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.