I might be reading your theory completely wrong but it sounds like you’re saying these counties are on the upswing due to the possibility of avian flu decreasing the raptor population. I can tell you there are no shortage of eagles, hawks,owls in this region, especially around these farms that are predominantly catfish/cattle. It’s actually the opposite. I work with these guys closely and it’s nothing to see half a dozen eagles/ half a dozen hawks on each visit to any of these farms. That’s just what I spot as I’m riding through glancing occasionally. Probably more eagles per square mile than anywhere in Alabama by a lot. The counter point is they are seeing and killing MORE turkey than ever in the region. Now, this may be due to record hatches the last few years but the raptors seem to have minimal impact on the turkey population as far as I can tell. It’s really prime ground for turkey. Good bedding, good brooding and enough cover/woods for roosting.
I can tell you that much of the prairie ground due to the vast openness and lack of swamps throughout much of the region, they have less of a hog problem. That’s kind of a blanket statement, as there are plenty of hogs along the rivers lowlands and WMA’s throughout the black belt, but from Selma to Eutaw as you ride the Hwy 14 corridor, much of that ground is wide open pasture ground with enough pine plantations to hold good populations of deer/turkey. Hogs are restricted to smaller pockets along the waterways/sloughs/swamps. It’s pretty dry ground through that area of the black belt compared to the rest of Alabama as far as major creeks, streams are concerned and lack of water means lack of pigs. My theory is wild hogs are more devastating to the turkey population than we are lead to believe. I don’t see how any turkey nest survive in high pig populated areas. All I can gather from my friends across this region, just in conversation, the landowners who have high hog populations, and many of these reports, the hogs haven’t been established and are somewhat new arrivals on their farms, they report much less turkey sightings when the pigs arrived. It took several years but sightings are down. These guys along the rivers historically had the finest turkey hunting around for generations. The guys with the cattle farms in more open ground, less hogs, are seeing a turkey invasion even with extremely high raptor populations. I’m leaning to pigs as the greater issue. That’s my elementary hypothesis.
I’m also dealing with pigs migrating to our hunting land in Perry county. They just showed up two years ago and this is already the worst turkey season I’ve had in 20 years. I’m blaming pigs for everything at this point. Ha!
I'm just down the road from RareBreed and I agree with all of his observations. If you wanna get a good picture of an eagle, just dump out a deer carcass and put a camera on it. You will get buzzards too, but also a great chance at an eagle. I think it's far more likely that hogs are contributing to any turkey decline. The folks I've heard complain the most about a turkey decline that I thought was legit owned land along the river with the big swamps. As RB said, these places used to have the best turkey hunting around, but I think it really has declined since the hog population has exploded.
It's something people in hog areas are just going to have to live with, as it would take everyone agreeing to get rid of them in order for it to happen. The state would have to be all in on getting rid of them, and that ain't happening because too many people want them. I've turkey hunted in a number of places that had them, and every time the landowner would complain about them and talk about how much they hated them. I would always ask if they wanted me to shoot him if I happened to see one, and 100% of the time the answer was an emphatic no. They could either sell hunts or wanted to hunt them themselves, so there is no chance of eradication when so many actually want them, in spite of what they say.
CNC, you have a lot of theories on turkey decline; what's your theory on turkey stability? I've been hunting SE Perry county for 61 years now, and the population has been relatively stable the whole time. There was a period in the 80s when nearly all our land was a young pine plantation and we didn't hunt it, but we knew there were turkeys just down the road. By 1990, the pines were big enough that they could use the land again, and everything has been stable since then. There was a never a time when you could hear 25 turkeys gobble, the way Carter and others have described for north AL, but there's always been turkeys around. Most days we can hear a turkey, maybe half the time we hear 2, hearing more than that is very unusual.
I've seen the land go from mostly hardwood, to mostly clearcut, to mostly pine plantations, and the turkeys continue adapt. We don't have any hogs, but sure have plenty of coyotes, bobcats, fire ants, hawks, owls, eagles, and probably everything else that people blame for their lack of turkeys. And we have surely had plenty of hunters who always blasted as many as legally possible. And back when the season came in 3/15, some of those hunters would try their best to kill 5 the first week of the season, and sometimes they did.
So you got any theories on population stability?
All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.
