Its not youtube, social media, forums

[2flyfish4]

I wanted to start a new thread on this topic. But it is in response to the Chadron, Nebraska thread. It seems everyone blames social media, YouTube, and internet forums like this one for the lack of birds and amount of pressure alot of places are seeing.

I have a different take. I blame the state game and fish departments. They have to get ahead of this problem. Turkey hunters have become very mobile and willing to travel to new areas to hunt good spots. To take a slam or complete the 49.

The individual state game and fish dept's have to get a handle on their turkey population and how many birds can be taken without a over harvest to the population.

2nd they need to cater to their resident hunters and make sure they have ample opportunity to hunt.

And 3rd they need to limit the amount of out of state hunters if their turkey populations can not handle the amount of additional hunting pressure and harvest of birds. I think the best way for them to do this is alot Xamount of tags per year to non residents and go through a draw system to obtain tags. Some areas may take a few years to draw a tag, other areas may have a near 100% draw rate bc the demand is not their or turkey populations are very strong.. Either way the state can control pressure and harvest rates by controlling how many tags they allow per year.

Just my thoughts on the situation.

[Gooserbat]

The biggest problem is poult survival.  If the states can figure out how to stay ahead of that everything else is mute. 

[2flyfish4]

The biggest problem is poult survival.  If the states can figure out how to stay ahead of that everything else is mute.

Unfortunately no one will ever be able to control that. All we can do is concentrate on what we can control and controlling hunter harvest rates is at the top in my opinion.

I figure this may cause alot of pushback. No one wants their favorite out of state hunt to turn into a draw hunt, were odds may only be 20-40% and you only get a tag every 3-5 years.

[spaightlabs]

it's a combo of factors, including fish nd game departments and social media hero posts.

A few years back in the area of KS were we hunt the limit was one.  Bird numbers were super high,  you'd almost have to try to not kill your bird.  Hunters, and especially outfitters, applied continuing pressure to increase the limit in the area to match the rest of the state.  After many, many years they were successful and the hunting quality suffered for it.

Turns out when you increase the limit everyone and their brother figures it must be pretty dang good if they are increasing the limit.

it was at first, but increased harvest equals decreased birds eventually.  Add in some cyclical declines, a big push by the KS government to drive revenues and constantly increased traditional and social media exposure and voila, Houston, we have had a problem.

[SimanOhio]

As someone who YouTubes heavily and has their own social media brand, I can tell you that's NOT the problem.

I would be doing the exact same thing I am now even if I didn't have the channel, and more birds are killed by non social media followers than any guy with a camera in the woods. To think the hunting now sucks because of that is incorrect.


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[Improvinghunter101]

I don't think they mean that the people filming are killing off the birds. I believe what they are saying are the followers of the people filming are seeing what states the people filming are going to and are going there.  I'm sure the people filming aren't going to put all their crappy hunts on Youtube.  They're putting their highlight reels on there where they have a bird working and hammering to them or one that comes in.  So then the people watching think it's an amazing area, when it probably took a few days of scouting and several days of striking out to finally get one and so the followers go to that state. 

I do agree that predation and liberal limits and seasons have altered the population.  People are bow hunting more and when that bow season comes in a a couple weeks early, they're going out.  Then if they can kill 3 or more, may as well do it before everyone else can.  Then when the state is pumping money into advertising and bringing people in and when they go to youtube and see everyone's highlight reel, they go there.  I believe the state needs to put the advertising fund into land management and give out grants to private land owners to manage for turkeys as well.  I have a small piece of property that I manage to the best of my ability.  Nobody else around lifts a finger in the off season.  Therefore, when season comes, it's not uncommon to have people hunting close to the line because they don't have turkeys or deer.  Another issue is outfitters like leasing up thousands of acres so the people that use to hunt it, now have to either win the lottery to pay for a lease or hunt public ground.  It's a culmination of issues.

[PNWturkey]

Turkey hunters have become very mobile and willing to travel to new areas to hunt good spots.

Has anyone seen good data for the % of turkeys in each state (or at least some popular states) harvested by residents vs. non-residents?

i.e. if 20,000 turkeys were harvested in a given state in a given year, how many of them were by non-residents?

[JohnSouth22]

I wanted to start a new thread on this topic. But it is in response to the Chadron, Nebraska thread. It seems everyone blames social media, YouTube, and internet forums like this one for the lack of birds and amount of pressure alot of places are seeing.

I have a different take. I blame the state game and fish departments. They have to get ahead of this problem. Turkey hunters have become very mobile and willing to travel to new areas to hunt good spots. To take a slam or complete the 49.

The individual state game and fish dept's have to get a handle on their turkey population and how many birds can be taken without a over harvest to the population.

2nd they need to cater to their resident hunters and make sure they have ample opportunity to hunt.

And 3rd they need to limit the amount of out of state hunters if their turkey populations can not handle the amount of additional hunting pressure and harvest of birds. I think the best way for them to do this is alot Xamount of tags per year to non residents and go through a draw system to obtain tags. Some areas may take a few years to draw a tag, other areas may have a near 100% draw rate bc the demand is not their or turkey populations are very strong.. Either way the state can control pressure and harvest rates by controlling how many tags they allow per year.

Just my thoughts on the situation.

I agree about the YouTube thing but there is zero doubt in my mind that since you can't kill a bird you have to point a finger as to why that is. There is and always will be those who can't kill and its "not because they're a bad turkey hunter" its because of X, Y or Z. You tubers, too much pressure, ect are just the easiest for you to point your fingers at.  This is the second post you've done about limiting/limiting the max birds one can kill. its obvious you don't struggle with the issue yourself.

[SimanOhio]

In my area (Ohio) predators play a huge part. Nobody is trapping nest raiders and the population has exploded since everyone also baits for deer.

Add in the coyotes and foxes and life is pretty rough for a turkey.


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[2flyfish4]

Turkey hunters have become very mobile and willing to travel to new areas to hunt good spots.

Has anyone seen good data for the % of turkeys in each state (or at least some popular states) harvested by residents vs. non-residents?

i.e. if 20,000 turkeys were harvested in a given state in a given year, how many of them were by non-residents?

Thats one of the big points I'd like to make. Most states game and fish dept. Have no hard numbers on turkey populations, turkey harvest rates, and what a sustainable harvest rate is for the population.

Instead, what many of the game and fish dept said is we want revenue, let's advertise with the social media and youtubers and bring hunters to our state. Next thing they know they have had an I Flux of 25k hunters that took an additional 10k birds that spring. (I'm just throwing out numbers, I have no idea what the real data is)

What the game and fish dept should have done is put the resource first. Did their research, come to the conclusion with hard numbers that we have X amount of birds and we can sustain X amount of sustainable additional Harvest. Then advertised accordingly to collect revenue, with the process of a draw so you only had an additional 10k hunters taking an additional 2500 birds every spring resulting in sustainable healthy turkey populations and not everyone looking around saying what happened to our birds.

[JohnSouth22]

What the game and fish dept should have done is put the resource first. Did their research, come to the conclusion with hard numbers that we have X amount of birds and we can sustain X amount of sustainable additional Harvest. Then advertised accordingly to collect revenue, with the process of a draw so you only had an additional 10k hunters taking an additional 2500 birds every spring resulting in sustainable healthy turkey populations and not everyone looking around saying what happened to our birds.
[/quote]

agreed 100% with this.  also lets not forget that this grand decline has happened on their watch....I would like to think the majority of people abide by state bag limits (cross referencing licenses sold/harvests reported) 40-50% success rates are abnormally good so even if there's some outlaws you'll never even touch 60% success rates. So as they continue to pile on regulations and pushing back seasons its all based on theory. And its hard to be confident in because their theory of what was sustainable for a bird population in years past has become quite obvious that it was not and in a way they failed.

[FLGobstopper]

The biggest problem is poult survival.  If the states can figure out how to stay ahead of that everything else is mute.

Unfortunately no one will ever be able to control that. All we can do is concentrate on what we can control and controlling hunter harvest rates is at the top in my opinion.

I figure this may cause alot of pushback. No one wants their favorite out of state hunt to turn into a draw hunt, were odds may only be 20-40% and you only get a tag every 3-5 years.

No one wants their home state to turn into a primarily draw state either. If you want to hunt public land in certain parts of my state that's about what the odds are. Some parts it's every other year to 3 years but like I said depends on where you want to go.

[redleg06]

1. Turkey numbers have been declining since before youtube hunters became a thing. But...90%(+ or -) of a state's land is private and my guess is that the majority of the increased hunting pressure resulting from the youtube movement is on public... with that in mind, I do think the public land (which is the much smaller % of land in the majority of states, is getting hunted harder because of what they're doing.   Some of their video's have 100,000+ viewers on a single video- and it has the name of the state in the title...from there, it doesn't take much to identify a specific part of the state or even specific piece of land.  So if you say 100,000 viewers on a video of _______ state, and they go light it up at that spot, and just 1% of that viewer audience decides to head to that area...1% of that number equals 1,000 extra people going to that area, with a majority of them going to hunt public because these videos are specifically promoting using public land. So while 1000 more hunters spread across ALL land (public and private combined) isn't a huge difference when spread out, it's huge to isolated public areas. I'm not going to act like I don't enjoy their video's and respect what they're doing but I want to see them use their influence to make positive changes, even more so than they already are.

My thought on this is, if they're going to profit from the public hunting land, they need to be giving as much back to the resource as they are taking out. That needs to mean donations, calls to action for their audience to do things like trapping (with how - to videos, etc), and direct action to give back. Some of them do this and it's noted but it needs to be a direct focus...if they can influence people to travel to hunt states away, surely they can influence them to also pick up a few coon traps and get to work, or volunteer to help with habitat, or take personal responsibility on self-regulating the number of birds they take from a specific state or area, etc.  If you're going to use your platform in a way that puts stress on an already struggling resource, there needs to be an equal emphasis on giving just as much back IMO.

[redleg06]

Turkey hunters have become very mobile and willing to travel to new areas to hunt good spots.

Has anyone seen good data for the % of turkeys in each state (or at least some popular states) harvested by residents vs. non-residents?

i.e. if 20,000 turkeys were harvested in a given state in a given year, how many of them were by non-residents?

I have not but it's almost a non-starter to take non-resident numbers into account on total state harvest IMO. Mostly because there's a lot more private land to disperse the added pressure AND because a lot of non residents are going to public land anyway. I think the real issue with out of state hunters is going to come from the effect on the public land in that area... What's that ratio look like?  In a lot of these states, the public land is so limited, relative to private, that it doesn't take a ton of extra hunters to make a big dent.

[joey46]

For all the whining the residents do the Florida draw system for most of the public land is the only way to go.  Why they don't limit the non-residents to one bird is a mystery but the south Florida Osceola is a money game and I bet it won't change in the near future.  The you tubers and TV guys do add to the pressure.  Find one notable TV guy that doesn't start off in Florida.  You can set your watch that by mid February the hunts from season 2021 would start popping up on the Outdoor Channel and others.  They did.