Some interesting stuff in the newest episode.........

damn, just beat me to it!

Guarantee I killed less turkeys due to season push back - should kill less turkeys. I know i killed less starting later.

But we hav a ton of idiots going early and killing over the limit so that will offset! U got outlaws everywhere nothing works!

I absolutely hate the push back! Just way less fun! My birds are hunting hens in march - & not April - they found em in april

Very good podcast and information!

Tough week for Mr. Sykes.

It’s always good when they have Dr Harper on their show. Like how he put out the importance of habitat plus trapping.

That’s funny. What’s that quote? Life is hard, but harder if you’re stupid.

Reckon they'll change the dates back now??

Heck no. It don’t matter what the science says. They’ve been determined to do it and won’t ever admit they could’ve been chasing false theories. Never happen.

Adam Butler ought to have received the NWTF award for not jumping the gun.

I hope they do. I'd be back hunting in March if it ever changes back. Otherwise, I'll stay north.

No earth shattering results here. They said that a two week shift wouldn’t affect anything from the start. They said that they wouldn’t be able to move it to where the test needed to be due to hunter backlash. Unfortunately, this study didn’t do anything to support or disprove if a shift in starting season dates. It only proved what they already stated. That a two week shift wouldn’t do anything.

Who is they? Be specific.

Then why was it ever changed? Why do anything? Politics? To piss off hunters? That’s a great strategy.

Moving it to where “they” want doesn’t solve anything either. Then you have zero hunter satisfaction. And that will be catastrophic for habitat management.

The best thing for our turkey is hunter satisfaction, period.

Dr. Harper said it in an earlier interview. I’ve talked about this before and predicted how the backlash from this study results would go. I got blasted for it, but it’s turning out just like I thought it would. Seemingly, the two week setback was an arbitrary timeframe between recent season start dates and the average peak nesting dates.

They got it right……the main problem is predation on hens, eggs, and poults

That sounds kinda obvious. Doesn't really take an award winning biologist to understand that everything out there eats eggs and turkey poults

Sounds like mind games to me. Hey, we need to push season back 4-6 weeks or the end of the wild turkey is upon us. But let’s move it just a little, so nothing changes, but we can still say “I told you so”. Plus - that way - we can continue to scold you rednecks for being upset about it.

BS politics at play. All for nothing.

I think what they wanted to do was elementary, in the sense that they took away the two best weeks and added it in May when it’s too hot for me to go. They shortened my season by a week and a half or so without shortening it. Fewer times to go, fewer chances to kill.

From what I gathered listening to the podcast……they said that they didn’t see much difference in nesting success on the first nesting whether the hens nested early in the bell curve, at the peak, or at the end…..If anything there might have been a slight amount more success for the ones nesting toward the end of the curve they said…..Which would mean that even if hunters did mess with that early hens ability to get bred and cause it to be delayed by a few days ……it probably doesn’t matter ….. You seem to have a decent margin of time to get the first nestings in……The more impactful factors at play were the predation events that caused the hens to have to do a complete renest…..That disruption gets her timing WAY off…..They said there was a range of 5-54 days that it took hens to renest after abandoning the first one……

In a nutshell they’re saying that if all the hens are bred and sitting on their first nests by such and such date then you’re good and hunters arent impeding that from happening. It’s the predation problems after nesting starts that's the issue. That makes sense to me.

As I drive across the southeast the primary factors I see impeding nest success and poult survival are absolutely horrible landscape scale habitat management and urbanization in rural landscapes. Turkeys do not do well with human (or dog) disturbance, and they don’t do well in poorly managed areas. In the southeast, particularly in our area, proper timber management and fire return intervals are not in a good place for turkeys. State agencies can jack around with season timing all they want to. It’s not going to help the wild turkey.