You do understand the concept of additive mortality though, right?

If you perceive a decline in the population yourself for whatever reason but hunters continue to shoot hens, surely you see that it could cause an issue over the long term...

Yep I understand 100%, when we had tons of birds, I killed 2 in 1 fall season. A couple years later all the birds simple disappeared, it happened here, wayne, county, and Giles where yekruts place is.

Now I hunt in Lewis and Murray co.

And given time, I bet Lewis and Murray will see a decline. It may not be as bad as what Giles and Wayne has been, but their populations do cycle.

We have to quit talking about what once was. I get sick to my stomach and start dry heaving.

bunchofhenkillingbastages........

the old man that taught me turkey hunting would crawl out of his grave and break both my legs for shooting hens.....

You think it was natural yek?

No. Natural would be a gradual decline I would think..... Not one year they are here the next they are not.

My thoughts exactly.

I really think it is just population cycles. We had ten or so years with great numbers, and now we are at the bottom of the cycle. If a major disease outbreak had came through I think that someone would have found piles of dead birds, or at least the reminants. We all just got used to the big numbers, but hopefully this is the bottom of the cycle and numbers will start to improve and level out to normal numbers. We may never see the numbers we have had in the past though.

Man I don't know Demp those turkeys fell off quick. If there were enough yotes all of the sudden to wipe out that many turkeys we would have been reading stories about them snatching toddlers off of folks porches
A friend of mine who owns land on the Giles/Lincoln line swears to this day that the Tennessee DNR trapped a big winter flock of his turkeys and carried them off somewhere else. His place is coming back good now, but it took a bad hit about 5 years ago.

Brent, we all thought the same thing, but there is no way to trap off as many birds as we had and no one know about it. My places are big enough that the birds probably rarely ever had to leave them and I know that they didn't trap on us. I am pretty good friends with a couple of the higher ups in TN and they gave me dates on the last trapping done within 5 counties of me at the time and it was years before since they had trapped any out. I believe those guys on that part. We never kill yotes, don't see them, don't even hear them like we did years ago growing up. If I see a yote a year up there I am doing good. I wish I had a good idea, but the more I study it, hear others talk, the more confused I get. A die off is all I can make myself believe. Disease, poison, something that spread like the plague in the off season when most hunters were not in the woods to see the feathers. My winter flocks were 200+ on one farm, now they are 10-20 tops