It’s surprising that there’s not more data out there on nesting season burns. It would be good to see a study on the difference between renesting success based on predation or their nesting habitat of her first choice being burnt. Would also be interesting to see how far she moves to renest.

I agree…….unless it’s a situation where we are harvesting ALL or the majority of the mature gobblers being produced across the board. Then you’re looking at an apples to apples comparison of output to population. Such and such plantation may be 5,000 acres but I doubt it has dozens of mature gobblers running around that someone doesn’t show up to kill by the end of the season. Are there a bunch of places in Alabama where skads of mature gobblers are just dying of old age? Probably not……Yes, there is likely SOME variation but I bet its small.....I think that density map is probably a pretty accurate representation of the amount of gobblers being produced across the board.




True......

Ill pass on taking your sage advice



First off, in the southeast, historically, burns happened for days, weeks, sometimes months since there were no firelanes except water. Also from east Texas to North Carolina and the Gulf of Mexico to the Appalachians was dominated by the Longleaf pine or mixed longleaf forest - a highly pyric community. If you go out right now and look in a broomstraw piney woods (basically what the early settlers described) you will find very dry, cured grass fuel ready to burn with very low "point of ignition" numbers on many days. You should have tried to burn last Fri/Sat in 17-18% humidity with 20 mph gusts. Any spark would set a fire (and did on ours). Combined with higher winds, it was a very "burnable" couple days. The woods are ready to burn right now and you can't tell me that if the conditions were right that either a native set (or accidental) fire or a lightning set (we had a lightning storm here a week ago) and smoldering snag (mostly lighter wood back then) wouldn't and couldn't set the woods on fire on March 3 or 4. These fires could cover a lot of ground and, I am sure, did. June and July may have more lightning storms but the fuel is green, humidities are high and winds are lower. I understand that research in the coastal plain indicates that the majority of fires were, historically, in the growing season, that area also had wiregrass, another highly pyric plant that burns well even when green. We don't have it up here. So, I would say that there were plenty of spring fires to go along with plenty of growing season fires. We would have to go back a few hundred years to prove it though.

That being said, Bartram, who made a swing through this area in the 1770's noted 2 things worth stating. One was the dominance of "a vast forest of the most stately pine trees that can be imagined.”, "This plain is mostly a forest of the great long-leaved pine, the earth covered with grass, interspersed with an infinite variety of herbaceous plants, and embellished with extensive savannas, always green", Second was his description of the astounding numbers of turkeys he saw in these forests - so many they kept him awake at night. "They begin at early dawn, and continue till sun-rise, from March to the last of April. The high forests ring with the noise, like the crowing of the domestic cock, of these social sentinels; the watchword being caught and repeated, from one to another, for hundreds of miles around; insomuch that the whole country is for an hour or more in an universal shout."




The simple fact that you think that domestic turkey reproduction and wild turkey reproduction is the same is astounding.

Gobbler you are not kidding about last Friday!!! Boy we ended up with a humdinger of a fire, on both sides of our fire lane. We could’ve burned up a heck of a lot if we wanted to. 😂

CNC, to suggest burning in contributing to turkey declines based on harvest data from two seasons is jumping the gun a little I do believe.

If they harvest gobblers at a lower rate, yes, they leave a LOT of excess gobblers running around at the end of the season.



Yea, NOT a density map - its a drawing you made up with squiggly lines and made up numbers - totally useless



Turkey home ranges are around 2-3,000 acres. Some of these places are 15,000 acres. Using the term "nesting grounds" and "draw in the birds for nesting". If you don't know that it doesn't work like that, you don't know turkeys (except for barnyard turkeys of which you seem to be an expert). Turkeys have a home range and they stay in it mostly. If you want to manage for turkeys you have to have all the habitat types within that area managed correctly. They don't move miles to go to "the nesting grounds" like a friggin crane.
That being said, even on the most intensley burned wildife property in this area,, AT MOST, 40% of the ground is burned in any given year leaving 60% unburned, Plenty of "nesting ground".
Again, these places are carrying some of the highest turkey densities in the State. More than most other private land and certainly more than the National Forest, Management areas and timber company lands. You should be commending these places for managing well and acting as a place for turkeys to flourish and spread to other local properties instead of whining about their burning practices. Do you ever carry a driptorch?

There is some and Chamberlain has probably published the most. There are not a lot of telemetry projects in the southeast going on and there is very little burning going on in nesting season so the data is hard to collect. Chamberlains stuff looked at success in initial and subsequent attempts, incidence of burns influencing nests (he found most fires never touched a nest and, of the few that did, some still hatched). My understanding is after an area that a hen may have been nesting and the area was burned and her nest unsuccessful, she chose the same type habitat in a different location. As always with research, it is difficult once samples are whittled down over time. Hens fitting the above description might be a couple out of a sample of a hundred hens radio-tagged. Plenty of data available on how far they move to renest.
Also shows the importance of the Auburn project currently underway. They have radio-tags on hens right now in areas that use fire to manage the habitat. we will see if any get influenced by fire. Support AWF, and TFT, to help support the project. ALFA, NWTF, UGA, THP, among others are all contributing.

Yea we spend half of Saturday putting out fires.

Imagine a fire started on Wednesday in the historic longleaf pine forest in 1400. It would have burned till the rain on Monday and, with the winds Fri - Sun and the humidity in the teens Thu-Sat, covered thousands of acres, maybe tens of thousands

I hope it turns out some good info. Will be interesting to read and develop management strategies from.

I have seen that on several occasions. Not fun at all.

Nice informative thread!

I think if you are gonna look at this situation objectively….meaning without bias…..then you would look at the frequency of lightening strikes and the frequency of dry conditions and you would look to see where and how often those variables overlapped and that would give you something like a “probability of ignition” for different times of the year…..I think what you would find is that the probability for ignition would be much higher from July-November when conditions are the most dry and we have the most lightening strikes as compared to the POI for Feb-March……This would in turn give you a fire frequency interval that would probably look something like every 3-5 years for a July-November burn and every 20-25 years for one in Feb-March……or something to this effect. I don’t think this is a valid justification for why we do most of the burning every year in Feb-March. Its done mostly around convenience and deer season with the assumption that it has no impact on nesting success.

If any of the folks who are doing the research are following along……One of the things that no one seems to be taking into consideration by the comments I’m reading is the impact of “stress” on the hen caused by major disruption to the nesting process and the impact that this has on egg production…..meaning does she have 12 eggs or 6 eggs……When I read things like the comment about the fire not even disturbing the nest as if everything is just all good….it makes me wonder if the stress that this caused the bird is even a consideration.

Noone is talking about turkeys migrating like "friggin cranes".......I'm talking about each hen across the landscape moving within her 2,000-3,000 acre home range of ALL habitats to the blocks that are being burned because those are the stands with the best nesting cover. I imagine the hens are likely heavily concentrating within these burn stands during this time of year

Just out of curiosity......Do the quail plantations care if you burn during quail nesting season??



Does 100% of the property have to be burned during nesting to cause an impact to productivity?? You're saying that 30% - 40% is just insignificant? That's a pretty big assumption dont you think?? We're not just talking about burning 30 or 40% of the total land mass....We're talking about 30-40% of the nesting cover.


Lets circle back around again now to the idea of burning the quail plantations Oct-Jan.

If we were to look at our probabilities for natural ignition from lightening…..When would likely have the highest probabilities of the year??......Late summer early fall, right???.....Our driest months with the highest amount of lightening strikes. When do quail nest…..May-Sept ......Turkeys March-May……..Is it just a coincidence that these birds are nesting outside of the most likely time for natural fire??

Earlier you said that you couldn’t burn during that time because it would take away all of the hunting cover but yet you just said that at most there is 40% burned….and plenty of cover left as you described……So isn’t there still enough to hunt then too??.....I don’t see why it wouldn’t work except for deer hunter whining a little at first…..I think what folks would find though would be that a late summer/early fall burn would be a deer magnet as the little plant shoots started popping back out.

While we’re on this topic of what the natural system may have likely looked like……Something else that would have been different about this scenario from what we have now that we may not think much about but would have had a significant impact is the absence of the wild grazers like buffalo, elk, and sheep……These animals would have consumed or trampled down a lot of this grass vegetation that we are currently burning. You wouldn’t have had these big grass dominated stands of understory in the same manner…..It would have likely been a more patchy design of grass clumps like a checkerboard on a small scale with a more balanced amount of broadleafs and legumes as a result. If you look at some of those Texas cattle ranches that have such good quail populations I think this is a lot of the reason why…..They have the cows running on a large enough scale and behaving in a manner similar to what the wild grazers use to and it creates that intense checkerboard patchwork structure….maximizing your “squares” and potential production or output.

Also, this reduction in the fuel load would have meant that fires were likely much less intense than many of our controlled burns today in these plantation settings where we are quickly consuming massive amounts of grass fuel....not to mention the loss in soil organic matter this causes and loss in productivity from that as well. I figure these natural fires were most often the result of late summer afternoon pop up thunderstorms where lighting strikes an old tree and catches it on fire an hour or two before dark.

This has the potential of creating a predator pit in certain situations.........

https://www.cullmantimes.com/news/f...3559816-088e-11e8-897d-2b1bfb71041e.html

Some bonus acres.......

https://www.outdooralabama.com/hunting/wildlife-management-areas

https://www.outdooralabama.com/hunting/special-opportunity-areas

Got to be some kind of record

Does this drawing illustrate what could potentially happen if you burned 3 sides of a high fence thus pushing all the predators into a corner or “predator pit?”

There are roughly 2 million strikes a year in Alabama in the spring (March. April and May) and 4 million in summer (June, July, and August). Fall (September, October and Nov), as well as winter (Dec, Jan, and Feb) have very few strikes (less than half million) so not really an issue. "dry conditions" do NOT relate to fuel moisture in most of the indicators. "Drought" is usually indicated with the Keetch-Byram drought index and that is what you see on the news. The other is Palmer Drought Severity Index. Vegetation can be burned a day after a rain and we burn all the time in "wet" weather, sometimes over water - we did last Saturday in a marsh. We also burn in drought conditions, usually after a rain. So drought index is not indicative of fuels ability to burn. Things can be very volatile and likely to burn even if there is no drought (like right now with cured and dry grasses, weeds and leaves/needles). However, things are more likely to burn in drought conditions.
It has been generally wet since 2020 so lets look at our last real drought. It started in September of 16 (the end of lightning season) and ended in May of 17. It was a little droughty from March to August of 18. Both of these windows would allow a lightning set fire to occur in spring/early summer (or you could say right in the middle of quail and turkey nesting season) and NOT in fall. The worst of these in spring of 17 was highly likely to capture a lightning set fire. In the growing season, April, May and June are somewhat dry, July is rainy and August, Sept and October are, again, the driest. So if you are looking at the likeliest time to have a lightning strike with dry conditions, it seems to be April, May and June and again in August. For a turkey, I would prefer to have my burning done in Feb/Mar than May/June.
Again, I would argue that the difference between fuels in the woods right now are way more ready for a spark (dry fuel, no green, low humidity and high winds) than those in the summer/fall when vegetation is green, leaves are on hardwoods, winds are low and humidity is up. Hard to find good data but a study I found for forestland wildfires in Mississippi indicated not only did Feb-April have the most incidence of wildfires but also the largest acreage burned per wildfire 1990-2006. Couldn't find the Alabama data.

Yes they do. They want to burn before most quail are on the nest....just like we do with turkeys




Late summer early fall, NO. Driest months with low incidence of lightning coupled with high humidity and green fuels. High incidence of lightning strikes and dry fuels is April - May.



Weak argument coming from lack of knowledge of the subject. If you take, say a bird per acre quail population in fall and burn 50% of their cover you double the number of birds per acre in the remaining habitat - great right, 2 birds per acre? Problem is you just exposed an unnaturally high prey population to a predator population that is not only at it's highest due to lots of young of the years animals running around but also the major influx of northern migrant hawks and owls that are searching for prey items that may be over exposed to predation by, say, a 50% reduction in their protective cover. You would suffer devastating losses I would suspect. There are ways to reduce cover to increase findability of birds but burning 50% of their winter cover in blocks is NOT one of them.

Finally, something I don't disagree on. Some truth here....except I don't think we had sheep in Alabama. Too bad you had to bring out the drawing with squiggly lines superposed on an Alabama map with random numbers inserted.