Awesome, sounds like you got further to fall than most. Never mess with an old man, they don't lose.

I hunt several different places in 3 counties. I would like to kill something on each place, but if I can call a bird into range on any of them I'll kill it. I may have these places next year, I may not. It's all timber company land so it may be cut at any time or get sold or get leased out from underneath me.

I believe if you got turkeys and don’t shoot the Jakes you will have turkeys next year. If you let them go to save them there’s no guarantee that the neighbors gonna let em live!

Or coyote. Or a fox or anything. Turkeys don’t live long anyways. Kill em when they’re ready

I have only seen 1 Jake this year last year 2 on this peice of land! Up the road I called in 7 jakes so I know I’ll have a few 2 yr old next yr but it’s only 35 acres!

I left one gobbling last year at the house and had 5 before season this year. I’ve heard 5 gobble one morning but know where 2 are now since one is dead. We may kill one more on each property that would make 4 on 320 acres and leave a couple of birds on each property.

Based on everything you've said in this thread, I don't think you are anywhere close to "running out of birds" on this property. You don't say how big it is, but if it has been consistently producing 2 gobblers a year that is very good for a small tract. It sure doesn't sound to me like a place that has "only a few birds" on it.

I think it's great for people to decide to limit the harvest on their land, but it's gonna do very little to "build up the population." One gobbler can breed a whole bunch of hens. One of our biologists on here posted about a gobbler who was documented as breeding over 20 hens - in one day. And a boss gobbler is not gonna tolerate a bunch of other gobblers hanging around his hens. Those gobblers will just go somewhere else. If you wanna benefit folks miles away, I think that is great. It probably will mean nothing on your property next year.

And I think not seeing jakes is more meaningless than anything else you talked about. I saw several different groups of young turkeys on a couple of our properties during the winter, but most of them have not been around during turkey season. That's actually good; a pack of jakes will run off the gobblers, and I'd rather them go somewhere else. But if we have hens next year, we will have some of those same turkeys back as 2 yr olds.

The future of your turkey flock is in your hens and the poults they are able to raise. I don't want to kill every gobbler off a tract, but that is seldom possible anyway and you can't stockpile them. It's not even mid April yet. There are gobblers miles away that are gonna check out your place before the season is over. I'd enjoy hunting them.

KHAS !!!!

Thank you for all the replies! I have 1700 acres,I see most of the birds on the road I live on. I waked a 400 acre tract Saturday and found tons of old scratching but no fresh sign I take it they moved to there spring patterns off that tract. Just wanted to pick yalls brains for input and thoughts on the situation

Limiting the harvest on a property can definitely make a big difference. Good luck next season.

If I had 1700 acres and it was prime turkey land I wouldn’t bat an eye shooting 4-5 off it.

With all the jakes this year, will they breed the hens if there are no longbeards around ?

Will a 14 year old breed a hot 22 year old teacher?

Hells Yeah !!!

Every jakes dream.

Don’t shoot hens.
Don’t shoot jakes.
Have fun hunting long beards.

Only rules needed. It ain’t hard.

Or, shoot what you want, cause they all made of meat.

Once again.....Deep Thoughts from th' Peach Gallery!!!

I disagree with some one here about stockpiling/saving longbeards for the future. I had a great place, about 3000 acres. We took a lot of birds off it, but I always left a gobbling bird in any area of that property I hunted. End of season there would be five or six gobbling birds on the place, THAT I KNEW OF. We had lots of birds every year until the owner cut the timber. We still had birds , just not as many and we cut way back on killing numbers.

Friends hunted a property near me that they(five or six hunters) killed EVERY DAMN LONGBEARD THEY COULD. Next couple of seasons they really strained to kill any gobbler. I think they overshot the birds as there was no other change in the property or around it except the removal of ALL the gobblers on the property.

Troy, I've seen you and others post that before. Maybe we just don't have as good of hunters on our place, but I've never seen any evidence that we had over hunted it. But perhaps it's just a question of semantics, as there has never been a season when I thought we killed every gobbler. We have never killed more than 6 in one season, and since 1990 we have killed from one to 6 each year. We never shoot the Jake's, but they could certainly get killed on neighboring land. We have on several years decided we had killed enough and quit for the season.

So I don't mean to give the impression that we try to kill every gobbler, but I also don't feel guilty about hunting the mature gobblers. Try as we might, there would always be some that we could not kill without cheating in some way. I often marvelled at how gobblers survived on the Coosa WMA back in the 80s and 90s. The pressure on those birds was unimaginable to most here, and yet they gobbled a lot, and they survived. Populations went through cycles depending on the hatch, but there were always gobblers that survived incredibly intense hunting pressure. If those turkeys survived, I am skeptical of anyone being good enough to kill every gobbler out of an area.

What I meant by stockpiling being impossible is that there can only be so many gobblers in an area in relation to the hens. If you have an isolated tract that has just 4 hens that use it, you are not gonna have a dozen longbeards that will stay on the place because you didn't shoot them the previous year. You will have one or two, and the rest of them will go somewhere else. If they have to move 5 miles to find more hens, they will move 5 miles. And they very well might never come back.

If you wanna increase the turkey population on your place, focus all of your resources on producing poults. And yet we both know that very few do that. Most land managers try to make their land attractive to adult turkeys so they can shoot some of them. I'm not knocking that, but managing your land that way and then passing on some of the gobblers is not the way to increase the population. At least, that's what I believe and that is what the dcnr has told us the past 50 years. Now it seems that hunting is under attack from every direction, but I am not buying it.

But I could be wrong. I think it is great that folks are limiting their hunting. In fact, I encourage everyone reading this to quit shooting turkeys. I will handle that part of it.

The OP apparently knows of at least 4 gobblers still on his place. If he knows about that many, I would bet that there are at least a dozen others who use the land at least some of the time. I don't think it would have any effect on the flock if he killed a couple more, especially this early in the season. What we have found is that when we kill one that is with the hens, another soon moves in to take his place.