Maybe 2 gobblers in one day isn't good management (or even 2 in one week)?
Hunter Johnson---Arkansas Game and Fish
April 22 at 6:13 PM
Turkey hunters- You've called in that longbeard, he's drumming and strutting in front of you and you've got a bead on his neck. This is the moment you've been waiting for, it's all come together and fixing to happen.....but do you know what it's taken to get here? Most turkey hunters don't know. Most turkey hunters believe that turkeys just do their thing and they will be there to shoot come spring. I was born into a long line of turkey hunters, I killed my first bird 37 years ago when I was 10 years old and have hunted most years since. I thought I knew turkeys, but I have recently became a "turkey nerd". I manage a fairly large farm for turkey habitat, and a few years ago I set out to learn everything I could about turkeys....their behavior, breeding habits, nesting, brood rearing, roosting and feeding. My research led me to Dr Mike Chamberlin, one of the top turkey research biologist in the nation. Dr Chamberlin has devoted his life to turkey research and has recently came out with solid research that debunks most everything I thought I knew about turkeys. Yesterday I was listening to a podcast titled "Are you a producer or consumer", and it got me thinking, is the average hunter doing anything to help the declining turkey population that is currently going on nation wide? Probably not! Let's look at a few things we have recently learned from Dr Chamberlin's research:
1. The "pecking order" that goes on during the breeding phase- did you know that wild turkey hens have a pecking order that they breed in? Starting in the early spring, male turkeys get vocal, they gobble trying to establish their dominance amongst other males, hoping that hens will pick them for breeding. In the mean time, hens are establishing their dominance amongst each other as they choose a male to mate with. All this goes on for several days to several weeks. This is why we often hear a lot of gobbling in the early spring. Once breeding time arrives, a male "gobbler" may have several hens that have chosen to breed with him.....and him alone. The boss hen gets to go first, but only after she takes her sweet time and is good and ready. Then the next hen and so on till they are all bred or just run out of time in the breeding phase and decide to stop. So what happens if the gobbler the hens have chosen gets shot? Do they just breed with the next gobbler in line, kind of like deer do? No, the hens start all over! They re-evaluate all the gobblers in the area again. This often forces hens to travel to other flocks of turkeys to choose a gobbler to bred with, and yep you guessed it, the hens have to once again re-establish their dominance with other hens in that group to establish breeding order. What if all this takes place again and that gobbler gets shot....yep they start it all over once again. In spite of all of this, statistics show that about 75% of mature hens will get bred. Not a bad number right?.....wait, we ain't done!
2. Nesting- so now 75% of our hens have been bred. Not a bad number if we have 100 hens in the area, but sucks if we only have a few! So these hens have been traveling to their nesting site and laying 1 egg per day, this can last for about 2 weeks till her entire clutch is laid. Once she lays her last egg she starts sitting on them. She sits there for 23 hours each day, only leaving the nest to feed and use the bathroom. She sits there on the ground on top of her eggs day and night, through rain, thunderstorms and even snow fall in some areas, for 28 days. This leaves her vulnerable to everything in the woods.....coyotes, bobcats, snakes, coon, possum, rats, skunks, hogs, tractors, skidders, fire, extreme weather; basically everything can destroy her nest! Because of this there is only a 25% chance that 1 or more of her eggs will hatch!! Ok, now the numbers are getting real! But wait, we still ain't done!
3. Brood rearing- After 28 days of the hen sitting on her nest, the eggs start hatching. Once the last egg has hatched the hen leaves the nest sight with her newborn poults following, she's in search of adequate brood rearing habitat.....a place with bare ground so the little chicks can move around freely, a place with short overhead cover to hide the poults from owls and hawks, and a place with lots of bugs because 70% of a poults diet comes from bugs for the first few weeks. The place the hen chooses to raise her poults has to have all 3 of these things. Statistics show that the further she has to travel to find this spot drastically reduces the poults survival rate to a point that at having to travel 1000 yards to find adequate brooding habitat equals zero survival of her poults! Ok, we all know that's a challenge in itself, but let's assume the hen and all of her poults made it safely to adequate brood rearing cover. Now they have the next 2-4 weeks to try and survive on the ground. They mainly hunt bugs by sight which keeps them actively hunting for food over the next few weeks. Owls and hawks are sitting on limbs waiting on their chance to attack from above. Coyotes, Bobcat, foxes and even coon are lurking in the bushes around them waiting on their chance to attack. Landowners are running around with tractors and bush hogs mowing everything so it looks "pretty". But still these aren't their number one problem, the worst problem is that they can't regulate their body temperature! The morning temps are still in the 40's and 50's on good days in a lot of cases, now imagine that front moving in where it is cold, cloudy and drizzling rain for 3-4 days in a row....this is their number one killer! In fact, it's so bad that we can normally only expect about 25% of these young poults to survive the first 2-4 weeks till they are able to fly up to a limb! Once they are old enough to fly up to a limb their survival rates drastically increase and we can start breathing a sigh of relief!!
So think about this- how many hens do you have now?....75% of those hens get bred, 25 % of those bred will have at least 1 egg hatch, 25% of those newborn poults will survive long enough to fly up to a limb. Now assume that only 1/2 of these poults are males and now those males have to survive for 2 years before you can put your shotgun sights on him like we started this story out with!
Wow!! Did you have any idea this was all so complicated? I didn't have any idea till recently. It's no wonder turkey numbers are declining, in fact it's a wonder we still have any turkeys at all! These aren't sustainable numbers for a steady turkey population.
So, why are turkeys declining? It's death of 1000 cuts! What can we do?
......The best answer is better nesting/brood rearing habitat and allowing more gobblers to bred before they are killed. So how do we get better habitat across the state?
For private landowners, this means educating ourselves first on what better turkey habitat is, then rolling up our sleeves and getting busy making it. For public land, it's slightly different but this is where your help is needed the most!! Since we can't manage public land ourselves, we have to support those that can. All across the nation Game and Fish departments have heard this latest research and are re-evaluating their turkey regulations as we speak. We need to do all we can to help them help us! We have to educate ourselves enough to know that closed canopy mature hardwoods have very little benefit to turkeys and how silly we sound griping about timber cutting and burning as both are necessary for good turkey habitat! Instead, we have to push for them to continue to create better nesting and brood habitat, insist on later season dates so more hens have time to breed, stop shooting bearded hens and things like only 1 gobbler per week can help...... support anything that can help these gobblers breed more hens each spring. But perhaps the most important thing we as hunters can do is to realize our own greed and that it's ok to not "tag out" every year. When I was a kid there was a covey of quail in most of the fence rows and ditch banks, I never dreamed a day would come that we didn't have quail to hunt, yet here we are and for a lot of the same reasons the turkey are declining. Those of you that still have a small covey of quail on your property, would you go out and shoot them? Heck no you wouldn't, because then you wouldn't have any! But you realize that as long as you have a few quail there is a chance that number can grow. We are headed that way with turkeys, and we are headed there pretty fast! Let's do something before it's too late! So examine yourself, then ask yourself this question.....am I just a consumer or am I also a producer? HJ
