Originally Posted by gobbler
Originally Posted by CNC
When I look at it I’m zooming out and looking at the land in 25K acre chunks and I’m recognizing that "50% of the hens are seeking out 7% of the habitat" within that chunk of land


I can guarantee on the places we work with that have good turkeys and good habitat, turkeys don't nest in 7% of the habitat. Good habitat management makes good nesting habitat compose 20-30% of the area..... mainly through burning and thinning right.

I mentioned in another post about a hen in southwest Alabama that Toxey talked about on Gamekeepers that traveled 6 miles each year to nest…..A circle with a radius of 6 miles equates to it being 72,320 acres in size……Lets be conservative though and say that’s an extreme outlier and we’ll cut it in half down to 3 miles for normal every day working purposes……That’s still 36,000 acres……That means when you create a 2-3 year old burn unit that the hens seek out to nest in…….you need to divide its acreage by something like 36,000 to get your percentages…….It may represent 30% of an individual 1000 acre property but that’s different than 30% of the landscape the way the hens use it……You need to zoom out and look at the percentage of the 36,000 acres that the hens are nesting in…..In most cases, except for maybe the heart of the plantation belt, I think it will be the same concept where a large percentage of the hens are moving around on the landscape to nest in a small percentage of stands relatively speaking......


The next question is then....."How vulnerable are these stands to hen predation?......How much of the stand do the hens utilize?.....Just the outside edge?"

Last edited by CNC; 03/22/26 10:52 AM.
Folks that know don't shoot old does........ wink