Take my place for instance, my only early successional habitat is a 40-acre block of old field sandwiched between fairly open timber. The field is great nesting and brooding cover, but turkeys aren't really using the interior.
In my opinion, here’s the fallacy in our thinking with cutting stand size down to 20-40 acres like many recommend these days as optimal……
We have recognized through studies that due the thickness of the vegetation in many areas…..once a stand passes a certain acreage threshold that the interior fails to get utilized……and the bigger the stand gets the more interior space there is that goes unused…..Just to plug some numbers in to show the concept lets say that a hen is only willing to wade 150 ft max into that grass stand in the pic above to nest…….If we make that grass stand 1000 acres……then that means there are 89 acres being utilized around the perimeter or 8.9% of the total stand………
So now here’s how we’ve proposed to solve this issue and where the fallacy comes in……If we cut that stand down to 40 acres and the hen uses the same outer 150 ft…….Now we’re utilizing 17 acres out of 40……which is a 42% utilization rate……If we cut the stand down to 20 acres then we are at nearly 100% utilization and we say that must be far better because we are using more space this way……. when in reality the hens are still nesting within 150 ft of the edge in either scenario and that’s what really matters when it comes to disturbance rates in these systems plagued with coyotes…….The hens are still just as vulnerable to the high rate of predation traffic that occurs on the roads and firebreaks…….even more so now because you’ve created so much more edge to be exploited……meaning that even more hens can be put in a vulnerable position to be flushed ……..
It wasn’t the size of the stand that needed adjusting to fix the utilization issue…..It was the density and height of the vegetation in the interior
