timber company land, that could benefit from trapping.

Here's the numbers for coon trapping in the past to give some perspective on taking out 100K coons.........I dont recall why I circled those few years

Here's turkey harvest numbers if you want to try and draw any correlation between the two. I think that's why I was circling the increase in coon trapping numbers......We also saw a jump in turkey harvest numbers at the same time period......You can also see that during the early 90's when trapping numbers fell off so did turkey harvest numbers.......

The circle on this chart is decoys being legalized.

This mythical place does not exist in the south. Y’all can keep saying it over and over - but it’s not a real thing. Look around when you are driving, get a grasp of how big 40 acres actually is, and reconfigure your mindset on “thousand acre desert”. This is false propaganda.

Yea, thats not the way statistics work And that is also the problem with something as complex as nest predation and predator removal. Again I am a BIG proponant of nest predator control..... on managed land..... intensive......NOT subsidized by taxpayers.
One study that is as good as you can get is this one
https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/thornton_ryan_p_200308_ms.pdf
INTENSIVE predator removal looking at quail nesting success. On one treatment site they removed a predator per 10 acres and saw nest success increase from 35% to 53%, pretty good but one predator per 10 acres removed! Removing 100,000 coons would roughly equate to one coon removed per 230 acres... drop in the ocean.
The other treatment site removed a predator per 13 acres the first year and one predator per 7 acres the second year and saw nest success go from 45% to 50%. Very little change for a HUGE effort.
https://www.talltimbers.org/images/pubs/QuailCallsp05.pdf#:~:text=From%202001%20and%202003%2C%20Wildlife%20Services%20personnel%20removed,average%2036%25%20to%20a%203-year%20average%20of%2058%25.
Most of these places are removing at least a predator per 20 acres or less, usually with a trap per 20 acres or more for months at a time and typically 70% of the catch is coons and possums. This is also with intensive managed habitat for birds, a high density of birds and there is measurable results.
All this intensive predator removal and they STILL have pretty high predation rates!

Of those 1,000 hens on maybe 25,000 acres - a good density, lets say 60% nested, thats 600 nests. Increase nest success from 25% to 27% by predator removal. That would be 150 hatched nests without predator removal, 162 hatched with predator removal. 12 more hatched nests would be an additional 120 poults. Both groups would experience over 80% mortality so the additional 120 are now 24 additional poults that make it to flight stage. That would equate to roughly 12 jakes and 12 jennys. That would equate to roughly 6 additional gobblers on 25,000 acres, or roughly an additional gobbler per 4,200 acres. An increase to be sure but not sure one anyone would notice. And thats if there were no compensatory mortality - a poor assumption. Again one of the reasons I would be against it - emptying the ocean with a bucket. It gets diluted fast.

Edit that, 1,000 hens per 25,000 would be exceptional. Realistically, thats a good turkey population. 1,000 hens per 50,000 ac would be more like it so half all my numbers. Ending up with an additional gobbler per 8,400 acres

That's not how statistics work......remember??? I think we can all agree that those numbers being thrown around are mostly just BS and in no way truly relevant. Just like the number your attaching onto the 100,000 coons as being 1 for every 230 acres......That's not at all accurate for how coons would actually be taken out

Y’all want to try and make the case that we shouldn’t do it because its wont solve every issue across every county……as if there is one solution that will. You’re wanting to strictly go with creating habitat as being the one size fits all remedy even though there will likely be far less places where that will have an impact than the trapping incentive……..places like Jackson Co for example……Fire will likely never have a major impact across that county but trapping could.

The fact is that it WILL make a difference in some spots and some it wont……It will be just one measure taken to help improve things in areas where other options are not feasible. There are also more things to consider than just data and studies…….Being that it WILL have at least some positive biological impact, I think its also then fair to look at what impacts it will have on hunter satisfaction…….and a lot of hunters have stated that they want to start the season earlier again and they want more trapping to occur. Both of which this addresses…...This idea that habitat is going to fix everything is only catering to the high rollers and snubbing its nose as the "little guys" who lease hunting club land.

I’ll throw this out there one more time too since it seems to get hazed over…….Its simply using “data” to cherry pick what you like and what you don’t when you scrutinize “the numbers” of an trapping incentive to this degree while corn baiting and decoys are legalized without numbers even being questioned. Why does one have to produce numbers showing it to be the end all cure all solution while the others don’t have to show anything concerning negative impacts??.....Just using common sense will tell you that the potential chances for negative impacts of those last two are far greater than any trapping incentive. This is just agenda driven decision making.

Hell, the season and limit changes had no data with it either. For the record, I was opposed to those, baiting and decoys, not just because they had no data to back it up. Didn't figure the baiting and decoys had ANY upside and potential downside for turkeys and the limit changes because it wouldn't make a difference.
Ill throw this out there again as well. Lets say I am an exclusive coon hunter and thats all I care about. Public land or private, why would I want my license dollars to go towards a bounty on the critter I choose to hunt. Same for the bird watchers, animal lovers, hikers who use our public lands - you think there would be ANY public support for it?

The amount of $$$ going toward funding this is virtually nothing……Since this is hypothetical anyways lets just go ahead as say that the cost to receive in coon tails is going to be covered by a private grant.

As far as the other users of the resource……..The state would simply be taking measures to help moderate coon populations through trapping and strike a better balance between their numbers and other species like turkeys,quail, and song birds since the coon hunters arent accomplishing that on their own. The incentive is in no way trying to eradicate the species but rather just better control population numbers that have likely been over inflated and pushed beyond carrying capacity due to legalized baiting. This is no different than what we do with controlling deer populations.

Sounds like a government employee



Where do I go to turn in my deer tails?

https://game.dcnr.alabama.gov/Game/Deer

I think you’re being a little stubborn now Gobbler and showing very little flexibility to see this any other way but your own.

Serious question CNC, you ever been in sales?

Ahhhh My MO

(and I usually provide references for the numbers I use)

Kinda I guess……I worked at a pool store from age 17-20 and part of my job was selling swimming pools……

Why?.......Do you feel like I’m over selling the incentive idea and don’t know when to stop because I’ve won the argument or made the sale???

No but you have a lot of attributes that make a good salesman. You research and know your product. You come up with outside of the box solutions to problems. And you (seem) to take it personal when a customer doesn’t take your solution as his own. And when he doesn’t take it as his own, you present the same solution you in a different way to help him understand why it is the best solution for him.
Sometimes you don’t know when to stop, but that’s a good salesman attribute as well, sometimes.

I'd venture to guess that CNC had the highest percentage of original threads to go 10+ pages. When he latches on to something there ain't no letting go for a while. We need 257 back to moderate some of his semantics

Lol, whereas YOU always maintain an open mind and carefully consider each possibility and reject one only because it wouldn't work.

So please tell us - why did reject the idea of adding burning to your incentive program? I'm sure you know that would do far more to produce more poults than collecting coon tails.

You know I am just joking with you, CNC. It's impressive that you have kept interest going in the turkey forum all the way to June.

I think getting any sort of incentive program that gives some participants an earlier season is extremely unlikely; there is no precedent for it that I have ever heard about. There is precedent for actually paying landowners for prescribed burning. The nrcs still has programs that pay for burning as part of longleaf pine regeneration, but they used to pay for burning under the WHIP program that was entirely for the benefit of wildlife. The forestry commission also administered programs that seemed to cover burning for any reason.

The peak time for those programs was in the range of 2000 to 2010. It might not be a coincidence that was also the peak time for turkey harvest in AL. At any rate, why would you reject burning as part of your incentive program? That's a practice we know can produce poults.

I’d have to understand more about what we’re talking about here first……..

Who all are we talking about paying to burn??........How many acres??.......What is the cost??........Are you talking about reimbursing every landowner who strikes a match??

I saw this Saturday while planting beans on the Trace

Cartervj, hopefully they just hatched and are doing fine. But it don’t look good lol

Lot of things eat the egg shells

I wasn't talking about paying anyone; just offering the same deal for burning that you were gonna offer for coons. That is, burn at least 20 acres and you get to hunt early. I'm not sure if you have defined the specifics, and there seems to be confusion about that. Some here seem to think you want the dcnr to pay money for coon tails, but that was never your proposal, was it? Maybe I'm the one who misunderstood. I thought your proposal was 20 coon tails let you start hunting a week earlier. Or maybe 3/15. Did you define it?

Anyway, what I was saying was why not let 20 acres burned = 20 coon tails?

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.

The truth is there will be no new system unless it generates revenue.

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.

That's the reason I said originally that you would have to include a hefty fee with whatever you proposed in order to even get them to consider it. I don't think it very likely that any sort of early season like CNC imagines could ever happen, but I think the chances are zero unless there is a hefty fee that will make dcnr some money. I've been paid for prescribed burns a number of times. I had to take pictures and submit the paperwork, so the documentation requirement is on the landowner.

But whether you are receiving pictures or coon tails, it would take manpower on the part of the dcnr to handle their end, so money would have to be involved.

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

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.

Burning isolated 20acre patches in areas where no other burning was occurring would likely do more harm than good. You create an island for predators to hammer when you do that.

Let me ask you this hypothetical question PCP.........If there weren't any predators, would habitat really matter?

I’ll speed this up and just skip to the point I’m gonna eventually make… ….Turkeys can exist across a much broader range of habitat types than just “burned prairie” IF you give them a little relief from predators and don’t do things to exacerbate the situation…..……The higher the predator populations climb, the more important prime hiding acres become……The lower the predator population the more turkeys are able to utilize the rest of the landscape. Same with deer. We've done a number of things though over the decades to tilt the balance more and more in the favor of the predators.

I use Jackson Co a lot as an example because of personal experience hunting there as kid……but you also look at how turkey populations have done really well in such areas as these without extensive fire being used to see that burn regimes arent the only ecosystem where turkey are able to thrive …….It may be that all of those hollers and closed canopied rocky ridges are giving them ample cover from above already but due to the habitat type the turkeys may tend to nest in the “bottoms” and nest predators like coons may be playing a much larger role in limiting population growth than is avian predators…….That's a possibility and in that situation trapping would have far greater impacts than trying to modify the landscape with burning

I mean no offense but this idea that burning will solve everyone’s problem seems very narrow in scope and vision. It is ONE avenue for change in a scenario where there needs to be several enacted.

This ties right back into something I’ve been pondering over and I may have just answered it…….It’s highly likely that baiting being legalized has had a disproportionate impact from one area to the next due to the differences in all the other variables at play. I couldn’t figure it out though……But……I think now it may have disproportionately greater impacts in areas where nest predation was already the main limiting factor for population growth.

Maybe I missed it, but what does the percentages on the map represent?

I think he's being a little stubborn now and showing very little flexibility to see this any other way but his own.

It's the change in the numbers of birds killed this year compared to 4 years ago.......There's more details in this other thread. Some counties have been on a 4 year decline

http://www.aldeer.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=3910240&page=2

Between coons, possums, yotes, fox, snakes, ants, dogs, hawks, owls, rats, etc..... its impossible to imagine what would be with no predators and just as impossible to get there. BUT, I would say that without coons, there would still be nearly the same predation rate as there is now. Something else would take it's place.
To answer, habitat would still matter without predators. Not nearly as much and, yes, turkeys would explode with the CURRENT habitat conditions. You can see the importance of each, however, by imaging that there would be plenty of turkeys without predators in our current environment (suitable habitat). But there would be NO turkeys without habitat regardless of the predators. For example, take 100,000 ac sized area with creeks and roads, etc but 100,000 acres of closed canopy mature hardwood forest and no predators = no turkeys. Same if there were 100,000 acres of 7 year old pines at 600 trees per acre = no turkeys.

Something to keep in mind about those numbers on the map is that you cant attribute all of the change or lack of change to one single factor…..For example, we’ve had two years of record rainfall during this time period which has an impact on rodent populations and likely gives turkey poults some relief from avian predators……This could very likely be why we’ve seen a big spike in kills this last season……At the same time though, increases in coon populations could be having a negative impact and negating some of that increase…….So like the -19% decrease in Jackson Co…..That very well could have been -30% or more if the last few seasons would have been dry and avian predators keyed in on them more........In other words, the positive change in weather could be propping up the population over this time period and not yet showing just how much impact the baiting will have long term. That could very well be where we’re headed when the next downward swing in rainfall hits. I'm just using that as an example of how there's more than one factor at play with those numbers......

Here's another way of looking at that…….I’m simply posting the chart below to show the pattern at play on it…….That up/down pattern tends to be how most of these variables play out over time…..If you’ll notice our kill totals follow the same up/down pattern but long term is showing a slow decline where as this chart is showing a slow incline. The baiting impact may not be fully showing itself yet because we are in one of these upward swings due to environmental factors at play……

Taking that same concept a little further about the numbers on that last map…….I have an idea for why that big swath of southern counties may be seeing those big increases………

It seems pretty obvious that turkey kills are following the same up/down patterns that temps and rainfall do……likely lagging a couple years behind. I’m guessing its probably rainfall and its impact on rodent populations and in turn the impact that has on avian predators preying on poults.

Soooo, we pretty much all saw the same record wet pattern statewide a couple/three years ago. That should mean that everyone saw relief from avian predators during that time period……What I’m thinking is that the numbers on that map may also be showing us just how much of an impact avian predators were having in those southern counties. The record rainfall removed a lot of avian pressure and those areas really responded since that was a major limiting factor for population growth…….

Other counties, again like Jackson or Cleburne were not being as limited by avian predators and therefore the “relief” didn’t matter nearly as much…..The little amount of relief combined with the increase in nest predation due to baiting being why they saw a decline during this same time period.........maybe......possibly.......something to that effect is happening.

I have gotta believe that you have never done any burning if you believe that. Most of the burning I've done is with 20 to 30 acre patches, though I will usually burn several of them in a year. I think your statement could possibly be true if you burned 1 acre plots, but I have found 20 acres to be plenty big.

But actually, I just pulled the 20 acres number out of thin air to come up with a figure to pair with your figure of 20 coon tails. And I might also point out that you pulled your number out of thin air as well.

I am trying to HELP your proposal, not tear it down. For it to happen, you have gotta sell it to 2 groups. The first is the dcnr biologists, though in actuality that is just Chuck alone. Convince him and it doesn't really matter what those under him think. And the 2nd group is the CAB. I don't think they will go for a plan that gives extra benefits to coon trappers but leaves out the people who are actually doing things to produce poults. There's a lot of those people who have a lot of political influence, and from what I know of the process, I think they would be considered.

To have any hope of getting it done, I think you have to make the most people happy that you can. Pitting trappers against the people who are spending large amounts of money to produce turkeys doesn't seem like a recipe for success to me. But good luck with it

>>>I mean no offense but this idea that burning will solve everyone’s problem seems very narrow in scope and vision. It is ONE avenue for change in a scenario where there needs to be several enacted.<<<

Let me respond to this too, CNC. I absolutely agree; burning is just one part of a good plan. If you are going to put together an incentive plan that would let some hunters start before others, then I agree that it should include as many practices as possible. I thought that was the argument I was making? Just allowing hunters to qualify for the incentive through coon tails is too narrow, and burning is a practice that I have found very effective and relatively easy to document. I think I said somewhere in this thread to look for some other practices to include.

But I will also add this - I've found burning to be a practice that has always been beneficial to turkeys in some way, no matter what kind of burn it is. Whether understory, site prep, or young longleaf, the turkeys always seem to use it and benefit. I think burning fits in nicely with coon trapping in that I don't think either practice is ever likely bad for the turkeys. The only good coon is a dead coon, and burned land makes happy turkeys.

The thing about including other practices into the proposal is that many are very site specific. Cutting all the timber on a tract of land can be disastrous for turkeys, virtually eliminating them from using the site after a couple of years. But cutting SOME of the timber can be an essential part of a good management plan. So how can you write that into a proposal like this? I don't know how to do that without making it very complicated. Maybe someone else can help with it.

PCP.........All I know to say to all of this political stuff is..... Hmmmmmm

I think I may be onto something with that last set of ramblings........Just check out the main habitat types dominating the areas associated with decline and the main types dominating the areas associated with an increase.......

These pictures suck but go to your own Google Earth and match things up and it makes sense........

Decrease.........






Increase...........

Here’s the basis for what I’m talking about……..Variables like rainfall are the beginning for what can be a chain of cause and effect events. The easiest way to see how these things play out are when they occur at “extremes”……For example, when there’s an extreme spike in rainfall then its easier to see the effects stick out several links down the cause/effect chain because they are likely to occur in an extreme as well. We just came through a record wet period so you would expect to see other large effects tied to it…….

Just like in extreme south Alabama……Looking at Google Earth actually makes it easy to see because you’re basically looking at it from an avian predator’s point of view………..There’s very little canopy cover. Its probably an avian predator paradise across a very large area. In years when rodent numbers are down poults probably get hammered across this region. But when there’s a rodent boom……then there’s a rodent BOOOM!!!!.....and poults see a lot pressure taken off of them temporarily. Record rain would produce a record rodent boom which would produce record relief from avian predators and eventually down the line.....a really big spikes in kill numbers like we see.

I think canopy cover is probably a big variable at play here……When you have closed canopy it probably takes away a lot of the avian predators advantage and population growth becomes more limited by nest predation than aerial attacks. There’s probably much higher base rodent populations in those uncanopied areas as well.

And to be clear……I’m not saying that this is only playing out in this area……It is playing out to varying degrees in every county across the whole state……These are just the places where we can see it playing out the easiest because they are habitat “extremes”. If you look around the google earth map though at the whole state and match it up to that 4 year change map I posted…..it matches pretty dang well where areas with little canopy cover were the areas that benefited.

Burning is essentially creating “canopy cover” closer to the ground in areas where tree canopy doesn’t exist. I guess that’s something to think about when you start dropping fire……when is the best time to remove it?.......how much to remove??....etc……..Take all of those open cattle fields and switch them to a patch/burn graze system to get some "canopy" across some of it and you’re talking about making change……

This probably answers the question of why we've seen a steady increase in avian predator populations......We've been steadily opening up and exposing more acres of ground to them over the years.....cow pastures, hay fields, etc

Good Night! Could you provide ANY references that would support your argument. Talk about pulling ##'s out of your butt!



Same, Why OH Why would Jackson and Cleburne co's be exempt from avian predator pressure?? Yea, had to use the rolleyes, haven't used it since 49r



We have increased in forest land and decreased in open cow pastures, hay fields and ag lands. I can provide a reference if you wish



I agree

Quit feeding the chimpanzee, and he will quit throwing chit at you

Most all studies on rodents show their populations linked to rainfall……I don’t know that any have been done specifically in Alabama but you can pick and choose for yourself which one you want to disagree with.



If you’ll read it again you’ll see that it said “not as limited”……..meaning not effected as much…….instead of “exempt” as you choose to mischaracterize it. The way y’all choose to purposely take things out of context is very telling.



Post up your study about land use if you want but if avian predators are increasing then it would only stand to reason that their main food sources are as well. There's certainly no shortage of open land no matter how you want to label it.

Its pretty apparent that "what's best for turkey" is taking a back seat to what's best for everyone's personal agenda.

Most everything is linked to rainfall and mostly positive correlation. The problem is you always take it 2 or 3 degrees more without supporting data, in this case linking avian predation and poults to both rainfall and rodent populations as if increased rainfall is responsible for higher poult survival because of higher rodents populations. Might be true but it may also be that higher rodent populations cause higher nest predation rates or more rainfall cause increased insect populations increasing poult food supply or better nesting cover increasing nest success or better cover for poults while they are feeding increasing survival...........





OK, Why OH why would Jackson and Cleburne co's be not as limited from avian predator pressure??





"For instance, agricultural lands have decreased by about 27% while timberlands and urban lands have increased by about 8% and 13% respectively from 1972 to 2000 [6]. Within the timbered landscape, hardwoods constituted the highest in the 1970s; however, recent timberland outlooks show that softwoods have increased relative to hardwoods [7]."

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/14/2/171



Agendas here? Didn't realize I had an agenda

You slay me……..One minute you say I’m pulling chit out of my butt and the next minute suddenly it seems feasible after I explain it. Maybe you should give it more thought before slamming what I post

Do you have a link to the Tall Timbers research on alternative prey sources??........I believe I remember you quoting yourself where they found higher levels of rodent populations equating to lower levels of predation on poults. It would stand to reason that this would be something that would swing back and forth over time as rodent populations went up and down





Couple of reasons why they may not see the same rate of avian mortality…….The first being that those close canopied hardwoods probably don’t support the same levels of rodent populations as open grassland to begin with……therefore you likely don’t have as many avian predators per sq mile or whatever unit of measurement you prefer……..Secondly, the avian predators likely don’t have the same ease of hunting in closed canopied hardwoods as they do in open rangeland. There is limited visibility from the air and much shorter lines of sight which likely means less efficiency in comparison. If this isnt true then explain the dynamics of how an area like Jackson Co has such a thriving turkey population…..or has in the past.

You know you put yourself in a tough position to ever be able to accept anyone else’s ideas as being correct when you phrase your questions in such a condescending manner. Maybe after someone explains it and you give it some more thought it begins to make more sense to you but you’ve already put yourself in the position of having to admit you were being an ass in order to get there. You could avoid these hurdles in the future by changing the tone of your posts but it’s however you want to do it……

These dive bombers clean up as many young birds as coons and fire ants (Can’t touch this)

Not only does CNC argue until the end of time, he tells you how you should argue back. 🤣🤣🤣

Who's arguing??.......We're just debating ideas.

Well dang......I guess Gobbler took his ball and went home.......Some days I miss Ol' 257 around here.

I bet there’s already a chart like this somewhere but this is the basic food pyramid that I figure supports bobcats, hawks, and owls…….rodents being the foundation. Manipulate that foundation and you’re going to create a ripple effect. Mother Nature already does this but I suspect that we do numerous things to the landscape to impact it as well.

This is what I would guess the population levels look like over time. The reason the raptors don’t follow the same valleys and peaks being that they switch to other prey sources to supplement their diet. Really I don’t think its so much that they “switch” per se but rather a function of there just being so many more or less targets in any given year. You would have to think that actual rodent numbers are on a much different level than everything else. So its kinda like you either have say 100 turkey poults per sq mile scattered in amongst 10,000 rodent targets or 50,000 depending on if we’re coming out of a drought year or a record rainfall year. Of course the turkey poult number is going to fluctuate some too but the real fluctuation number that matters is the rodent…..(and maybe tweety birds with specific hawk species).

That kinda makes it sound like more rodents would be better but I think that’s likely only true over a short time period. If you increase the rodent population long term you’ll likely have increases in over all predator populations eventually follow assuming they arent constrained by anything else like “territory” or nesting habitat. Again keeping in mind that we are also doing things along the way like burning, bailing hay, etc to create minor flushes of rodents during different time periods. I really think you could use that concept to your advantage......or possibly disadvantage, which may be what we're doing by flushing a bunch of targets well before poults are even born

I found this study on bobcats done back in the 70’s on Alabama quail plantations. It shows the cotton rat being their main prey. I’m guessing that this is our main rodent specie driving the cycle with hawks and owls too.


https://seafwa.org/sites/default/files/journal-articles/MILLER-100-111.pdf

"Rodents as a group, and the cotton rat in particular, occurred with greatest frequency and volume in the stomachs, large intestines, and scats analyzed (Tables 2,3, and 4). The higher frequency of occurrence of cotton rats in the scat analyses (Table 4) compared to the stomach and large intestine analyses (Tables 2 and 3) may be explained by the fact that all scats were collected on areas intensively managed for bobwhite quail, while some ofthe samples in Tables 2 and 3 were collected on adjacent woodlands. Cotton rats were also the most important prey in the combined analysis for each ofthe 12 months (Fig. I). Trapping efforts during the study indicated that the cotton rat was the most abundant rodent on the study areas (Table 5). This conclusion is also supported by data collected by Gilbert (1975) on the Bermingham area.

Simpson (1976) reported that certain quail management practices tend to increase rodent populations and that at high densities, cotton rats in particular could have a detrimental impact on quail populations. These impacts are manifested in several ways. Cotton rats can eat or otherwise damage roots of valuable quail food plants (Stoddard 1931). Direct competition for quail food can be serious, particularly since cotton rats can occur at densities 60 times greater than quail (Stoddard 1931, Komarek 1937, and Schnell 1968). Perhaps the most obvious impact of cotton rats is destruction of quail nests and eggs (Stoddard 1931, Simpson 1976). On one area in Georgia, nest destruction by rodents, of which cotton rats were the msot abundant species, accounted for destruction of 12 percent of the quail nests found; on the same area bobcats caused less than 0.4% of the total nest destruction (Simpson 1976).

The importance of cotton rats in the bobcat's diet in this study is apparent (Tables 2, 3, and 4),.and the consequences of this high rate of cotton rat consumption to quail populations should not be overlooked. Schnell (1968) concluded that a highly mobile predator population could be more important than food, weather, or social interaction in regulating cotton rat density. The rate of predation applied to cotton rats by bobcats on these study areas may actually benefit bobwhite quail populations".




Here's something I’ve mentioned several times in the past. We should likely be focusing more on “grass” management in these situations to lessen overall rodent populations.


Cotton Rat

https://www.tn.gov/twra/wildlife/mammals/small/hispid-cotton-rat.html#:~:text=Habitat%3A,materials%20under%20rocks%20or%20logs.


Habitat:
Occurs primarily in open fields or borders of fields with dense, grassy growth. Also, occurs along borders of agricultural fields and along roadsides. They build small nests of grasses, plant fibers, or other materials under rocks or logs. A system of runways is created as the rats move around in the soil and grass.

Diet:
Feeds primarily on plant material including stems, leaves, roots, and seeds of grasses and sedges, and domestic crops. However, they will occasionally eat crayfish, insects, ground-nesting bird eggs and chicks, and dead carcasses.

I’ll add this in there about rain and the impacts of it and other variables on these rodent population…….It’s very likely that it’s a more specific time frame that’s having an impact than just “annual” rainfall. It may be more like May-Aug that’s really dictating it. I’m guessing that it’s basically the impact of rain on grass and grain production…….Again, we can also impact grass and grain production with our management practices.

Something else I found interesting about that bobcat study is that turkeys weren’t even mentioned as being found at all in their scat. I don’t know if turkeys were much less prevalent back then or what…… I don’t think coyotes have been found to be a big threat. Something has to be killing adult turkeys though and if it isnt bobcats then it would really narrow it down to great horned owls and maybe eagles in some situations….. If that’s true then I’d be turning loose every bobcat I caught. They would simply be reducing the prey population for the other predators that do impact turkeys. Foxes may also fall right in line with this same idea although I bet they’re a little more prone to nest raiding.

First bobcat I trapped was caught with a half eaten turkey it had buried

I’ll have to see if I can dig up some more recent studies to see if they show turkeys being more prevalent in bobcat scat. You almost need to weigh the cost/benefit on this one to really see which one is worse…….a bobcat killing an occasional adult turkey or excess raptors wreaking havoc on poults. Another way of saying that is if bobcats are eating thousands of rodents that don’t go toward supporting raptor populations, then it may be worth the occasional loss of a bird here and there to leave them alone since raptors kill far more……It really just depends on how frequently bobcats kill adult birds. Great horned owls can apparently be pretty rough on them according to some of the literature......

There is the possibility that something else killed that turkey and the bobcat just came along and found it. One of the links I was reading said that great horned owls take the head off of grown turkeys…..I wonder if they just target and kill them then waste most of the bird…..I cant imagine them utilizing much more than a small portion of a grown turkey…..They could possibly just be mistaking the turkey’s head for prey

Here we go……...

https://www.newsarchive.msstate.edu...fe-research-tracks-mississippi-predators



"A 10-year study by Mississippi State University is yielding some surprises about the state's wildlife populations.

Between 1988 and 1998, the research team kept tabs on more than 400 animals, including coyotes, bobcats, gray fox, raccoons, and opossums. Leopold said the study's length, as well as the number and variety of animals involved, was unprecedented.

The wildlife specialists collected data on the animals' home ranges, habitat use, diet, mortality factors, reproduction, and interaction with other animals. Surprisingly, they found that neither the coyote nor the bobcat, Mississippi's two largest predators, dine regularly on wild turkeys.

"The research confirmed that the greatest threat to the wild turkey population is raccoons," Leopold said. "They feed on eggs and disrupt nests."

They also posted this……….

"The study also helped identify a solution to the raccoon threat to birds.

We found that controlled burning of woodlands populated by wild turkeys every three to five years helps improve sites as nesting areas for the birds," Leopold said. "The burning also makes the habitat less appealing to raccoons for hunting, reducing their threat to the turkey population."

Now……there’s way more to it than just that simple statement and this is the very conversation we’re currently having and brings us back full circle to the trapping incentive. There’s a much more complex dynamic at play across the landscape that includes rodents and raptors….especially if we’re talking about comparing Bullock Co to Jackson.

Just thinking out loud……it may sound odd but looking at what these studies are telling us…..If you have plenty of deer then I don’t know that I’d trap bobcats, coyotes, or foxes for the sake of trying to help turkeys……If you hit these three heavily then you’re likely shifting a whole lot of rodent food over to supporting larger avian predator populations……and they seem to have a much more significant impact on turkey populations than do those other three. A good happy medium may be to kill the yotes and turn the bobcats and foxes loose.

It's common to hear folks say that we need to wage all out war on every predator but unless you come up with another way of dealing with rodents then you really have no choice here but to pick your poison…….SOMETHING has to and WILL thrive off of the rodent populations that our landscape produces whether we choose to see that part of the equation or not……it still happens…..

Look at how we have the system set up now though…….We hammer dang near every coyote, bobcat, fox, snake we see, while rarely does a raptor ever get shot…..(and they shouldn’t)…….So raptor populations go virtually unimpeded while others are being suppressed……..That setup heavily favors the raptors. WE humans are helping to give them the advantage……

If we look at numerous studies and compare the numbers and we see that raptors heavily impact turkey numbers while bobcats only do so very sporadically…….then we’re better off to go with the cat form of “mouse control”. The maff on turkeys would appear to work out much better with them versus owls and hawks. Pick your poison.

OK throw and mow/tracker man , it's time to get yourself some professional help.

What I have seen since baiting became legal is a very healthy coon population. Coons come though the winter very fat and healthy after eating corn all winter. Legalized baiting has made corn feeders the norm in the woods and the raccoons congregate around them. Middle of February the free buffet ends and the coons disperse back over the landscape. Shortly after the turkeys start nesting. Shouldn't be a big surprise that the coons put a hurting on the turkey eggs. The question is "Does baiting inflate the raccoon population?" and "Does that effect the turkey population negatively?". I have not seen any study addressing these questions.

My personal opinion is there are more raccoons since baiting became legal and they are eating turkey eggs.

Man you ruined it! I was counting how many posts he was going to do in a row with no response 😂

It has to be a new record.

Here's another study I found showing slightly different results........It has racoons as being the top predator on turkey poults. One thing I noticed about this study is that they werent able to identify the cause for most of their mortality......only 33% was able to be identified. Keep in mind too that a lot has changed since the mid 80's so some of this probably needs to be taken with a little grain of salt.......

https://seafwa.org/sites/default/files/journal-articles/PEOPLES-448-453.pdf


"Mortality rates of wild turkey poults have been documented for several habitats (Glidden and Austin 1975, Speake 1980, Campo et al. 1984, Vander Haegen et al. 1988) and ranged from 69.8% (Speake et al. 1985) to 80% (Hon et al. 1978). However, poult loss in coastal plain pine forests may be greater than in other environments. Exum et al. (1987), for example, reported poult losses averaging 87.3% for a three year period in south Alabama. Additionally, Sisson et al. (1991) found mortality rates averaging 90% during his study.

Although poult loss rates have been described over a broad geographic area, information concerning specific mortality agents is limited to the Appalachian plateau of north Alabama. In that study, Speake et al. (1985) reported free-ranging dogs (Canis sp.) and raccoons accounted for 42% of the poult losses. Avian (16%) and reptilian (7%) predation was attributed primarily to broad-winged (Buteo platypterus) and red-tailed hawks (B. jamaicensis) and gray rat snakes (Elaphe obsoleta), respectively. In the southern coastal plain of Alabama, Exum et al. (1987) reported that mammalian and avian predation ac counted for 37.9% and 13.8% of mortality, respectively. "

I’m a little suspect of that last study the more I think about it. If you aren’t able to identify 66% of the mortality that you’re trying to count then the potential for bias is ripe in the 33% that you’re reporting on. I don’t know this to be the case but lets just say that maybe its easy to pick out coon mortality but much, much tougher to definitely say ones been killed by an avian predator. If that were the case then the numbers being reported would be heavily skewed. It could be that the vast majority of that unidentified 66% is avian mortality.