Originally Posted by CNC
Originally Posted by Semo
But, I highly doubt fire has an impact on county level populations outside of maybe a couple counties dominated by NF with large scale burns.


Gobbler named off 130,000 acres worth just at a bare minimum across a few counties where we’re at….…I’m sure you could add a bunch more to that and its just a drop in the bucket for what gets burned in southwest AL. I mentioned this before but the reason I believe these burn acres can have an impact even though they are only a certain % of the total land mass is because these burn acres basically represent your nesting grounds in these areas. The burn tracts on the landscape create the perfect cover to draw in the birds for nesting. In other words, the use of fire is likely concentrating them to those tracts during nesting……and then when weather delays burning season…..the late fire being ran through these stands could easily cause enough disturbance to see decreases in “egg” production....birds are finicky to disruption. I believe the reason we are seeing it being more of a factor in recent years is due to the warming trend causing turkey to likely breed earlier as well as the change to the Feb 10 end date of deer season which pushed the start of burn season back as well.



And there is 32 million acres of land in AL. That is.04% being burned that he listed. That isn't all that is burned, but it's a significant amount of it. You gotta admit that if you add up every acre that is burned it's gonna be miles below 1 % of the land in the state. And a big majority of that is burned before the nesting season.

I don't doubt that somewhere a nest is burned up every year, but the impact is quite insignificant when compared to the long term habitat improvement. If you don't have any turkeys, it's not because of burning. Use the common sense you spoke of earlier. Don't burn your land if you don't want to, but I'm gonna burn mine.

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