Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk ALTurkey Talk -- Beards and Spurs The Turkey Numbers '26

Just another bit info to take into consideration…..I’m pretty sure all of the commercial fish ponds over there on the left side draw in a lot of birds and sich that get preyed upon by raptors…..

"Hale, Dallas, Greene, and Perry counties are the top catfish-producing areas in Alabama, situated in the western Black Belt region. Hale County is the largest producer, accounting for over a third of the state’s total farm-raised catfish sales, followed closely by Dallas and Greene counties."

You ignored it last time so I’ll ask it again. If your theory is correct and avian flu was prevalent enough that it wiped out a large portion of the raptor population, which saved all the turkeys, why didn’t it wipe out the much more socially dominant turkey populations in those same areas?. Hunting should have been decimated for 3-5 yrs after as the flocks were forced to re-populate. How do you explain the best hunting in years, if the avian flu, which dang sure kills turkeys too, is the root cause of the population growth. Just trying to understand where you’re coming from and how this theory works.

Its being carried through flyways by migratory birds and being transmitted to raptor populations through them preying on infected ducks and geese and other water birds, etc……Turkeys don’t eat ducks and geese.

Here’s the thing......Its just like that one article I quoted said about wild bird detection rates being a significant underestimate of the impact that’s occurring in wild bird populations……The reason being because something is gonna have that dead bird eaten within 12-24 hrs or less…….The vast majority of raptors that die will likely just up and vanish like a fart in the wind…….and I think that’s probably what has happened right under our noses……

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!

My theory is not that ALL of the avian predators died…….Its that the numbers have been knocked way back so that now the ones that are left are mainly concentrated on their major food sources and not the broader landscape……They are not having to use “alternative prey sources”…..For example in North Alabama around the Tennessee River…….I’m sure there are still eagles there now……But the population has likely been knocked back to a point to where the remaining birds have plenty of food resources on the lake and river……I think its only when the populations grow to a point of exceeding the river’s food/space resources that raptors like eagle’s expand their hunting grounds out into the dryland landscape and have a more profound impact on turkeys…….I would assume the same with the fish ponds over on the west side……..They are likely still concentrated around the main food sources but the rest of the landscape is getting some relief……I think that’s kind of why I’m not seeing raptors in my neighborhood anymore.....Also, something that may account for you seeing more around the fish ponds themselves may have to do with that same flocking behavior that was seen in the 40 eagles eating stranded fish on the Flint River......There may be a major shakeup and reshuffling in dominance and territory going on which is causing the remaining birds to flock to the main feeding grounds

I'll give it to CNC, when you go down a rabbit hole, you go deep!

Well……so I had an interesting neighborhood observation…….I’m not sure what species they were but there were 6 medium sized hawks swarming in a tight group together several hundred feet up the air……They never checked up……The swarm drifted by and just kept going off into the distance……..Apparently that’s called a “kettle”

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?

I don’t right off but I’ll give it some thought……

Gonna add this map to the mix…..All of the big booms in harvest we are seeing are associated with the major watersheds.....basically flyways…….. Those are the main “corridors” where water birds would be spreading avian flu to raptors……The strip where turkey harvest is down is “grassland” that likely has yotes booming…

I don’t disagree with y’all about pigs having a negative impact..... Its been proven that turkeys show an avoidance behavior to areas with high pig densities but that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what we’re currently seeing with the big increase in harvest……Pigs arent killing adult turkeys and they likely arent messing up very many nests since hens avoid nesting around them…..The worst impact from pigs is through manipulating where hens wont nest as well as the fact that pigs are eating snakes that would currently help with some of the extra rodent population in the grassland....Snakes may eat eggs but they dont kill hens.....Coyotes and bobcats do though

Here's an updated timeline with the new map for this season added in......

Lawrence Co has officially hit 200%........Jackson Co is 23 birds away from going over 900 birds total……I thought they might go over 1000 but everything is kinda creeping to a halt…..This weekend will probably wrap it up…….Next week likley wont equate to a whole lot

Alright PCP……I’ve thought about it and I have a theory………

The catfish industry in Alabama started in 1960……So I’m guessing that by the mid 70’s or so you probably had a lot of those commercial ponds established……So my answer is that you’re limiting factor in southeast Perry county over time has always been avian predators associated with the food sources being produced by the commercial fishing ponds……commercial fishing ponds which are the same stable state every year producing stable food supplies that produce the same general population of raptors……Compare that to the grassland where grass and rodents fluctuate heavily with weather.

Now that being said……I do question how “stable” y’all have actually been over time…..Human perception can be tricky in recognizing change…..Just for example here are Perry county’s numbers for the last 7 years…..You can see there’s a good bit of change that's occurred but without having this data to look at it would we recognize it ??

Perry..... 279 .....208..... 181..... 180..... 192 .....171..... 164

I say that to say that I DO think at some point eagles moved in and added to the mix and probably impacted that fish pond area a little more than before……That may have just been in the last 10-15 years though as their populations have really grown and expanded in the last couple decades.....They likely didnt target grown turkeys and half grown poults until the day came that they had to

So I zoomed in and circled the main area that’s dominated by commercial fish ponds in red……roughly 725,000 acres of land area with 17,000 water acres spread throughout …..The area might as well be a wetland impound….That’s more water than in a lot of our lakes……..not to mention the fact that it has the Black Warrior watershed running down the middle of it and the Tombigbee on the west side and Alabama River bordering it on southeast side………



The impact of that high avian predator density is likely going to extend outward for quite a ways and buffer out to lower levels as you move away from the center……The yellow circle represents a roughly 10-15 mile buffer area but It could be farther than that and it could be a different shape with some areas like the river corridors carrying the impact farther away from the epicenter.

In reality that yellow box probably looks a little mo' something like this......Might need to even stretch it out a little wider

Back to my side of the state and the grassland plantation belt……Below is another important feature on the landscape…..These four main watersheds running out of the plantations and converging on the Tallapoosa River is how wild hogs originally pushed out of Macon/Bullock and into Elmore county…..These also likely serve as travel corridors for transient coyotes pushing out of this area…..Right at the top of your screen is the dam for Lake Martin…..

The reason I think Elmore Co is down is because of a rodent boom in the plantation belt that has caused a lot of excess yote traffic to be pushed through this landscape level funnel