Ooh look how pretty, it has colors!

......and some of y'all would also fit in so well on the Discovery Channel searching for sasquatches and lost pirate booty.

Squatch are pretty much universally accepted as the #7 natural predator to wild turkey and should warrant a chart or three for accuracy’s sake.

Argh. Pirate wenches and booty!!
🏴‍☠️

More smoke from "neighbors" doing controlled burns yesterday during nesting season……Is this not additive mortality to the coons, crows and squatches??...... I don’t know how we rationalize this to ourselves as making sense. I get that some guys have a lot to burn and only so much time to do it in……But a lot of these properties are being taken care of by individual caretakers or landowners, etc who are only managing that one property…..Why are these folks burning while turkeys are nesting?.....Is it because they are taking their cues from folks telling them that there’s no bad time to burn and that the positives outweigh the negatives??.......You know that’s probably only true when there’s just a handful of nesting season fires dotted across the landscape…….When every Tom, Dick, and Harry just keeps throwing fire on the ground in March and April then the amount of turkey nesting that is impacted adds up. I don’t know how it is elsewhere for folks to think fire doesn’t make a difference but everyday someone can light one around here this time of year there’s smoke in the air. Why in the world are we burning up assloads of prime nesting cover before they nest anyways??? If you were taking care of one property for the purpose of producing deer, turkey, and quail…….Wouldnt you be better off to burn in May and June…..at the tail end of the turkey nesting…. And with enough time before quail nesting for the cover to start growing back??....There is a natural transition time in the vegetation around the end of May, first of June anyways when many more plants will emerge. There’s PLENTY of fire around here but there really aint that many turkeys and I’m here watching some prime acres for them erryday.

Once again, you're living in the weeds. Most turkeys will re-nest and lay again if they lose their clutch, especially early in the nesting season. Research shows that the sperm from from being bred, remains viable in the hen for 30 days so if she loses her first batch of eggs she can re-nest and lay a second without even having to find another male. Fire is not the catastrophic turkey killer that you seem to think it is. I dont know anyone that burns their entire property all at once. People been cutting fire lanes and burning in the spring here in the south for the last 100 or more years. If it was as bad as you seem to think it is, there would not be a single turkey left in the SE by now. I think that the real issue is you like to grow weeds and you just dont like to see weeds get killed by fire.

I'm ignorant about the best times for burning so educate me.

IMO it would seem:

Winter - too rainy and crappy
Spring (now) - drier and young-of-year not born yet (other than coyotes, and f'k those)
Summer - hot, green foliage, young-of-year, humidity
Autumn - hunting seasons, fawns, poults, upland birds, perhaps more humid

I don't know, though. Spring would seem the best time. Turkeys re-nest if the opportunity is there. Most folks, at least the intelligent ones, burn in patchwork don't they?

Just because they are able to renest doesn’t mean that the offspring are gonna be just as successful long term……Does come into estrous a 2nd and 3rd time if they don’t get bred too but the fawns are born late as a result and at a disadvantage from the ones born earlier due to being out of synch with the seasons. They’re also at a disadvantage to predators because of being the only outliers hitting the ground during that time period….

I’m gonna say that the same concept applies to turkeys as well……For the best results I would think we would want the highest success rate possible on the first wave of nesting the same way we would want the highest amount of fawns possible being born from the first estrous cycle…..The fewer renests the better. The more of it we push back to the second and third go rounds….I believe the less successful we are…..It becomes more and more out of synch with the stages of growth of plant vegetation and natural food sources…… (the timing of nutritional needs and the availability of them)....You have to think that it is also out of synch with the insect cycles and such too.

What I’m saying is that if you’re trying to create more turkeys then I would think you would want to identify the 5 or 6 weeks when the peak of that first wave of nesting was occurring and at least not burn during that time period……If you do then you are just adding to the nest predation any way you want to slice it……Like I said before, I’m right in amongst folks burning thousands of acres and I watch or ride by prime fields for turkeys every day and I’m telling you that I don’t really see that many.

Songbirds nest 2-3 times during a spring-summer. I've seen this in our yard.

Are the offspring born in the second or third wave lesser birds than the ones born in the first wave? That's your posit for turkeys.

To that, you say identify the 5-6 weeks of peak time and not burn.

So when do you burn? After? Because then you're into true early summer and poults are on the ground, along with other animal offspring. Then the screaming would be about killin' all the bayyybeeees and how that's bad.

If you do it prior to those 5-6 weeks you're in late winter, which could be cold-wet-not great. And then a lot of people will be yelling about "burning all the habitat turkeys will need for nesting in just a few weeks!"


So when is the best time? THE very best time that doesn't affect something? Because just like with deer season rutting or peak turkey gobbling or whatever, your best time might be different from my best time here 3-4 hours away.

I think that there's a good chance that the long term success rate of second and third nesters is likely much lower compared to first wave nesters.

When you say what is THE very best time….I think nature operates in overlapping bell curves……Basically this means that the back end of the turkey nesting bell curve will overlap with the front end of the natural fire frequency curve…… That’s how nature would likely do it……Arent turkey poults suppose to be flying and getting up into trees after 2 weeks??

What is optimal from the standpoint of a human managing one single property……I would say it would likely look to burn 2/3 of of the annual burning in late May and early June…….and 1/3 of the burning during the dormant season when conditions permit from Nov-Jan……Nature’s bell curve would be throwing down a few fires earlier than late May but knowing what we know we could wait until the peak and after to burn so as to give the turkey curve more time without clipping it in on the back end as much. Keep in mind these were meant to be low intensity burns as well...Iffin we're trying to be optimal.

Actually, iffin we're talking about truly optimal we'd have cows in this equation reducing some of the fuel load as well......

Best time to burn -- whenever you can and the conditions are optimal

Wildlife recovers. Habitat recovers.

Another turkey article.

https://www.realtree.com/turkey-hunting/articles/are-southern-turkeys-harder-to-kill

awww, did my smoke yesterday bother you that much. How do you think that those "assloads" of prime nesting cover got to be prime nesting cover - through the same burning you condem

^^^^^

I definitely will have to figure out how to get the phrase "assloads of prime nesting cover" into a story.

It’s all good……I’ll just keep running my coon traps to help compensate for the nests you’re roasting.

CNC, what do you hope to accomplish by posting your opinions on spring burning ad nauseam?

I honestly don’t think he can help it it’s the way his brain is wired.