I bet the proliferation of coyotes across the landscape since the 90’s has had more of an impact on turkeys than what we’ve given credit to……I’m guessing that if they can sniff out and find 60-70% of the fawns born in a given year then it would stand to reason that they also likely sniff out and find a lot of nested hens…..They may not be eating them but rather just running a bunch of them off their nests each spring causing nesting to be much less efficient than it used to be…..Like I mentioned before, its likely that the more they have to renest the less successful they are…….

As far as chicken litter is concerned…..I would guess that the amount of hay fields and cattle pastures that litter is being used to fertilize these days is far more impactful across the board than any amount of turkeys that may be directly killed by diseased litter. All of those fertilized hay fields and cow pastures where the understory has been turned to grass and injected with supplemental inputs that ends up being a rodent draw and benefiting the predators more than the turkeys is just a part of that setup of the chess board I was talking about that’s tilting in predators' favor. It isnt just that we’ve lost some good turkey habitat…..but that at the same time we’ve created a bunch of prime predator resources……probably a lot coming from increased chicken and beef agriculture………..I bet if we had the data in front of us it would show that we have WAAAY more coyotes, hawks, owls, and racoons now than we had in the 80’s and 90’s

Another side note to something we were talking about with the weather.......Rainfall in the July-Sept timeframe is likely gonna dictate over wintering rodent densities which probably dictates swings in the amount of pressure being applied to poults the following spring by the rodent predators……. Wet summers are going to support more rodents than the dry summers due to the difference in grass and grain production…….So there is potentially another critical time period where the amount of rainfall eventually impacts the amount of pressure being applied to turkeys…….You could have July-Sept……then March-April…….then May-June……. ……each having different rainfall patterns in a given year that impacts turkey recruitment outcomes in some way…..add in temps as well for the March-April time period……….The weather patterns in all three of those time periods lining up just right is probably what gives you the really good boom years……..and there could potentially even be a fourth time period between Oct-Feb where weather has an impact somehow on the process…..I’m not sure what that would be unless there was something significantly impacting the health of the hens coming out of winter....Again though, these are just natural weather swings up and down that we cant control but its still good to understand it

I think we need to start promoting trapping and figure out a way to incentivize it. I get that doing so isnt changing the underlying issues that we have with the structure of the chess board but there probably isnt any hope for changing many of those things in any significant manner….Nobody is about to stop spreading chicken litter or growing hay for the sake of turkeys and you’re only going to ever hope to get a small amount of additional prime turkey habitat restored…….It just is what it is with some of it…….The best hope we have on a large scale is for lots of trapping to take place annually……Sure we’d like to change 2 million acres worth of Alabama hay fields over to prime brooding understory next year but it aint about to happen. It’d be nice to do away with feeding corn to coons all winter……. but it aint about to happen…..Significant increases in trapping participation is really about the only realistic thing we could implement on a broad scale to try and effect some change……

PCP said it takes turkeys to make turkeys……While trapping will not change anything about the structure of the landscape…..I think there’s some aspect of it though where areas that are fairly void of turkeys now will benefit from it…….Those areas are never going to get turkeys to begin to establish without the areas that already have turkeys spilling over into them…..”Spilling” requires growth of the areas that have turkeys…….In the long run trapping may help to get turkeys at least temporarily reestablished in some of the void areas…..What happens from there who knows….I suspect there are some areas that may just need to get established beyond the bounds of a predator pit and they would be off and running......Maybe that's what is happening in cartervj's east Colbert example...

Along these same lines……on the latest Wild Turkey Science podcast they have a guy on there from Mississippi talking about their situation. Part of the discussion they talked about how in 2022 Mississippi saw what was their best hatching since something like 2004 I think it was……It had been two decades since a spring that good he said……He went on to say that the 6 million dollar question is why that was and they were speculating different things? Here’s my guess for what its worth….

I think it was probably due to the weather conditions during these different critical time periods lining up just right with some kind of disease event running through one of your main predator populations…..Maybe the coyotes, hawks, or coons had a big die off for some reason and it happened in perfect timing with a year with good weather across all the critical time periods. The turkey hen is likely not what’s inconsistent and causing the fluctuations…..Its the variability in the forces being applied upon her that causes the ups and downs…..

The flip side of these ideal weather patterns is how I could see some low density areas falling into a predator pit scenario……when we get those couple years that roll around where everything lines up completely wrong. Scenarios like this probably need help from surrounding growth to recover and get over that hump.

I hate them mangy suckers!!