So just about all of the counties in northwest corner of the state are going to see 5-year highs for harvest numbers this season……Right now Marion and Franklin Co are both almost 25% over anything in the last five years ……Is that change man-made or is it coming from environmental influences?? Meaning, did humans do something different to impact the outcome and create those extra birds or was it just due to fluctuations in rain….temp….etc??......What was the specific variable that made the difference??

We will se the results of this next year if it’s true. I know a lot of folks that game check the counties they think would be best..

Here's the map…..All of these counties will see five year highs…..What factor caused all the counties in the northwest corner to produce more birds?

What were climate conditions like in 22? Wet, dry, hot, cold, etc. I’m sure someone could dig deeper and find out what the weather patterns were like for 21-22, but likely good conditions resulted in good hatches those years. Just a uneducated guess

If you look at last year’s numbers pretty much the whole southeast corner of the state looked the same way …….a year that will likely be their largest in at least a 6-7 year span…..Their numbers went back down this year to much lower levels. Looking back we had two record wet years about 3 years ago I believe it was....

My guess is that it’s environmental fluctuations……basically being the things that impact the speed and timing of the understory growth in spring and early summer…..The turkeys need “cover” and “food” to get established and anything hampering that is likely going to have a negative impact on them……I’m guessing that ideal conditions would be springs/early summers that were more on the warm and wet side where growth really popped early and grew fast. Vice versa…..a spring that has late freezes and long dry spells may be the other bad end of that spectrum.

If you went back and looked at weather history I'm thinking you'd probably want to narrow it down to the March-July timeframe.......You might could include the second half of Feb

NW AL has had a few years of decent hatches. That and there’s a lot of people putting an absolute whooping on nest predators over large areas.

AND, there are areas of those counties in Green that have been closed to hunting, or severely reduced opportunity for decades. They’re just getting a season back the last couple of years.

I'm guessing more honest folks in that area?

Whatever the reason, you can guarantee it wasn’t anything those folks in Montgomery were responsible for.

So I went back and looked at the past rainfall maps and tried to match them up to the years when some areas had extreme highs and lows and it would seem that there’s a possible correlation between the amount of rainfall received during March and early April and reproductive success…….It appears that dry conditions during that time period equals lower success rates and vice versa….potentially. The really low year that the southeast corner experienced during 2021 matches up to a really dry March/early April for that area in 2019………And the really high boom year that area experienced in 2023 matches up to a really wet March/early April in 2021….That would make sense…..no rain means slow plant growth and therefore scant hiding cover for nesting…..

It may actually be that there’s two critical time periods for precipitation with the other being roughly the month of May and early June. It may be that for the most optimal success you need rainfall in both of these 4-5 week time periods to line up for you in a given year…..and it may even be that you need the first one (pre-nesting) to be wet and the second (early brooding) to be a little drier…..I’m guessing you probably don’t want a lot of 2-3 inches rains coming down on newly hatched poults there at first……I think its kinda the same concept they have playing out in Texas where rainfall heavily dictates reproductive success but it’s just playing out to a lesser degree. It isnt as drastic an effect here because plant growth isn’t so all or nothing with drought like out there….

Not to get too complex with it but you would also have to layer on the rodent factor we were talking about in the other thread and how that may be compounding the issue of a dry spring if the amount of rodents coming out of winter is on a downswing…..I think you’ve basically got the combination of a couple factors determining your success……..1) The timing and vigor of the understory plant growth in early spring and how quickly it’s jumping up to give you cover from the time of nesting to brooding…….. along with 2) the amount of pressure being applied by predators…. which is dependent on several of its own variables that we’ve discussed…..grass/grain loads and rodents….corn fed coons, etc

Something that may also be happening along with this fluctuation in spring green up is that you probably have periodic years where the front end of your nest initiation bell curve gets cut off due to spring green up getting delayed or set back or slowed down due to rain/temp…..I suspect you have outlier hens that initiate nesting well ahead of the bell curve peak and the success of those front end nesters from year to year would really be flirting will the line on enough “cover” greening up to camo them in their nests….Some years we have early springs and the weather lines up in the favor of these front end outliers while other years it doesn’t……Over time I would guess that this is your built in mechanism for the species being able to adapt to climate changes……The earlier spring pops the more successful those front end outliers become.......maybe......

Someone will probably say that none of this matters because that early hen will eventually go renest and that’s true……..but here’s what I suspect about renesting……I suspect there’s probably about a 6-7 week optimal window for poults to hatch out and grow through the most vulnerable stage occurring in late April through early June when insect availability is at its peak……the old saying of April showers bring May flowers…….It also brings along insects . The hens that have to start over and renest may potentially nest successfully but I would bet that the brooding success is much lower for those poults that hatch outside of that optimal insect window. I bet the end poult recruitment numbers are pretty low for renesters that get really off schedule……If they don’t hatch out until late June or into July then they may have missed the bus on easy to catch bug stuff

I’d like to see the percentage of poultry litter spread in those green circled counties vs the same number of counties being the worst….

Something I noticed looking at all the rainfall maps was that we get a lot of rain events during March, April, May that impact the northern part of the state but never make it to the southeastern corner......I think because of this the bottom right corner may be more prone to being impacted by dry spells during this time period.....Below was for 2019......two years before the southeastern corner saw a major downswing in harvest numbers in 2021........That will likely end up being at least a 6-7 year low for that part of the state.....You can see it was in drought conditions during April.....Also look at the map that shows the year's total and you can see our distinct areas separated.

https://www.weather.gov/bmx/climo_2019review

Here's a pretty cool map to play around with to see the rainfall by month.....If you'll go down to map overlay and slide that precipitation meter over to left a little it makes the map easier to see.

https://water.weather.gov/precip/

To see the totality of how things are functioning I think you gotta take the layout of the landscape and run fluctuating annual weather patterns through it and those two things pretty much give you the base framework for your “blueprint” for why things are playing out the way they are……Both aspects are impacting the outcome over time. The annual weather patterns are what’s dictating the swings from 14K – 18K in our harvest like we’ve seen over the last 5 years…….The changes to the “chess board” layout is what’s dictating long term whether we’re swinging in that range or whether its say 30K-35K instead…….The “turkey decline” is likely due to things we are doing to the chess board……mainly through the creation of excess predator loads IMO…..coons, coyotes, bobcats, hawks, and owls……We’ve created better predator habitat with the landscape as a whole…..I think what turkeys need as much as anything is for there to not be an excess amount of those things wearing their asses out at every turn. We’re completely focused on trying to create habitat for them to hide in and not focusing any at all on the amount of critters being created that they have to hide from…..Supplementally feeding coons is right at the top of the list.

Is it weather? Is it chicken litter? Is it predators? Is it HUNTERS?

Weather just fluctuates back and forth pretty consistently over time…..It isnt causing a long term decline. The main issue is predators and the variables that we humans are manipulating that's promoting their abundance on a landscape scale …….

I agree, but several of those counties circled in the graph, I’d be willing to say, are the highest chicken litter spreading counties in the south east United States. Knowing that is the number 1 turkey killing agent of all time, just doesn’t make since on how they’ve done so well…

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!!