Alabama DCNR loves bats turtles snakes frogs eagles and weird crap way more than a wild turkey. I personally think that is a huge problem. Prove me wrong.
Studies? Why keep doing them. It's predators, case closed.
Until we hunters have a agency that cares and spends our money on what we originally pay for then I see a dim future for turkeys in general.
Amen!
I see similarities in the situation now with African elephants. Some of the African countries outlawed hunting them years ago. With no funds from hunters to manage and protect them, poachers soon wiped them out. There was nobody to stop them.
But elephants actually increased in the countries that allowed hunting. That is now coming to an end as the geniuses who run the US FWS have decreed that we can't bring any elephant parts back to the US, and so have many European nations. The president of Botswana threatened to send Germany 20,000 elephants to roam freely over their country to see what it's like to live with them. That was a funny response, but it doesn't change the fact that African elephants are doomed to extinction, and it's not due to anything except essentially ending legal hunting of them.
It will likely be a long time before turkeys go extinct in AL, but I believe their numbers will decline in direct proportion to hunting restrictions. Our land will produce a few without effort from anyone, but the numbers we all want to see come from management. Eliminate hunting and the management goes with it. The poachers will be very hard on the few that remain.
