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There are 580,000 acres in Wilcox county and your chuckie check numbers correlate with there being 222 birds killed in Wilcox for the season. That's laughable. There were at least 11 killed on our managed deer cooperative which is just over 4800 acres. So youre trying to tell me that between me and my 4 bordering neighbors, we killed 5% of the total turkeys killed for all of Wilcox county. Heck, I heard another 8 or 10 shots that were just off the fringes of our co-op, so if all those were kills, then that's 20 or 21 total or 10% of the total birds killed in Wilcox came from just a single 5000-6000 acre block of woods. Im betting there were over 750 birds killed in Wilcox. Like I said laughable, just like the deer numbers. Nothing but a joke.

I agree that those numbers dont have to be 100% exact to be useful, but data that is 70-75% incorrect/wrong 222 kills versus 700-800 (or more), is absolutely useless.

I saw that last season in Alabama the reported numbers were a little more than 25,000 birds.

Indiana's DNR has been doing checks for about 10 years. They reported more than 12,000 birds in the 2021 season. Indiana sucks for turkey hunting.

There is no way that Indiana is half as good as Alabama in hunting.

The good news here if what I’m saying is correct about the timing of our use of fire being the culprit then that is not a difficult thing to change. All we have to do is educate folks on why they need to do their dormant season burning from Oct-Jan and you should have turkeys out the wazoo in some of these “fire counties” that are currently struggling in comparison to other areas of the state….30% swings are pretty drastic but if you can fix it then it should also be pretty drastic in the good direction too and at that clip it wouldn’t take long to have populations make a big rebound in some of these areas.....in theory.

BUT BUT BUT ... YOU CAN'T BURN DURING DEEEERRRRRRR SEASON!

YOU'LL RUN OFF ALL THE DEERS AND I CAN'T SHOOT MY 6-POINTER BEFORE THE NABOR SHOOTS IT!!!

Yeah, my very point about our reasoning behind the current timing for doing “dormant season burns”……You know March really isn’t the dormant season….neither is late Feb now.

You say that but I remember the ice storm in April...... but that was before global warming.

Marshall county

I know a man who knows a man that killed 14 this pat year I really dought theses were reported. Fed and feeding several families.

That second graph is a good example of how the yearly temps can vary but the trend gets warmer……You bring up a very good point. Late freezes may cause similar issues naturally, especially in north Alabama and be a culprit of some of the variation we see…..Meaning, if it gets cold enough after green up to really knock the vegetation back and reset it then it could have similar impacts on reproductive success as what I’m talking about with fire in getting the growth stage of the understory veg way out of synch with the turkeys raising young. We cant do anything about hard late freezes but we can do something about when we burn.

Something that I think may be causing a lot of the population trends we are likely seeing with turkeys in these burn counties is the fact that our burning efforts are probably flirting with a “don’t burn after this date” threshold each year. This year the green up switch flipped around Feb 16th or so…..I think you probably have a short window of maybe a week so or after that happens where you don’t really impact things much and then every week that goes by after before you burn you get the vegetation more and more out of synch and the more impact you have on that first hatching especially.



I think what may be causing the crazy fluctuations and gradual trends downward is the fact that this “do not burn after” date is following the same pattern as this graph I posted. On an annual basis it may be early this year and late next year…..AND the trend is that this date is moving forward.....couple that with the fact that we pushed the start date for when most folks burn back 10 days as well with deer season extention. Like I said earlier, a lot of this burning is done in a narrow time frame after deer season ends and exactly when it happens is dictated by the weather. In a nutshell I think what is happening is that this spring burning timing is bouncing back and forth on either side of this moving "do not burn" target from year to year....and gradually hitting on the wrong side of the line more and more....some wet years we may hit WAY on the other side of it......all this the reason for the gradual decline in these areas........In theory anyways......

There’s the potential for the late burning to be causing other issues…..I’ll say that to me it looks like late burning is the culprit but exactly what its doing to throw things off is more in question. Another potential option for what it could be doing in addition to disrupting green up timing is simply destroying nests…..and or disrupting the nesting process of a bunch of hens making them have to make last minute changes. They could be changing patterns ahead of nesting moving into good nesting areas and that suddenly gets badly thrown off by late burning……Again, not sure but it would sure be interesting to remove the variable of late burning….move the same burning back a few months and see what happens

Late burns could potentially have major impacts on insect populations.......a\ possible indirect cause of resetting green up and getting the veg out of synch....which is tinkering with food sources for the turkeys

I would imagine this concept probably holds true for most animals but it would seem like for sure with deer and turkeys that if a female has success giving birth to and raising young in a certain spot then they’ll return to that same spot the following year to do it again versus just randomly seeking another area. It may be a combination and totality of these late fire factors but the one that may be having just as much impact on reducing the success of their reproductive cycle as any is if they return to that spot the following season and at the last minute suddenly they have all the good cover taken away from that spot through fire that made them successful the year before. It would force them to have to seek out sudden secondary locations that may not be as favorable.

I remember working in my aunt and uncles chicken houses as a kid and the egg production could be finicky about the things that would throw it off……like if there was something that was majorly spooking the whole house and upsetting them on a given day then it could result in a drop in egg production for the next pull of eggs. I’m sure turkeys probably arent too different in that they are likely finicky to swings in variables. I think in a similar manner the more we can help hold the variables stable for the turkeys the better off they’ll be. Last minute fire has to be a major disruptor to the process. I’d imagine that for highest success these habitat changes actually need to be made well ahead of the turkey hens ever making a pattern change prior to nesting…..whatever date that might be……and again, the smaller the squares the more potential for max production. When that hen returns to where she previously had success and finds it black…..how far does she have to go to find a new cover spot if you’re on a two year burn rotation?? In which scenario are the variables held more stable from the hen's perspective?

The issue is how much effort it would take to burn in those small patches. Your cost just skyrocketed. I’d bet there is a happy medium.

I agree……I often use the extremes to represent a concept because I think folks are able to “see it” better that way…..Once the concepts is grasped then it can be applied to find that happy medium that works best for your objectives. You may have some folks that are turkey nuts that decide it's worth it to them to cut their squares in half again…..I think what you would actually find if we researched it would be a “standard” for optimal/great/good/poor that we could apply that would be like 40 acre squares are optimal……80 great…….160 good……and over 160 being poor…..or something of this nature.

I would also point out about this fire variable that if the annual timing of it is constantly bouncing around on either side of a right/wrong threshold and not held constant then it will make it that much more difficult to identify other variables that may be causing impact. You need to hold this fire variable more constant first.

The Japanese farmer had another book he wrote after “The One Straw Revolution” that was titled something like “Getting back to true nature”……I read most of it but his thoughts can get so deep sometimes that it can be hard to grasp……Outback would be proud though because I think I can summarize that book for you and give you the cliff notes in a paragraph as it relates to what we are currently discussing……

If we put our Mythbusters hats on and look at this from a scientific perspective……What the Japanes farmer is trying to relay in that book is that we have tainted the natural processes of things so much that we no longer have a good “control” to know what “true nature” looks like…..In the situation that we are currently discussing a good example of what he is talking about is how we are burning in Feb and March simply because of how conveniently that works for us after deer season is over. What he is calling true nature would probably have fire occurring in Oct and Nov during our driest months……This may seem insignificant to us but its likely because we arent able to recognize all of the direct and indirect impacts we are causing from deviating from "true nature". Getting back to true nature as he describes means recognizing the ways in which we are out of synch with such processes.

I found us a burn density map……This is a map of the current wildfires reported by the Alabama Forestry Commission…..This is just as good as showing us where the most controlled burns are taking places right now and its pretty easy to see.


Let’s take and cut that section of the state out of our current turkey density map and look at it by itself…..It would be the bottom right quadrant.



What correlation do we notice about the best and worst areas within this “burn area” of the state?? Don’t you have a correlation of the worst areas being where everyone is conducting controlled burns right now and the best areas being where they are not??? Again, not saying fire is bad…..I’m saying the late timing is…….

Something else to point out about this late burning that’s happening right now……I circled two areas in red on the map…..When we talk about “being late”….the bottom area I circled is actually way worse in being late than the top circled area. Even though it’s the same date on the calendar spring has sprung more so the farther south you go. If the top circle is a little late then the bottom circle is really late…….

Now lets go back and take that same dividing line and look at the upper left quandrant of the map that isn’t being effected as much by fire.....We'll call it the "fire free zone" The first thing I notice is that overall things arent all that bad for many areas and there are some areas that look to be doing well. Urbanization is definitely killing Marshall/Morgan and that area



As a matter of fact if you look at the previous years density map for 2020 you find that there are a lot of areas on the fringe of being in the really good range in the fire free zone…..This back and forth from moderate to good could just be natural fluctuations in environmental variables…….

That really just leaves the southwestern portion of our fire free quadrant to look at for why that area is struggling around the Hale/Perry Co area. I think the common thread in that area is habitat and land use. That’s where all of your fisheries and are located I do believe. You likely have high predator counts there.

Matt Brock.......Do you concur???