Barbour County has more out of state hunting lease holdings than any other county in the state.

I game checked the 2 I killed. I won’t be putting in the correct county anymore though. That’s none of they damn business.

Opening Week

March 28, Mon - 478

March 29, Tues - 399

March 30, Wed - 263

March 31, Thur - 245


Season Total to date

CNC you actually believe this ?

I guess that depends on what you mean by "believe this"......

That depends on what you believe the definition of "believe" is. ( Had to go all Bill Clinton there)

Im sure he knows there sure are a lot of unchecked turkeys in Bama!

Absolutely!!......Fortunately random sampling equations don't require that every individual in a population be counted.

There’s nothing random about asking Turkey hunters to tell the truth 🤣🤣🤣

Well, look at it this way I guess.......If we had 10,000 people standing in front of us and we wanted to know the average height of the people in the group.....Do we have to measure all 10,000 people???

One of the first questions you are going to want to ask yourself is...... "To what degree of accuracy do I need?"......Do I need it to know the average height down to the nearest millimeter or is to the closest inch good enough??......Or is even a ballpark estimate good enough information for what I may be using it for, in this case we may say to the closest inch, give or take an inch on either side.

So from a starting point here with wildlife we are using numbers that are estimates like the last option.....We dont estimate wildlife numbers down to a millimeter scale......We only need it to be "in the ballpark" type of measurement. In our height scenario the actual average height of the group may be 5 foot and 7.24 inches......If we have an estimate that tells us the average height is between 5'6 and 5'8 that may be good enough to make decisions by depending on the application. Again though, this is part of what is built in to a sampling equation......How close to "exact" do you need to be?.....That goes into determining how many of the 10,000 we need to sample and measure...

The problem is that Game Check is not random sampling. The Hunter Survey that was used for about 50 years was random sampling, and I thought it provided good enough info for setting seasons and limits. GC needs for everyone to participate for it to be accurate, and nobody has a clue as to what % of hunters actually use it.

Is it 30%, 50%, 70%? Nobody has a clue because there is no scientifically valid way to measure any illegal activity. We have gone from a system that worked to one that can never work. I would think the people in charge knew this would happen, so the real purpose of GC must be about enforcement, not measurements.

I’m not for sure why you say it isn’t random sampling PCP……I get that you're using data from the folks that call it in instead of being like a lottery but the only bias I could see that causing is if the folks who used GC had wildly different harvest rates than the folks who don’t. When they sent out the old mail in survey there were a folks who didn’t send them back the same as there are folks who don’t use Game Check…..All we are needing to know is did you kill 1, 2, 3, or 4 turkeys and we have 60,000 people standing in front of us??......Are you saying we need to measure all 60,000 to figure that out?

BTW…….I was all for the old mail in survey as being good enough. This new way is about site specific micromanagement of smaller “herds” instead of broadscale management of wildlife populations. It doesn’t behoove everyone’s agenda for there to be a bunch of critters eating and tearing stuff up.

PCP…….The part that’s really the most in question about the new way looking at it from a sampling standpoint is not how many people kill 1, 2, 3, or 4……..but how many killed zero….I think that’s what you were getting at with the compliance…Is it 30%....50%.....70%......etc…..It was my understanding that they were gonna still use the old mail in survey in beginning to measure this amount until it stabilized……For example if we do the mail in survey and it shows we killed 25K turkeys and GC is only showing 15K then we know GC is probably running 60% and we can extrapolate the numbers…..I imagine someone somewhere will still be doing small scale sampling of some kind moving forward to keep a check on any movement of that compliance number even when the mail in comparison stops. I assume it would be expected to continue tick upwards over time.

But all that extrapolation is probably and maybes. Ask anyone who has ever designed a scientific random survey and they will tell you that GC is not. The whole basis for a random survey is that it has to be random. You can guess at the compliance numbers based on the numbers over the years, but it's still just a guess. Did we have a good year, or did more hunters just decide to start reporting? There is no way to know, unless you go back and run a random sample by a phone survey or something. They may be doing that. If they are, then what was the point of GC?

I'm not saying all the info in GC is useless. You can gather some info from it, but I don't think it will ever provide as good of a number of the overall harvest as the survey did. I thought when they started it that eventually most people would participate, but I don't think that's happening. It's just my perception, and I could be wrong. Nobody really knows.

GC does measure 100% of the legal harvest, so it has that going for it. I just think they have moved a bunch of turkeys from legal to illegal. I hope everyone will report their kills; it's going to hurt us in the long run if people don't.

They don't do the mail survey anymore

Breaking down to counties is also useless. You can't tell me that the folks that live in Huntsville report their kills at the same rate as those in Wilcox county.

CNC you would fit in so well with the DCNR. Long as yall got pens and charts your good.

Then they tell you "This many were reported but this many were actually killed". If they know how many are actually killed, what is the point in reporting them. And how do they know how many were actually killed? I get so tired of lies. I get so tired of petty laws that dont make any sense. Wear this, walk here, shoot this gun and this ammo, hunt here but dont hunt there, you cant put this in the field, cant have this on the property, you can have this on the property though. Ive grown weary of even trying to keep up with it. Ill kill a turkey or two every year, as long as theres plenty around here and you know what? I think i will do it how i want to when i want to.

Opening Weekend Totals

Fri - 1,204
Sat - 1,348
Sun- 870

2nd Weekend Totals

Fri - 678
Sat - 784
Sun - 720


An overall reduction of 36% from opening weekend. Here it is by county.........Keep in mind that the public land opener will be affecting some counties as well as the opener in the northwest corner

This also allows for neat little comparisons of how the kills trend from week to week as the season progresses.....

One more just for fun.........Them Dallas county boys are apparently just weekend hunters.