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……