A lot of truth there. Some things need better explanation I feel. This is based on my personal experiences since the 90s when I started chasing these things.

The biggest factor that bugs me is the shear number of hunters. What is the numbers of hunters compared to now, 5, 10, 15, 25 and 50 years ago. That is left off for some reason as if hunters are not having an impact. Sure we kill gobblers but hens are inadvertently killed and harassed too. The biggest impact I feel is hunters bumping hens off nest. Constant hunting pressure surely has an impact

Early 90s very few turkey hunters around these parts. Those old timers that did killed all those flying cats they could. Killed a lot of nest predators too. They loved chunking baited hotdogs etc…. Out and about. That stuff killed and killed and killed. I’m not advocating for. That in the least but that’s what they did. The fact is lower numbers of predators so populations probably exploded in the best habitats and i feel that explains exactly what I experienced in the 90s. Unreal numbers of turkeys.

Habitat as mentioned took a major hit around here. A lot of acres of cut timber at the same time. Thousands of acres and birds were easily killed in those cutovers. It’s thick now so that allowed things down. I darters to take pics day of my old stomping ground just for reference.

I’m seeing decent numbers rebound but still not nothing like it once was.

Something has happened across the south with regards to the numbers. It’s being reported all across the south

The only thing I know has happened is the shear number of hunters has increased 100 fold. Can’t deny that. Doesn’t matter if the same number of gobblers are being killed.
I personally think it’s the continued harassment of the flock and nesting hens being stressed during the season

There a no way to compare todays number of hunters that stay after them all day to the days when I started and or before. The need to post pics of the kill have far outweighed anything else.

It’s a shame what’s happened on youtube. Everyone is cashing in…… mossy oak is one of the worst offenders. THP, pinhoti are pimping. Woodhaven 100% sold out Alabama. What many have done can’t be undone and every turkey hunter is paying the price. And I’ll quit there

I just saw this and I’m glad you asked if I’d watched it. I’m agreeing with almost everything they’re saying. It’s funny that as you mentioned and they brought up as the population explosion so to speak. That may explain my personal experiences and southern Tennessees as well. The shear number of birds around, well is unbelievable. They mentioned harvest per acreage. No wonder no one believes what I’ve said. Jerry’s place with the trade splitting it would be 400ish acres. We killed at least 2 limits off that place every year from mid 90s to 2012-14 or so. The land around it saw as many killed. There is 9 mike air so Laing that bottom and most hunters killed their limit if not more than a limit. I’m talking around 20 hunters thru there.

No wonder it’s nothing like it was and I’ll admit that maybe I was completely spoiled. 😂

The 50% population decline being normal is also may be my experience and feel good that is considered normal. I’d never thought that to be the case.

Now I’m at the 50 minute mark and I’m also agreeing that too may gobblers killed too soon in the season could be detrimental

At the 1 hour mark is where Hunter sentiment wants a longer season when MS doe sin fact one of the earliest opening and longest. Also they’re very content with the season but lower the limit and days and you can see what happened here.


At the 1 hr 13 minute mark refers to hunter excitement with gobbling peak whichbis an overall better experience

MS said moved opening back from 18-20 to March 15 in 2005

At the end they got to the early successional and burning. Nesting in pasture in TN etc. all important stuff about increasing turkey poult etc…
That’s the best course of action.

I’ll add this Mississippi has a 3 bird limit and similar season. I could agree with that.


Thanks for prodding me to listen. I need that to adjust some beliefs I had.

Another thing that is maybe more important than anything. Hunter participation in data collection so real information can be used. I wonder the percentage of participation compared to Alabama. One of the most critical elements to making changes or not, needs accurate information/data from the participants.

Fire ants on eggs and poults?

they'll eat them alive in the shell , when they make that first peek in the shell if the ants find them they'll kill the whole nest . I'm sure they get turkeys eggs too . i know they'll run chickens off the nest and kill ever one .

Ok, thanks for the comments.

Glad you watched it and learned from it.

As I've told you before, I have never experienced hunting a place as good as yours was. It must have been a unique set of factors coming together at once to produce that. What we experienced in Perry county fits in very well with what they said about cycles. We got turkeys on the place in the mid 60s and had good hunting until the mid 80s. Then we didn't kill a turkey on the place from 84 through 89. We had enough to start hunting them again in 90 and have hunted it hard every year since. It's been consistent in producing turkeys ever since. Some years we have killed as many as 6, but I've never seen any indication of hunting having any effect on reproduction.

To be fair to Chamberlain, he might have said Mallards instead of ducks. Are mallards hunted during the mating season anywhere? I thought it was a comparison that didn't make much sense and have wondered why he said it.

Thanks to all for the comments and especially for the links. A good day to everyone!

I was referring to mallards mainly.

Mallards are usually paired up by the end of the season. It’s why the season “used to end” January 20 by federal law. It was pushed by hunters and the hunting industry in general to the end of January. Alabama usually ends theirs on the last Sunday of the month. Arkansas usually ends theirs on the last day of the month. Didn’t matter research had shown it was better to end it prior to the end of the month. From what I’ve been told by bios is they’re paired up on the return to the breeding grounds.

I see them paired up every year at the farm. My game cam will showing them paired up swimming together even though there is 15-20 in a group. Also will see those rogue drakes harassing the hens. Last week I had a pair that were acting broody for lack of a better word. The ducks I killed the last day were in twos and threes. The threes were two drakes and a hen otherwise they were paired up.

Most of the woodies I have pics of are paired up too

What that has to do with turkeys 🤷‍♂️

Auburn did a 4 year study about 12 years ago on Skyline. Our season got shortened not long after.

It has nothing to do with turkeys, except that I remember Chamberlain making some sort of comparison to indicate that maybe turkeys shouldn't be hunted in the mating season. But since I don't remember exactly what he said, everyone just disregard it.


I've not watched a lot of his videos, and most of them were linked from here, so did nobody else hear it?

I have killed only one mallard in my life so I never tried to learn much about them. I thought the drakes would breed multiple partners during a single mating season; is that not true? If it isn't, why are the limits designed to encourage hunters to kill the drakes? It looks like they should want them harvested in equal numbers if they have to pair up. Sorry for the OT question, but it looks like my original question has played out.

A good day to everyone; I am about to head to the lake and go fishing. Some have to work, some have to fish; we all gotta do our duty.
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Duck populations have a greater amount of males than females.

I’ve read that the mallards pair up but once they get to the breeding grounds if there is too many drakes they disrupt nesting. Basically the drakes will gang rape hens and cause problems with nesting.

Drakes have have higher bag limit. 4 in our flyway, some states it’s 1 or 2 hens.

We used to do a hen jar. Charge a dollar for each hen you shoot. When you teach 5 hens for the season it then goes to $5 a hen and so forth. We’d send the money collected to DU as a donation. I think they promoted it.

This is the interview with Craig Harper where he discusses the season changes and its impact on the nesting research. I don't think the final paper has been published yet but could be wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpJLKQBsB6w

This is the MS pub on the same
https://pdfhost.io/v/o8GD899.K_Cons...easons_in_the_Southeastern_United_States

Not defending Chamberlain but I think his comment RE ducks was something like "turkeys are the only gamebird species we hunt during breeding season. Imagine if we hunted ducks then" or something to that effect.

RE seasons (among other things) is Thank God for Mississippi! If they stay the same it will be the only southeastern State that didn't wilt under Chamberlains pressure and we can look if there is any better or worse effects of season changes. Chuck folded like a cheap pocketknife and is now Chamberlains Boy.

Also interesting that there is some data coming out that indicates that nesting success on SRS, an unhunted site in south Carolina, has lower nesting success than a nearby heavily hunted but well managed site in the same State. SRS also has a declining turkey population despite being unhunted.



Just FYI, what is happening to turkeys is NOT what happened to quail. Quail declined (and continue to decline) over decades of habitat change mostly related to more trees on the landscape and less fire. Also less small agriculture, possibly related to more predators. But it was slow and steady because it was habitat related primarily. Turkeys are declining (where they are declining) pretty quick. They are NOT declining everywhere - quail pretty much did decline everywhere. It is also not related to fire ants. They destroy less than 4% of nests in study after study.

Any studies on hunter impact on nesting hens.
Question I have relates to the last 30 years of chasing I’m seeing more and more turkey hunters. That can’t be denied.
Go back further and it’s even more dramatic at the increase.

This year had the most folks at the NWTF convention. I’d bet going backwards it’s a steep rise thru the years.

The LSU guy said a while back that they were starting a study on the question of hens abandoning nests after hunter disturbance. That might have been a couple years ago, so probably too soon to know. I would think that is going to be really difficult to get enough data to be very useful, but maybe they can. In his forum on OG, Lovett Williams said he was concerned that later seasons would cause this to happen a lot and make the season shift counter-productive. But he didn't have a FB army, so everyone ignored him and went with the theory of the Guru.

Thanks for all the info, gobbler! I wondered what you thought of the idea that it's just normal to have a population decline some 20 years after restocking? That theory seemed like common sense to me the first time I heard it, and it also lined up with my own anecdotal observations.

It seems normal to think that it takes predators a while to figure out how to raid turkey nests and even catch turkeys. They don't write books or have Internet access, so all they can do is pass on to their offspring a hunting method that worked for them. That's bound to take a lot of time and many generations - 20 years sounds reasonable.

That's also what we saw at our farm. We got turkeys in huntable numbers around 1965 and the population was good for about 20 years. It was never anything like what Carter and others saw in North AL, but we always had turkeys. The population took a big dive in the mid 80s, but rebounded in the early 90s and has been stable since.

Most of us learned it in wildlife management at AU Restocked populations rose quickly to high levels then dropped off, rose again but not as high and went up and down normally after. Gulsby and Lashly have discussed this as well and they seem to see the same - 20 years after restocking - on nearly every state.

One other thing, Carter - I know our experience is different and we form opinions based on our own experience. I don't doubt that there are more hunters than it used to be in many places. I am just gonna have to see some hard evidence that spring hunting makes any significant effect on the population.

Anyone who was there will agree with me, but hunting on the Coosa wma in the 80s and 90s just couldn't have been more crowded. Getting to work a turkey by yourself bordered on impossible. Main roads would have a truck every few hundred yards, every side road had a truck parked at it. How many turkeys were killed is unknown, but they killed every one they possibly could. And every year the turkeys were still there and still gobbling. It doesn't take many gobblers to breed the hens.

If there's more hunters, so what in regards to turkey numbers. I don't believe that there is any place today with more pressure than the Coosa, but that pressure didn't stop reproduction.