Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk ALTurkey Talk -- Beards and Spurs Wild Turkey Science Podcast??

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?"

In order to actually explain it properly you really need to go a level deeper down the rabbit hole and look at the spatial distribution of the hens on the landscape not just from the perspective of WHICH stands they nest in……but you need to take into consideration HOW MUCH of those stands are actually being utilized……You may have a 100 acre burn unit but if only the outer edge is being utilized for nesting then its really more like 25 acres of spatial habitat from the hens perspective and the hens are being drawn to a much lower percentage of the landscape than “7%”……or whatever the number may be for any given area…..That was just the number from the TN studies I believe…..A key variable for hen survival for any given area will be the average distance that hens nest from a road or firebreak…..They arent going to be very successful nesting within easy nose reach of a coyote highway no matter what kind of understory it is…….

……not unless the traffic is reduced…….

Nowhere, and I mean nowhere in the literature is there an example of hens in the southeast having 72,320 acres.............or even 36,000 acres year round home ranges. Certainly not in nesting season. Most, as I recall, are between 1,000 and 2,000 acres total spring home ranges. You spend too much time in never never land. The Study being cited was done by Dan Speake, my major professor. While many of the hens on the poorly managed bottomland hardwood Stimson property (Choctaw Bluff) that the research was being done on moved miles off the property to nest in better habitat, that particular hen was an outlier. Their movements were typically one way out and one way back from a bottomland hardwood forest with no nesting cover to an upland burned pine stand with good nesting cover. Hmmm they went to the burned woodlands to nest......


You already spend too much time down the rabbit hole into unrealistic land. If I do a good job managing a 3,000 acre place, I provide all the habitat requirements of many of the turkeys on the property. Some spend some time on the neighbors but many have all they need.

A 3 mile radius IS actually a little lower…..Its 18,100 acres……Still we’re operating on a big scale……Hell you agreed with 50K acres the other day… ….I kinda like using 25,000 acres though……That’s a good round number that folks can wrap their head around…….That takes into account outliers and such like the 6 mile bird too and is probably pretty close to reality for a lot of areas

You’re still missing the most important point in it all……Whether your burn unit is drawing in hens from an 18,000 acre circle or a 30,000 acre circle ……if hens show up to said burn unit and nest 100-150 ft from an interior road just to suffer high nest disruption rates and 50% hen mortality rates because of nesting in a high traffic area for yote and bobcat noses…….then it hasn’t really helped anything……The perception of it just makes you think that it did because you see turkeys nesting there

OK, Nowhere, and I mean nowhere in the literature is there an example of hens in the southeast having 18,100 acre year round home ranges. Certainly not in nesting season. You can make up numbers and make believe they reflect reality but that reality only exists in your own mind. It is NOT in the literature.
Also, I have NO 50,000 nor 25,000 acre landowners I manage for. I manage for the property I am asked to manage, not some pie-in-the-sky theoretical property.

No, the perception of LOTS of turkeys running around the properties I manage makes me think it has helped. Hearing 6-8 different gobblers from one point in the mornings makes me think so. If hens show up to our burn units, we welcome them not question whether they are better off there or somewhere else. Their broods in summer also help with the perception that our management has helped. I don't think seeing lots of turkeys is missing the point at all but you do you.

This ^^^^^^ is a good example of some of those constraints I mentioned with “burn managers gone burn”… …Good luck with anyone thinking you’re gonna change something about the landscape different than what we do now …...Shew buddy....…Don’t get me wrong though, I’m accepting that constraint for what it is and say burn on burners…….This is just part of why we will eventually arrive at “breaking out the footholds” though in order to actually change anything…….

The problem is that if a hen is nesting close to an interior road or fire break then her scent is easily drifting across it at night…..With the length of time she has to sit there and the frequency with which coyotes come passing by….. its almost a given that the right conditions will take her scent across that road to a coyote’s nose before those 28 nights of sitting are up if she chooses to nest there…….Fifty yards is really nothing for a dog to scent something on the wind at night with the high humidity levels and the way the air gets pressed to the ground ..... How many hens are nesting within 50 yards of a road or firebreak??

From the video above concerning the Tennessee study,,,,,Here is an example of how your nesting unit could increase nesting success to 40% while still suffering 40-50% predation and no real growth occurring……Remember what was said in the hen decline video about those other vital rates not mattering if hen survival dips below a certain threshold…..

You know there may actually be one reasonably easy fix to our problem of the understory being too thick for interior stand use in a lot of areas….. though I’d be hesitant to get too excited about it being any kind of wide spread solution……It would be to match overstory coverage with soil productivity……In other words if the soil is really productive and gets too thick for interior stand use then we counter that with partial shade to suppress growth....maybe only allow 50% sunlight

Another option might be to spray strips of clethodim across the stand to thin out travel corridors through the stand without just creating another lane for predators to utilize......At best though these are potential solutions that are only feasible for a few to implement and may not actually solve the problem but just help alleviate it some......I think a good portion of the hens are still probably gonna gravitate to wanting to nest on the edges no matter what...... #breakouttheholds

Here’s a major flaw coming from that last video in my opinion……It’s the part toward the end where Dr. Gulsby talks about “breaking 2 acre food plots down into 1 acre units and saying that the most ideal stand size if you’re managing for turkeys is around 20 acres with maximum stand size being no bigger than 50 acres”

I think this ^^^^^ is fundamentally flawed and part of the problem now. Take the example scenario I just posted above and lets call that sqaure a 200 acre burn unit……The reason those 4 hens in the center were successful is because they found usable space in the interior of the stand away from the highly traveled roadways……Breaking that 200 acre unit down into four 50’s doesn’t help anything……it likely just makes it worse…….Those hens arent needing more edge……they’re needing more usable interior space away from the predator highways

I get the thinking behind it with trying to have “nesting” being located close to “brooding” but that concept is suppose to occur within the same stand……Ideally a stand is a mosaic of both nesting and brooding structure combined that’s all far away from any highly traveled edge……It needs to be an interior sea of nesting and brooding that’s patchy and chaotic in its structural layout and plant density……lots of thinned out usable space with thicker areas interwoven into it…….

That’s ^^^^ what we think we’re creating by breaking it all down into smaller units but we are doing it too systematically by having a road or firebreak wrapping the perimeter of all of them and/or running through the center etc……That completely changes the dynamic for the predator and its efficiency versus it having to deal with a "sea of chaos"

Now you don’t have to read nary a bit of this but iffin you did want to go down the rabbit hole a little farther………this is what I perceive to be happening when coyotes travel interior roads and fire breaks during spring

About the first of April to the end of May makes up the width of our bell curve for nesting for first attempts……. 60 nights…….Each one of those nights during that time period is going to have varying scenting conditions just like how weather conditions for fire varies from day to day……Tonight it’s a south wind at 2 mph with 60% humidity and a low of 62 degrees…..tomorrow it’s a north wind of 15 mph with 100% humidity and a low of 44 degrees with rain.......and so on and so forth………and those varying conditions are going to heavily dictate a coyotes cone of reach with his nose each night when he travels along the roads and firebreaks ……It dictates how far out he is able to pick up a scent stream on the air and from which direction

There’s gonna be at least a few nights where scenting conditions are perfect and scent is sticking on the air and flowing at ground level for a good ways……If a normal nose reach is 50 yards on an average night then it’ll be 75-100+ on those best nights and 0-25 on the worst…..or something to that effect ……It’s mostly about the scent being able to flow across the terrain and stay within 2-3 ft of the ground to reach a coyote’s nose on the air at farther distances ……That gets effected by things like wind for example…..It actually could flow for a long ways out under the right conditions and terrain features but I think 0-75 yards is probably a good working range for a danger zone for nesting hens along either side of an interior road or firebreak…… with 0-50 being the really high danger area…..

So all of that ^^^^ makes it end up being a lot about probability really……If a hen nests anywhere from 5-75 yards off an interior road or firebreak……..then there will be “x” amount of nights during the 28 night time span that she sits there where the wind direction, wind speed, humidity, and temp are right to carry her scent back across that roadway she is sitting near……If a coyote passes by on that road all 28 nights that she sits there……. then he inevitably is going to pass by on one of those nights when conditions are right to smell her…….

However, if the roadway or firebreak only sees a coyote pass by on say 4 nights out of 28……then you at least have a good chance for the conditions not being favorable for him to locate her when he does pass by……….At the end of the day…..or maybe we should say end of the night…….. we need to be limiting the amount of coyote, bobcat, and fox traffic running the roads and firebreaks during nesting increasing the probability of the hens making it the full nesting period without being disturbed or killed…….Ideally you would like zero yote/bobcat/fox traffic on your roads for those 60 days……

This isnt just about adding more "habitat"…….. Nesting 50 yards from a road or fire break is just as dangerous in a burn unit as it is in a stand of hardwoods or anywhere else on the landscape……It actually might be more dangerous in the 2-3 year old sea of grass since that road is likely going to see a higher rate of coyote and bobcat traffic than in any other stand on the map if not trapped

To give those scenting conditions a little current context…….its getting really dry and hot right now in a lot of places…..The longer these drought conditions persist the harder it becomes for a dog to use its nose efficiently…..When the soil and all of the organic matter on the surface gets dry as a bone then its basically sucking any moisture up at ground level that the scent particles need to attach to…… I commonly deal with it during early bow season when we’re in that Oct dry period…….Its not something as common in the spring but if it stays dry for several more weeks then it’ll likely help some hens to avoid being detected.....A little bit of drought might help some of that thick interior space too

I've got an idea for a new episode..........

I’ll see your eagles and I’ll raise you the exponential use of bait across the country over the past decade. You might as well fold.

So you’re saying habitat mitigates problems with turkey populations. 👍🏼

Such a radical concept 😝

Just like quail. Build it and they will come
We’re suffering from too much NEW information when in reality it seems information that’s been around and weathered time seems to be the more appropriate course

You seem to just be desperately trying to distract......You know there has to be some folks that promote the truth about what is best for turkeys no matter what that may be..... rather than just promoting what's best for their buddies