Matt I got a question for you if you’re reading along……Up there in your area is Fayette Co generally where the most burning is occurring??

The most turkeys I saw in one group in Alabama was on a quail plantation near Union Springs

Around 150 turkeys and at least 40 were strutting and gobbling

Every thing that would burn on that 12,000 acres was burned

Now follow me here for a minute….I got another theory.....

If we have counties with populations showing a lot of variance up and down then its probably safe to say that the rodent predators are causing those highs and low with the change in the rodent populations…..Their impacts are going to swing with the rodent swings.....So, if that’s true then you should be able to find the counties that virtually do not change from year to year and say that those counties probably ARE NOT being limited by the rodent predators…..something else is a limiting factor to further growth because the impact of rodent predators would fluctuate…….

Corn fed coon populations I dont think are going to go through those types of highs and lows from one year to the next…..I think they would be more constant……In theory anyways…. So potentially you could look at the trend in fluctuation for an individual county over time and it be a potential indicator as to what’s limiting the population in that area. Except for areas that may be impacted by chicken litter….everybody else’s turkeys are ultimately controlled by something that eats them or their eggs.

Here are those low variability counties….Some of these are a little bit like Morgan Co but on the low end……you can kinda pick those out though…..I went ahead and included everything that was less than .29 since there were so many counties that fell out in those mid 20’s….There's very little difference from about #5-#29

1) Shelby
2) Marshall
3) Etowah
4) Tuscaloosa
5) Walker
6) Perry
7) Choctaw
8) Elmore
9) Dallas
10) Madison
11) St Clair
12) Houston
13) Jefferson
14) Clark
15) Franklin
16) Monroe
17) Winston
18) Lee
19) Pickens
20) Calhoun
21) Lamar
22) Colbert
23) Wilcox
24) Marengo
25) Chilton
26) Bibb
27) Marion
28) Cherokee
29) Lawrence

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that everything over about .40 on the map is likely being controlled by hawks and owls for the most part…..

There’s not enough burning in any county of NW AL to impact populations of any species on a landscape level.

Gotcha

Here’s another way of looking at this with the outlined red area being the high variability areas and the green being the low areas……the red in theory being areas with turkey populations being controlled by our rodent predators through poult predation…. ……You could say that populations are being limited in the brooding stage…….Trapping coons might help on a boom year but probably wouldn’t matter on the bust years when rodents were scarce and poult predators are hammering them……So that would mean that the green area would likely then be areas limited in the nesting stage…..If it were brooding we’d be seeing the higher variability…..In theory anyways…..I mean there is a pretty defined grouping in the data here for most part.....especially if we throw out Morgan Co and a couple others to "clean up" the data a little so to speak......If you look there really aren’t many counties that are in a middle range…..The majority of the counties fall into an either/or……one or the other…..two distinct groupings of either high or low variability.....nesting limited populations or brooding (poult) limited populations…… The map isnt exact but I bet its getting pretty close. If know that bottom right area of red it makes a lot of sense that “nesting” wouldn’t be where populations were being limited…..There’s nesting out the ying yang.

Got a pair of Coopers nesting near my duck hole and the planter barn. Watched the pair kill and bring back rat/mouse etc… all day long yesterday. Very efficient killers.

Which hawks do you think would be the worst on poults? .....Sharp Shinned and Coopers??

Here’s a map I found of Cooper Hawk breeding locations……Generally speaking look how sparse they are on the western side of the state in what would be our green outlined area on the last map I posted. There's quite a few of those counties that have zero or one nesting locations found according to this study

https://conservationgis.alabama.gov/ALBBA/BBA%20website/BBA%20maps%20pdfs/coha.pdf

Here’s one for red tailed hawks…..They’re much more prevalent but still not as thick in several of our green counties…..Just to note that nesting for hawks seems to be in April-May time frame with them feeding chicks through mid June from what I’m reading…..

https://conservationgis.alabama.gov/ALBBA/BBA%20website/BBA%20maps%20pdfs/rtha.pdf

Tall timbers has done studies indicating that higher quail populations follow higher rodent numbers. I would assume turkey poults are the same. I will assume that the counties that have higher variability in harvest and burn more simply have more turkeys per acre than those counties that don't burn. Higher overall numbers lead to higher swings. Low numbers cant swing much or they would go extinct. Harder to swing from a turkey to 100 acres to a turkey per 200 acres than swing from a bird per 20 acres to a bird per 40. I also have seen the highest densities of turkeys on quail plantations or quail emphasis properties.

That coopers hawk breeding map is as useless as a lot of your charts. 1% confirmed?? Virtually nothing in bullock/macon in the quail plantations? I know I could take you to breeding pairs right now on those places. They are everywhere.

Just taking everything into consideration when looking at all the data and putting 2 and 2 together, etc…….To me it looks like if I were to pick Alabama’s optimal turkey habitat for which to be my model for “prime” habitat to recreate…….It would be whatever is occurring in the areas below…..It seems to be the best combination of all factors…..I kinda think what may be happening is that the habitat is providing a lot of excellent nesting but it’s coming from nesting that isnt producing a massive poult predator load to go along with it….. Maybe that’s the reason you don’t see the hawks there.

If you measure it by the “boom” years I could see that being the case…it's providing a lot of good nesting.....But you also would have the bad "bust" years too…..It just is what it is……Big swings up and down over time



Yeah it would be cool to see some very recent surveys…..I know for sure from living in Macon Co that the hawks and owls are thick…..I actually think maybe more so with owls. There's a lot of them

Wouldn’t that area of southwest Alabama be mostly a massive area of timber land with a big checkerboard of clearcut and replant rotations??.....That would account for your excellent nesting if you consistently have stands of year 2-5 regrowth occurring fairly evenly all across the landscape year in and year out……That’s resetting succession without the massive grass production……..

It seems to be pretty obvious that if you use fire to create grass then you are also bringing in predators to go along with it…..It just is what it is…..The more grass, the more predators……Knowing what we know I would think folks would want to have the goal to try and use fire in a way that created the least amount of grass and predator load as needed for nesting…..I forget what it is but there’s an optimal clump per acre rate for quail…..I bet it would be real similar for turkeys……Anything over that is imbalanced and just producing more predators than what has to be produced……I still say these quail plantations would benefit greatly by having cattle run through them along with the fire for this very reason

You know just keeping this concept in mind of creating that early successional nesting habitat like the kind occurring in SW Alabama timber stands…….I bet hinge cutting trash trees would be a good tool for folks that cant burn. I’m not talking about just making a mess out of things with no rhyme or reason but rather dropping them in a checkerboard pattern with the same idea as the grass clumps per acre…..Maybe just 4-5 per acre or something……Laying down and dotting the land with “security clumps” while still leaving proper space in between each one. I mean in essence that’s creating some makeshift early successional nesting habitat if you do it right. I would think you would want to do it to a decent scale as well of hopefully at least 20-40 acres at a minimum…..That’d be like 200 hinge clumps…..I don’t know, you’d have to play around with it a little to figure out the optimal number per acre. I’m guessing its going to be a density that’s thick enough to overwhelm nest predators with clumps while still leaving the hens room to move around and see.

2 pages CNC 22 and others just scattered. hang on he’ll post another. Interesting opinion

I don’t know where your map came from but them suckers are all over around here. 20-30 years ago they were rare. Old buddy called them blue darters and killed every one he could. Same as all the other old timers down there. No longer the case.
Got to handle a Sharpshin that had a broke wing. It was brought in as a rescue to my friends place. He’s a vet and does raptor rescue. He called a fellow but they didn’t want an amputated wing Sharpshin for educational purposes. That joker was straight up mean and in person smaller than I thought they’d be.

My buddy said all their bird predatory raptors were mean as chit and hard to handle.

Them jokers haven’t been documented in areas because there’s nobody looking and recording. They’re EVERYWHERE in NW AL.

Breeding Bird Survey does some work and their trend data shows a 700% increase in Alabama since 1966