I posted this once before but I’m gonna do it again because I think this is one of the most important variables that the long term data tells us……If you look at the years around when decoys were legalized there is a big spike in harvest because of legalizing them…..There was likely an additional 20-25% killed in 2006-2007 due to decoys that didn’t have anything to do with an increase in turkey population. Without decoys that year’s harvest would have most likely been in the 50K’s again with an additional 14K birds left on the landscape. The lack of those extra birds on the landscape is why you see the crash in the two years that follow down the 37K…..We knocked ‘em out.

Nothing has changed since then……Using decoys is still allowing hunters to knock out a very high percentage of the gobblers as a whole each season. This is another one of the points about the trapping incentive……If we are already killing the majority of the yield each year anyways…..then what does it matter if you issue a few more tags???.....

Unless folks have a huge objection to making decoys illegal again that would add 20% back to the mix that got taken away…….It would most like come from the people killing one bird as their success rates would be reduced. Its really a question of how easy do you want to make it for folks to be able to kill one???.....That move alone gives you many more bonus birds for the hard core turkey hunters to have an incentive to go after with the coon tail bounty…..which should build on itself over time.