Honest question.... Am I the only one who believes hunters are the greatest reason turkeys are in decline? Why are we so afraid to consider we are the problem? If you want to instantly tick people off, suggest that we're simply overkilling in relation to poult survival.
I do not believe it's predators or nest raiders, nor habitat loss or change, nor disease or climate. It's us. The ONLY thing I see different over my 49 years of life is the exponential increase in turkey hunters. Here's my hypothesis....
Simple thesis statement: I hunted much of the late 80's and all of the 90's, and nothing ever changed. There were only a handful of guys who turkey hunted in all of the woods I ranged on, and I knew basically all of them. I don't remember having anxiety about getting beat to a spot on public land back then, and there were always multiple turkeys gobbling anywhere you went. I see no more predators today than I did then, and the habitat is identical, the weather is identical. There's only ONE thing that's different.....
About the time we say turkey numbers (and hunter satisfaction) started a decline, in my assessment, it coincided with the explosion of the commercialization and marketization of the hunting industry. TV, social media, and just a modern-progressive marketing of all things hunting and fishing. Eventually, everyone I know turkey hunts. There's a truck parked at every gate, pulled over anywhere they can. Out of state tags camping at our WMAs for weeks, pounding our turkeys all week while we're at work. All these boys saving their vacation for turkey season. My social media shows numerous dead turkeys every single day. We are killing the everloving @#$% out of them.
Stay with me.... Turkeys are a dominance hierarchy animal, not all of them breed. You've got a few dominant birds in an area, doing most of the gobbling and breeding. If you kill him today, how long does it take the subordinates to recognize this, then establish a new pecking order and begin breeding again? Or do they at all that particular season? It's far-fetched, but it's plausible, that we're killing those dominant birds in quick fashion all over the place (because they're getting pounded every day by burgeoning numbers of hunters), and the overall flock breeding is affected. Perhaps it's only a fractional affect, but over 20-25 years?.... So we're killing them in larger numbers than ever, coupled with less/no breeding by subordinate birds, and here we stand today with a mess on our hands.
Just my thoughts.
