Don't take everything Chamberlain says too seriously; he certainly tends towards hyperbole in those podcasts. In one of them he described how gobblers just went crazy gobbling in unhunted areas, while they nearly shut up completely in the hunted areas. That was in the podcast he did with the Meateater guy a while back. You can find a link to it by searching this forum, but I don't think I have misrepresented what he said.

Apparently, he was basing that on a recording device they had on an unhunted area in SC. In the SC report, they had a graph that showed gobbles per day on the unhunted land vs hunted. They averaged around 11 on the unhunted and 8 on the hunted. It wasn't anything even remotely like what he described in the podcast. They had a lot of info in that report on the unhunted land, but strangely, nothing about how much higher the poult recruitment was on it. Does anyone really believe they didn't look at that? Of course they did, but it didn't support the agenda so it wasn't mentioned. That report was still used for all sorts of restrictions in SC.

So do 3 gobbles per day more lead to more poults? They have no idea. Chamberlain is on Twitter; you can ask him yourself. Forget about proving that starting turkey season too soon can hurt reproduction; they have no proof that legal spring hunting affects reproduction at all. I remain convinced that I what I learned at Auburn over 40 years ago is still true - spring gobbler hunting has no effect on turkey reproduction, with the possible exception of areas with very few turkeys. I think they should restrict those areas and leave the rest of us alone.

Gobbler, thanks for the links.