I know you have already thought through any rebuttal, but my take is they are speaking to a broad audience. The majority of properties just don’t have good habitat for any ground nesting bird. Obviously they focus on the lowest hole in the bucket. I’ve never heard any of them be anti trapping. I have heard them say let’s get habitat right on a broader scale before we spend effort trapping. If you don’t live on the land or very close to the land, trapping is much harder to do than habitat improvement.
Double Creek…….the problem is that folks are just wanting to use the term habitat and “getting it right” as a generalized term to mean everyone needs to burn……..…..The reality though is that “getting the habitat right” means something much more specific and deviation from that structural blueprint causes big issues not just for the landowners doing it but for the whole landscape……..Those 4-6+ pups being pumped out for every few hundred acres of rat farm habitat being created eventually disperse and go other places…….Not to mention the 40-50% or less hen survival that occurs when you draw in the local hen population to a stand that’s too thick to nest in and you set her right out on a linear edge to be preyed upon. etc. etc…….These things matter and at a certain threshold the bad begins to outweigh the good.
At the end of that podcast Dr Gulsby said something to the effect that creating turkey habitat is also creating coyote habitat………but again that’s the generalized dumbed down version……The real truth is that some of this “habitat” we’re creating is actually habitat that maximizes predator output…..Its about as efficient as you could possibly set it up for predators…..If we were managing for them we would have a Utopia in the plantation belt…….And that’s what y’all are selling to the public……A flawed idea that needs tweaking in order to be implemented without causing more problems than it actually solves
