Well, for starters, turkeys in my area and are the greater area of people I’m in close contact with didn’t dwindle. They dropped rapidly. “The entire southeast” is down, I keep hearing, from the scientific community. That’s a large and diverse region to be pinned on weather, hunting, burning, hahitat, etc. It just makes more sense that a disease might be the culprit. It makes at least equal sense to a picky hen, low T theory and age old season dates being wrong, wouldn’t you say?
Besides that, I have (marginally illegally, hmm, hmm) hatched and raised two clutches of wild turkeys from destroyed nests here on my property (one mowed over and one burned over nest). Here, with daily care and a brooder, feeding on a diverse diet and all the crickets they could eat, both flocks wound up suffering through avian pox or what the gamers would call “foul pox”. They took heavy losses even being babied by me behind chicken wire. Out in the bushes wandering around with swollen eyelids, I’d say they would have been basically all lost.
That’s where I’m coming from, and I’m pretty darn disappointed in the nonsense I keep hearing from both sides of the biologists mouths. On the one hand, we’re screwing them up by hunting and we need a synchronized hatch…on the other, burn away! They can renest multiple times, donchaknow!
It was brought up at the public meeting I attended to make zones for turkeys. The biologist there said “it makes it more complicated and people complain”.
Exactly why the Biologist can’t produce accurate information. Why wouldn’t a true sportsman provide information on harvest unless they have other intentions like over harvesting turkeys
wow Dooly County on had 34 birds reported
