In a perfect scenario where we humans hadn’t manipulated the landscape so heavily, you would have a nice balance of habitat structure across the land that was comprised of a nice balance of grasses, broadleafs, and legumes……and that structure would be the driver for producing a nice balanced mix of cover and food where predator and prey populations also nicely balanced each other out…..They would go through ups and downs with the rainfall and vegetation but the end product that came out the back end would be in line with what the natural balance of vegetation was producing.

That’s NOT what we have happening now though…….We’re not even close to operating on that type of game board…..We humans have heavily influenced and manipulated not only the structure of the understory but we have also subsidized food sources that push these predator populations beyond natural levels……

For example with the structural difference……Instead of that natural mix of grass, broadleaf, legume…..we’ve converted HUUUUGE amounts of land to grass monocultures……doing this swings the balance in favor of some animals over others……One of the most important things is that it heavily increases rodent populations…….Lets add 5 or 6 chicken houses to the grass monocultured hay fields and you have a major rat producer that provides lots of quality resources for our predators but few for our desired species like turkey/deer…..That’s why areas like Sand Mt where I grew up have few turkey and deer but still have thriving coyote populations…..Another example of how we skew the predator balance is through our corn baiting…..That is directly introducing additional resources for nest raiders like coons to push their populations above what the land produces…..Even things like the chicken litter that’s being discussed….That’s a subsidized input being injected into the system to produce more grass that comes out the back end of our chain favoring the predators.

My point here is that when we get to this point we’re not really operating on an even playing field anymore with the predators….We’re not just gonna come out on the back end with a nice natural predator/prey relationship with turkey/deer/quail…We’ve done things to the landscape to tilt the benefit in the favor of predators and those things arent going away…. You’re not about to convert thousands of acres of chicken farms back to turkey habitat or anything like that. Even if you did convert one, habitat needs scale to truly be effective.

If we want to do something realistic to help then one of the biggest holes in the bucket is to try and moderate the predator load due to all of these imbalances so that the prey is able to exist in less than ideal habitat conditions…..Because even our “prime” habitat still has its issues. wink grin

Folks that know don't shoot old does........ wink