Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case underwear listening Hunt podcast, you
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor
Speaker 1: where you stand with on X real quick before people
Speaker 1: listen to the show, I want to make it feel
Speaker 1: like they're being super constructive. And how would we do that? Well,
Speaker 1: we would have your honest tell this story. You like that?
Speaker 1: I set that up? I did, Um, which story do
Speaker 1: you want me to tell about the I've got a
Speaker 1: couple of them guy getting shot? Okay, what do you
Speaker 1: mean you got a couple of them? Well, we were
Speaker 1: just earlier talking about the weasel in your yard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but how does that make people feel constructive? That's just
Speaker 1: something in your yard. They don't own your yard. When
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the shot they getting shot. Thing would
Speaker 1: show like how this how this program saves lives? Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm reading up though right now? How much does anybody
Speaker 1: in this room know? How much one unit of blood is? Point?
Speaker 1: I don't know, yes, roughly the equivalent of one point
Speaker 1: about five million leaders. Good job. So we had a
Speaker 1: podcasts a while back which was number Brody You Were Here,
Speaker 1: I Was Not Here? Episode one two called Bleeding Out
Speaker 1: and uh a fella rode in um Joey. Joey wrote
Speaker 1: in to say that this podcast saved his father's life.
Speaker 1: Now this podcast you here or not You do you
Speaker 1: want to give a quick rundown of what went down
Speaker 1: on that podcast? Well, we had our buddy Dr Alan Lazar,
Speaker 1: who's an emergency room doctor and uh that's correct, also
Speaker 1: a hunter in Detroit and Detroit. He had been helping
Speaker 1: us out with various research questions and uh so Steve
Speaker 1: decided to have him out because he's an interesting dude.
Speaker 1: And uh one of his main points was that all
Speaker 1: hunters and fisherman too probably should be carrying around a
Speaker 1: tourniquet in the woods because if you get cut bad,
Speaker 1: that's really the only thing that's going to save your life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he go ahead, Well he had mentioned everybody thinks like, well,
Speaker 1: I'll just jury rig one, right, do you know that
Speaker 1: it's okay to say Jerry Rigg and jury Rigg. No.
Speaker 1: I looked it up. People think, wow, does jury rig one?
Speaker 1: He's like by the time you jury rig one, you're dead.
Speaker 1: Your buddy's dead. How's it okay to say Jerry rig am?
Speaker 1: I not thinking that it's the same like kind of
Speaker 1: like it's a negative like, isn't it doesn't it come
Speaker 1: from Jerry's kids and doing it the wrong way? That's
Speaker 1: what I always understood. If that's the case, I'm not
Speaker 1: I don't say it anyway. Is If that's the case,
Speaker 1: I definitely wouldn't say it. But you think it has
Speaker 1: to do with Jerry Lewis telephone? Uh? Yeah, Where does
Speaker 1: Jerry Rick come from? I just thought it was people.
Speaker 1: Just Jerry can come from? Jerry can. It's a good one.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's not a jury can No jury
Speaker 1: rig who seth you know the type he's just sitting
Speaker 1: over there watching this. Well you were the one that
Speaker 1: says that you found out that it's okay to say
Speaker 1: about so I want to know why that isn't And
Speaker 1: then it's we should just I don't mean okay, like
Speaker 1: socially okay that that that that the source I looked
Speaker 1: at accepts both. Now it wasn't making a moral it
Speaker 1: wasn't anyways, you're dead by the time, like if you're
Speaker 1: gonna go, like run back to your truck and get
Speaker 1: whatever you come back. Your buddy's dead, that's right. And
Speaker 1: he's got like a national campaign going on. Uh right,
Speaker 1: it's called Stop the Bleed. A bunch of e R
Speaker 1: doctors going around and uh educating people about how to
Speaker 1: stop bleeding better. Right. Yeah. Yeah, And he convinced all
Speaker 1: of us to start packing tourniquets. Yeah, I had never
Speaker 1: done mine. Finally made it from my desk, the tourniquets
Speaker 1: they left me or you gave them to me too,
Speaker 1: into my back my daily backpack, which I guess is
Speaker 1: better than at my desk. But now I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: one and put one of my turkeys. He was trying
Speaker 1: to fancy new turniquet out yesterday. It's a belt that
Speaker 1: you wear. It's pretty aggressive, but yeah, you'd have a belt.
Speaker 1: Your belt is a tourniquet. Your belt can be deployed aid,
Speaker 1: so you would always just have it on. Well, just
Speaker 1: so happens that in this story Joey writes in about
Speaker 1: he used his belt as a tourniquet. They were out
Speaker 1: pheasant hunting. I believe in uh Colorado, Kansas, maybe some
Speaker 1: some place that has a lot of pheasants and uh,
Speaker 1: to cut this story a little bit shorter, they get
Speaker 1: to a spot where they're giving their dogs some water
Speaker 1: and uh, Joey's dad is in front of one of
Speaker 1: the other hunters guns and the hunter's guns gun goes off.
Speaker 1: It's a twelve gauge and approximately eight yards and catches
Speaker 1: him in the ribs, abdomen and uh, one of his
Speaker 1: arms pretty bad bleeding. Um. They immediately realized it's bad.
Speaker 1: They call UH. It takes fifty minutes for them to
Speaker 1: get for help to get there. I think Joey did
Speaker 1: a good job with his story. I like the way
Speaker 1: that he explained this part right here. He said when
Speaker 1: he was looking at the blood, he's a big deer hunter,
Speaker 1: and he said, if I was tracking a deer and
Speaker 1: saw this much blood, I'd be expecting that deer to
Speaker 1: be dead or just around the corner. He said, it
Speaker 1: was like spurting right. Yes, that's a great detail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: great detail like that. And they're on snow to which
Speaker 1: always makes it makes it look like there's more blood.
Speaker 1: It makes you think you're gonna find deer that you don't. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So anyways, he's saying that they had started a tourniquet
Speaker 1: with some ripped clothing shreads. One of the other hunters
Speaker 1: had well, he had just recently two weeks prior, listened
Speaker 1: to episode one two leading out, and he remembered three
Speaker 1: key points. One, nobody ties a tourniquets tight enough. Two,
Speaker 1: tying a tourniquet does not necessarily mean that the limb
Speaker 1: will be lost. And three, when tying the tourniquet, it's
Speaker 1: necessary to go as far up the limb as possible.
Speaker 1: So he took off his belt, put it way up
Speaker 1: his dad's arm, and cranked on it. Um. He made
Speaker 1: it to the hospital. He received fourteen units of blood,
Speaker 1: which we now know is uh roughly fourteen points and
Speaker 1: how many doesn't could that possibly be true? How many
Speaker 1: points does a human body hold? Seth come on eight
Speaker 1: eight to twelve, So they might it might have been
Speaker 1: more blood than his in your body losing they was
Speaker 1: pumping it in. I think I'm not calling the brother liar.
Speaker 1: This is hard to fathom. Okay, Well, let's just say
Speaker 1: it was tanned and not fourteen. Um. Yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 1: say like a pipe and an out pipe. The hospital
Speaker 1: complimented him many times on the quality and application of
Speaker 1: his tourniquet all principles uh that he learned on a podcast.
Speaker 1: So there you go, man, good job. Listen to the
Speaker 1: media podcast might save someone's life, especially episode one nine. Yep, now,
Speaker 1: uh real quick, Johnny, tell about the wheel quick. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get a little background, okay, Uh, well, just
Speaker 1: telling about the weasels. I was gonna talk about how
Speaker 1: I can't get permission on your property and whatnot. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: my gal just loves loves the wildlife more alive than dead.
Speaker 1: Sometimes she loves them more in a way. In a
Speaker 1: way because there's a long list of things on your
Speaker 1: property that are on the goal list or they are
Speaker 1: on the okay list. Listen, Yeah, as soon as they
Speaker 1: took out a chicken or two and the ermine long
Speaker 1: tail weasel, it'd be game on. You know, Like we
Speaker 1: had some squirrels attack in the house. This winner, she's
Speaker 1: out there with the hunting them. You know, she said
Speaker 1: a babe pile for those squirrels, but she didn't. I
Speaker 1: think she got a shot off but she missed. But
Speaker 1: later I think one day I had come home, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, you pulping my driveway. You can kind of
Speaker 1: see past the back of the house. I look down there,
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, what is that wondering what that squirrels
Speaker 1: doing there? I get a little closer and he just
Speaker 1: sitting there, munching away on whatever she'd put out, some seeds.
Speaker 1: So I went inside, I got the twenty two and
Speaker 1: dispatched him. She uh even almost declared war on a fox.
Speaker 1: What she did? She killed the fox. Okay, so don't
Speaker 1: give me the whole wildlife thing. Uh So it's pretty
Speaker 1: cool on these ermans around because you get to see
Speaker 1: him hunting every now and then, maybe once or twice
Speaker 1: a winter. And we have a decent, contentent population that
Speaker 1: lives in and around the house, and the erman's usually hunting.
Speaker 1: I've never seen anything besides the cotton tail. Anyways. The
Speaker 1: other morning i'm up, must have been this this weekend.
Speaker 1: It's snow and there's like three or four inches of
Speaker 1: fresh snow, and I see a bunny rabbit hopping around
Speaker 1: our plow truck. Watch him for a minute, go away,
Speaker 1: come back, he's hopping around. And then next thing I
Speaker 1: see is I see like the tumble the bunny sort
Speaker 1: of tumbling erratically down our driveway, which immediately because I've
Speaker 1: seen it before. Means that he and the ermine are
Speaker 1: locked together and the ermins trying to grab by the
Speaker 1: neck and suffocate it, and they're tumbling away. Now I've
Speaker 1: seen this two or three other times. The bunny rabbit
Speaker 1: always gets away, so they kind of go out of
Speaker 1: view over kind of the crest of the hill, and
Speaker 1: I wait for a bit, don't see him come back.
Speaker 1: Maybe five or ten minutes later, and a little farther
Speaker 1: down the driveway, I can just see a dark spot
Speaker 1: and I can see a magpie like five ft away.
Speaker 1: So I grab the grab the buyos and I look
Speaker 1: down there and like it's actually two dark spots because
Speaker 1: the white ermine is bisecting the cotton tail rabbit. And
Speaker 1: now he's just sitting there. Then a rabbit was still
Speaker 1: alive a little bit. He was sort of the ermine
Speaker 1: was finishing off. But it's amazing how fast and magpies were.
Speaker 1: They're sort of like, all right, we're gonna get our
Speaker 1: peace too. Well, as long as I watched, he fended
Speaker 1: off the magpies and eventually drug the bunny rabbit into
Speaker 1: the sort of hawthorn and thicket, and I couldn't see
Speaker 1: him I didn't. I don't want to go. I wanted
Speaker 1: to go investigate, but I didn't want to go disturb
Speaker 1: his you know, peace and his kill. So I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know if the magpies eventually end up getting
Speaker 1: a chunk or not. But uh, he drug him out
Speaker 1: of the road and into the Hawthorne the Erman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. Fourteen inch really, that's a
Speaker 1: good one. I just had to throw a number at it. Well,
Speaker 1: we wanted one because we wanted we want one to
Speaker 1: get tanned. We want one big exemplary specimen to get tanned. Um,
Speaker 1: we want to collect up addition to stuff, we want
Speaker 1: to collect up one of all furbears. Uh as a
Speaker 1: little project. We're out. We got our big one because
Speaker 1: we were out that. I don't think I told this story.
Speaker 1: Me and my kid walk out of my friend's ranch
Speaker 1: house and he's like, there's a coyote. There's a coyote,
Speaker 1: And I look, I don't see an kyote. So now
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit annoyed. I'm like, dude, you know,
Speaker 1: don't just be like crying out that you see stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but your boy usually doesn't. He's got a good game. Out, Well,
Speaker 1: check this out, So I mean, not thirty seconds goes by.
Speaker 1: He turns and looks the other way and yells, there's
Speaker 1: a weasel. Now you can go like a long time
Speaker 1: without seeing a weasel. So then I lay into him.
Speaker 1: I'm like, James, you gotta and I'm like yelling at him.
Speaker 1: This weasel runs back across the road the other direction,
Speaker 1: and he runs over there. It's a little for ten
Speaker 1: and the reason went down in the hole and I
Speaker 1: started doing one of those like making mouse noises with
Speaker 1: your hand. He popped his head right back out of
Speaker 1: the hole and Jimmy got him nice tanker. But then
Speaker 1: in skinning it, I broke The whole thing is in
Speaker 1: skinning the tail. I have a tail stripper that's used
Speaker 1: for like getting the tailbone out of tails. Um, but
Speaker 1: it didn't have a fine enough it doesn't have like
Speaker 1: a weasel setting, and I tried to flub it and
Speaker 1: broke the end of the damn tail off a little tip.
Speaker 1: So I'm My wife's annoyed because she doesn't like it,
Speaker 1: this whole thing. Um. I was like, we just need one,
Speaker 1: and she's like, well, here's your one. I'm like yeah,
Speaker 1: but the tail is broken now, so I might just
Speaker 1: stitch the tailback on Winners, kind of winding down. Michael
Speaker 1: Chamberlain special guest here today. Oh one last thing? Are you? Um?
Speaker 1: Are you doctor Michael Chamberlain. Okay? I like that that
Speaker 1: kind of adds, that kind of builds that resume here.
Speaker 1: Just call me Mike on the show. You just want
Speaker 1: to go by Mike. Yeah, only my wife and my
Speaker 1: mother called me Michael. Dr Michael chamber Uh. Wild turkey researcher. Yep.
Speaker 1: But I got one last point I want to before
Speaker 1: we get into that. We're good on weasels great. Um,
Speaker 1: one last thing I want to mention, and this has
Speaker 1: to do with turkeys. You know, when you're hunting turkeys,
Speaker 1: you don't use a blind. It's called running and gunning. Uh.
Speaker 1: A guy we're talking about on social media. We had
Speaker 1: a thing up about like when you guys don't where
Speaker 1: you're from, you don't ice fish and ice fishing. There's
Speaker 1: a thing now and then where you just strike off
Speaker 1: across the lake drilling thousand holes. Right. Um, it's the
Speaker 1: ice fish and equivalent of like walking along the bank,
Speaker 1: casting all over the damn place, and you call it
Speaker 1: hole hopping. Prospecting. Um what else you call it? Taking
Speaker 1: a poke, taking a few pokes whatever, You just like
Speaker 1: leave your area to start drilling holes all over the
Speaker 1: damn place and see what's going on. And a guy
Speaker 1: in Canada said, in Canada, that's called running and gunning,
Speaker 1: which I thought was because it's the gun. Um. Okay,
Speaker 1: how to turkey researcher? You're affiliated with the university University
Speaker 1: of Georgia. How does lay out? How that happens? Did
Speaker 1: you become a official turkey researcher hard work and good luck?
Speaker 1: Did you grow up hunting turkeys? I did? I did.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Virginia as a suburban kid that
Speaker 1: got to hunt on saturdays with his dad. Uh. We
Speaker 1: had a fall season that was actually as popular as
Speaker 1: the spring season then, so we actually learned the turkey
Speaker 1: hunt during the fall, calling them. Yeah, you'd you'd actually
Speaker 1: go and bust the flocks up, just walk until you
Speaker 1: run across the flock. Did you use a dog to
Speaker 1: scour him up? Sometimes? And as soon as the dog
Speaker 1: would flush or you would flush the birds, you just
Speaker 1: sat down where they flushed from and start calling. And
Speaker 1: usually the juvenile birds were the first ones to come
Speaker 1: back off in Jake's So you bust them up and
Speaker 1: they all fly in different directions. I want to know
Speaker 1: about the busting them up because I keep thinking I'm
Speaker 1: gonna gonna go out and do that. Some want to
Speaker 1: know you see them up like fifty year a hundred
Speaker 1: yards out right, we would actually like running and yelling
Speaker 1: at them. Well, what we would do is get up
Speaker 1: on high ground on ridges and call well you would, yeah,
Speaker 1: and as soon as you could get a response, you
Speaker 1: just start moving towards them until you could see them,
Speaker 1: and then you take off running. Now I didn't know
Speaker 1: there was like a locating components. So you're like really
Speaker 1: deliberately heading out to do this. Yes, yes, it's not
Speaker 1: like opportunistic and it's it's a bit on the redneck
Speaker 1: side because there you are running through the eastern hardwood forest,
Speaker 1: you know, wide open, trying to bust these birds just
Speaker 1: a shooting, no, just just just running and they would
Speaker 1: usually they would flush like quail. A lot of them
Speaker 1: would go in one direction, but the ones that did not,
Speaker 1: they were money. How close would you have to get
Speaker 1: to flush them just to really break it just depended.
Speaker 1: We used to do the same thing in Pennsylvania. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was popular in a popular way to I can
Speaker 1: thought when you opened your mouth next it would be
Speaker 1: to tell us about jewelry. Agin No, just find anything out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's had two research projects. Well yahni covered the one.
Speaker 1: Um jury rigged means something was assembled quickly with materials
Speaker 1: on hand and jerry built this says, or jerry rigged
Speaker 1: means it was cheap or poorly built. But what does
Speaker 1: it say that does it give the etymology? Free folks
Speaker 1: at home. The etymology of a word is sort of
Speaker 1: how it came to. What am I trying to say?
Speaker 1: There was? It's the words history origin. Yeah, the Wikipedia
Speaker 1: says it's origin lies in such efforts done on boats
Speaker 1: and ships, sail powered boats. M hmm, Kenny, how what
Speaker 1: were you saying? Seth um, No, I I cut my
Speaker 1: teeth on Turkey hunting in the fall of the same
Speaker 1: exact way. Just walking. We used to like get a
Speaker 1: group of guys, just walk until you find them. That's
Speaker 1: how we did it too. Spring hunting was not. Fall
Speaker 1: hunting was way more popular in Pennsylvania than sing hunting.
Speaker 1: Really before the world. That's true when I was a
Speaker 1: kid before that. Turkey population blew up. There's really only
Speaker 1: turkeys in the mountains, like down by where Seth lived,
Speaker 1: and fall hunting was the way people hunted him Seth
Speaker 1: from the mountains. Yeah, man, yeah, that's exactly how I
Speaker 1: grew up. Yeah, it was people like it just was
Speaker 1: not as popular the spring hunting where the spring is limited,
Speaker 1: and that's why it was just gaining popularity at that time.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, but you grew up where there always
Speaker 1: were turkeys. Yeah, it was just not as popular. It
Speaker 1: wasn't it as the thing that it is now. And
Speaker 1: now you know, of course it's done a complete script
Speaker 1: flip if you will, and spring hunting is it's hugely popular,
Speaker 1: and fall huntings declining and you know most of the state. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm so, we're like basically the same age. My grandfather
Speaker 1: still to this day will take fall turkey hunting over
Speaker 1: anything else. It's like his favorite thing to do. Well,
Speaker 1: you don't have to figure out if it's a male
Speaker 1: or female in most places. Okay, so you guys are
Speaker 1: systematic though, Climp on the ridge, located group the flock,
Speaker 1: take off running, and then just talk about the use
Speaker 1: of the dogs. Because I got a a friend of
Speaker 1: mine from back home from high school. He's got a
Speaker 1: turkey dog trained up to bust him. You just probably
Speaker 1: get a more effective bust with something as fast as
Speaker 1: a dog. Absolutely, So the dog would run into the flock,
Speaker 1: scatter the birds in all directions, and then you sit down,
Speaker 1: put a coat over the dog, or put the dog
Speaker 1: behind you, and and start yelping. And usually, like I said,
Speaker 1: the birds that scattered by themselves, they would immediately come
Speaker 1: back to you. And you're so the call you're making
Speaker 1: is called a kiki. Yeah, just a ki ki and
Speaker 1: a you a real raspy yelp. Anything that would make
Speaker 1: you think, make those birds think it was mom, because
Speaker 1: most of those birds that scattered were I mean, they
Speaker 1: were juveniles, got you. So anything that would bring those
Speaker 1: birds back to you, Well, what what? What is the difference?
Speaker 1: I never understood this. There's a kiki and a kiki run?
Speaker 1: Is that not true? You hear people refer to them
Speaker 1: as it's basically just this this you know kiki ki
Speaker 1: ki call that that birds make when they're younger. Oh
Speaker 1: so just different words from the same thing. I think
Speaker 1: it's the same thing. I didn't know if it was
Speaker 1: a difference in kikikiki run, And that kind of originates
Speaker 1: from you know, when you when you scatter poults in
Speaker 1: the summer, you'll hear the poults start whistling that kiki
Speaker 1: ki ki ki, and you know, and mom will start putting, clucking, trying,
Speaker 1: you know, so she doesn't they do it, but she
Speaker 1: doesn't do it. She can do it, she can't do
Speaker 1: the whistle. Turkeys have all sorts of vocalizations. Show me
Speaker 1: the sound, like if you let's hear you are you're
Speaker 1: hunting the fall, you you bust up a group of turkeys,
Speaker 1: Show me a sound that would be like sound that
Speaker 1: would be effective? Huh, But you'd call a bird in
Speaker 1: the spring like that. Yeah, it's basically. I mean, all
Speaker 1: you're trying to do is say, hey, here I am.
Speaker 1: That's them collecting up. Yeah, come back over here. Everything's
Speaker 1: good when it's not. I got a buddy that used
Speaker 1: to get Hans that way. Really, he would bust Hans up.
Speaker 1: He lived not far from here. He would bust Hans up.
Speaker 1: And I don't know what vocalization they have. Um, I've
Speaker 1: probably heard it, but then it's a whistle. If memory
Speaker 1: stirs and that's spent several years. He would bust them
Speaker 1: up and hide and start doing that, and eventually you'd
Speaker 1: start drawing him back in mhm. Yeah, because they make
Speaker 1: that raspy kind of cackling. Yeah, it's like, get on
Speaker 1: the ground and start running. Yeah, there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: my neighborhood and I hear it all the time. If
Speaker 1: you bust them up, they you'll hear him all in
Speaker 1: different directions making that noise. So you guys did that
Speaker 1: growing up? Absolutely? Did you know? Were you like? Man?
Speaker 1: When I get old, I'm gonna be a turkey biologist. No. Now.
Speaker 1: I went to Virginia Tech just wanted to be a
Speaker 1: you know, a game ward and wildlife biologist, wildlife manager.
Speaker 1: And next thing you know, I ended up in grad
Speaker 1: school at Mississippi State and realized research was was kind
Speaker 1: of my thing and got the opportunity to stay on
Speaker 1: and do a PhD. And the project that I studied
Speaker 1: when I was a master student was a turkey project.
Speaker 1: I was basically I didn't play in the study turkeys.
Speaker 1: I just ended up in this project and became infactuated
Speaker 1: with the bird and their biology. What was the project?
Speaker 1: It was just studying turkeys in the Mississippi Delta, just
Speaker 1: flood prone areas, didn't know a lot about the birds
Speaker 1: in that area. Um, I got to get my you know,
Speaker 1: feetwet if you will. And then my PhD program was
Speaker 1: actually looking at predation on turkeys. So I was studying
Speaker 1: turkeys using radio telemetry, but then I also put collars
Speaker 1: on coyodes, bobcats, gray foxes, raccoons and studied how all
Speaker 1: those species interact with turkeys. And then I landed in Academia,
Speaker 1: which was just fortuitous. What year was was that going
Speaker 1: on that you were doing that that initial research, uh
Speaker 1: through Do you feel that at that time there was
Speaker 1: a lot of low hanging fruit from turkey research because
Speaker 1: the country had gone so long without that many turkeys around. Yeah, that, man,
Speaker 1: that was the heyday. I mean, turkeys were exploding everywhere.
Speaker 1: They were being restored throughout their range and beyond, as
Speaker 1: you know, and the research that was ongoing was grabbing
Speaker 1: low hanging fruit, partially because we could answer those questions
Speaker 1: with the technology we had at the time. And there
Speaker 1: were studies everywhere. There were there were research projects and
Speaker 1: all sorts of states, you know, you know, multiple universities
Speaker 1: had work on going. And then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: around two thousand to two thousand three, it just kind
Speaker 1: of started stagnating. And I think part of that was complacency.
Speaker 1: You know, there were birds everywhere, they seem to be
Speaker 1: doing well. People harvest was increasing, and at least in
Speaker 1: most of the Eastern United States, and agencies stopped putting
Speaker 1: research money into turkeys at that point. And then you
Speaker 1: kind of saw this lull until the late you know,
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, two thousand ten period, when I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people in the East and Southeast realized
Speaker 1: there was there was an issue, and you've kind of
Speaker 1: seen a resurrection of turkey research in my eyes, and
Speaker 1: people stopped taking turkeys for granted. Yeah, absolutely, humans got
Speaker 1: short memories, man, we do. We do shortsighted and short
Speaker 1: memory in some cases. When you were doing that work,
Speaker 1: that initial work, you did a lot of predator work
Speaker 1: I did. What if you look at that, but also
Speaker 1: all the things you've learned since then. And I want
Speaker 1: to get back into in a minute, I get back
Speaker 1: into your sort of like professional biography. But what kills
Speaker 1: turkeys in your mind? Not in your mind? I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not you got to guess, you know, as a
Speaker 1: matter of fact that you look at like a national
Speaker 1: sort of picture. Um, what kills turkeys? All of your
Speaker 1: larger mammals, coach, bobcats, foxes, horned owls. Great horned owls
Speaker 1: are an efficient predator of turkeys because they kill him
Speaker 1: in the tree. Oh, they do, they do. Someone was
Speaker 1: telling me that just the other day, the dude we're
Speaker 1: driving around. Yeah, they are really efficient. And they kill
Speaker 1: adult tom's too. And we find that they do that
Speaker 1: early in the morning while the birds are gobbling. They
Speaker 1: single land on birds on you know, in the tree,
Speaker 1: and then it is to get him on the ground.
Speaker 1: And they actually hit them in the tree and you
Speaker 1: can see a plume of feathers that goes away from
Speaker 1: the tree in the direction that they carry the bird
Speaker 1: down to the ground. And then they kill the bird
Speaker 1: on the ground, consume what they want and leave and
Speaker 1: they you know, horned owls are bad man. They is
Speaker 1: a big thing to hit. Yeah, horned owls when they're
Speaker 1: in breeding pairs. They I used to call at the
Speaker 1: Bermuda triangle I had really when I was doing my
Speaker 1: PhD work, I had four raccoons. There were collared a skunk, um,
Speaker 1: a gray fox and two turkey hens in the same
Speaker 1: kind of general area, and this pair of horned owls
Speaker 1: killed all of them. Back up, give me the list again.
Speaker 1: It was four raccoons, a gray fox, a skunk and
Speaker 1: two turkeys, and that that parah you kill a raccoon
Speaker 1: rad cougar put the fight and almost seen a raccoon
Speaker 1: kill a dog one time. Remember that horned owls are
Speaker 1: vicious and they're so if you think about it, the
Speaker 1: way they hit their prey with the force that they
Speaker 1: hit their prey and they blindside you. You don't know
Speaker 1: what's coming. They have the element of surprise on their
Speaker 1: side and they're they're incredible. But what's the actual like
Speaker 1: the method of killing, like what dispatches the animals, not
Speaker 1: just the hit because you it's the talents. They strategically
Speaker 1: put the talents like around the neck I'm guessing neck,
Speaker 1: vertebrae back, anything that disabled them, and you hit it
Speaker 1: like a peregrine hits like they hit it. It's like
Speaker 1: a it's like a baseball bat. So they'll blow a
Speaker 1: gobbler out of a tree. Yes, yes, I wonder why
Speaker 1: they responds, well, yeah, it's in their frequency band that
Speaker 1: that owl hoot is in the same frequency band that
Speaker 1: a gobbles in. So some of the gobbling work we do,
Speaker 1: it's very the technology we use to tease out the gobbles.
Speaker 1: It's in the same frequency band as an owl hoot,
Speaker 1: as a crow call, as a coyote, how a gunshot,
Speaker 1: a cow moving, they're all within on the sonogram, they're
Speaker 1: all within that same frequency band. So it makes sense
Speaker 1: we need to give him one of our t shirts
Speaker 1: that shows all the things that make a turkey gobble.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen this shirt? No, but I'd love
Speaker 1: to happen. Do we gotta run? We got a running
Speaker 1: list that includes some incredible things. Oh, they'll they'll gobbled
Speaker 1: all sorts of things. It's crazy. Sonic booms, thunderclaps. Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely so a guy, a guy hawking rock to the
Speaker 1: stop signs in our list. That was me. When you
Speaker 1: say like the same frequency band, it's almost like they
Speaker 1: can't help themselves, like they just yeah you hear of
Speaker 1: shot gobbling? Ye Oh, I want to get I want
Speaker 1: to talk about this in like detail first ime on top.
Speaker 1: I want to finish up in the Great Horned Owls.
Speaker 1: So hold that thought about shot gobl exactly, Like what
Speaker 1: is he thinking, um, the great horned owls they ride
Speaker 1: it to the earth. Yes, so they hit. We lose,
Speaker 1: routinely lose. If we let's just for number or sake,
Speaker 1: let's just say we put fift GPS units on Tom's
Speaker 1: and on this site, we'll lose at least one or
Speaker 1: two before the turkey season starts to horned owls at
Speaker 1: least every year, and it always occurs from about right now,
Speaker 1: you know, late February early marks when they first start
Speaker 1: gobbling in the tree, until right before the turkey season
Speaker 1: when when we see gobbling really is starting to ramp up.
Speaker 1: That's when those horned owls hit. Those times, we had
Speaker 1: a gentleman the are day explained to me and Seth
Speaker 1: that he believes that his bobcats go up into the
Speaker 1: roost tree and kill the turkey's off the roost. Cats
Speaker 1: can obviously climb out. I can't really discount that. But
Speaker 1: I doesn't speak to you. It does not, because when
Speaker 1: you get under a turkey roost, they know exactly I mean,
Speaker 1: they know you're there. They know you're there long before
Speaker 1: you ever get there. And yes, cats are much more
Speaker 1: stealthy than we are. But but bobcats are are primarily
Speaker 1: stalk and sit hunters. They sit and wait on things
Speaker 1: to walk by them. They're lazy like our housecatch and
Speaker 1: your housecats sits on your refrigerator and smashing ahead when
Speaker 1: you walk by. Bobcats typically kill birds. We see they
Speaker 1: kill birds while birds are out forging. So it's you know,
Speaker 1: the kills made during the day sometime or early morning,
Speaker 1: late afternoon when birds are kind of strolling along roads
Speaker 1: or rights of way or whatever, and all of a sudden, boom,
Speaker 1: there's the kill. I'm not saying they couldn't climb a
Speaker 1: tree and kill a bird, but man, if you think
Speaker 1: about it, that would be It's hard to imagine them
Speaker 1: wrestling a turkey off on a tree branch. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess it could happen, but it could be a
Speaker 1: hack of a fall. You're putting putting yourself into a
Speaker 1: dangerous position to take at fall. Yeah with yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he seemed to think that he would get up there
Speaker 1: when they're still sleeping and surprise him, isn't that what
Speaker 1: he was saying, and get a whole bunch of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say the whole bunch probably. Yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to call bs on the whole bunch. Maybe one
Speaker 1: of the time, I was just sharing a perspective with us.
Speaker 1: Uh okay, So you did all that, and that was
Speaker 1: in your your PhD project was in the Mississippi Delta,
Speaker 1: Well it was in Mississippi. My master's work was in
Speaker 1: the Delta, and my PhD work was in the kind
Speaker 1: of upland piney woods. And what was that work because
Speaker 1: PDHD work is very specific though, right, Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: the predation. That was where we went in and we marked.
Speaker 1: We radio turkeys, hens and all those predators. And basically
Speaker 1: what I did was I recreated GPS data, but I
Speaker 1: did it manually tracking there there was no GPS at
Speaker 1: that time, so I would track these animals simultaneously. So
Speaker 1: I may have three or four cats, a kaya, two boxes,
Speaker 1: five hens, two raccoons, whatever. How are you getting all
Speaker 1: that stuff colored up? We trapped our butts off live trapping. Yes,
Speaker 1: we foothold trapped for the cats, coyotes and foxes, and
Speaker 1: used cage traps for the raccoons, and of course you
Speaker 1: used rocket nets for the for the turkeys. And I
Speaker 1: did all that simultaneously. So there were several students working
Speaker 1: with me that Let's say student A he was studying
Speaker 1: raccoons and student B was studying bobcats. And then I
Speaker 1: was kind of overseeing all of it, trapping birds, trapping this,
Speaker 1: trapping that, making sure you didn't get a collar on.
Speaker 1: We we both years of that project. I tracked about
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty animals simultaneously. How are you catching
Speaker 1: the bobcats foothold traps? I mean, what kind of sets
Speaker 1: did you make? We could trap with bait because we
Speaker 1: were permitted under the state mean visible like visible bits.
Speaker 1: We used um. It was funny based on your story
Speaker 1: this morning before we started. We used beaver because the
Speaker 1: caster has such a strong odor, and we had a
Speaker 1: local trapper that provided beaver carcss and we would uh,
Speaker 1: we would use the liver. We would use deer liver,
Speaker 1: deer ribs, anything we could get our hands on that
Speaker 1: that had a sight to it. We would hang feathers,
Speaker 1: you know, anything. Because cats are such visual hunters. The
Speaker 1: cats were pretty easy. The kyotes were more were more difficult.
Speaker 1: But but but because we could use meat, we were
Speaker 1: pretty successful. And then you had to have used um
Speaker 1: like rubber jaws, laminated jaws because you had these things,
Speaker 1: you couldn't cripple them up right. Yeah. Yeah, So we
Speaker 1: used either offset jaws, but most of them were padded Yeah.
Speaker 1: Soft catchy, soft catch. So we would, you know, we
Speaker 1: would catch the animals. We were in traps every morning,
Speaker 1: every afternoon, pulled animals out of the trap. Uh. We
Speaker 1: didn't drug foxes or coyotes, but we would immobilize bobcats
Speaker 1: and raccoons because they were vicious. Obviously. Oh, it was
Speaker 1: harder to wrestle bobcat than a coyote. Coyotes are so
Speaker 1: docile they with few exceptions. When you catch a kayat,
Speaker 1: they know they've been beat They you you can take
Speaker 1: a bath towel and sedata kayak truthfully, yeah, they even
Speaker 1: you know, we use catch poles or the dog catchers nets.
Speaker 1: As soon as the net would go over them, they
Speaker 1: kind of lay down because and they would just lay there,
Speaker 1: and of course we would hobble them, you know, with
Speaker 1: with leg hobbles, and we would put a muzzle around
Speaker 1: their mouth. But I can only remember too that ever
Speaker 1: tried to nip at me. The cats, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: when you try to throw a net or something over them,
Speaker 1: it is like hell on wheels. When you put a
Speaker 1: catchpole around a bobcat, it's like an explosion. It is.
Speaker 1: It is a lot of times will kill themselves. We'll
Speaker 1: fight the cat. So when we're talking about a catchpole
Speaker 1: like I used to have on that may, it just
Speaker 1: took a piece of cond to it. It took like
Speaker 1: a it must have been maybe three eight cable, three
Speaker 1: diameter cable, and imagine that you're run. You take like
Speaker 1: four ft con to it, let's say, and run both
Speaker 1: of the ends of the cable through it, so that
Speaker 1: on one end you got coming out the two ends
Speaker 1: of the cable, and then you just got like the
Speaker 1: loop and you can pass that loop over its neck
Speaker 1: pull tight with the other hand. And they make more
Speaker 1: sophisticated versions. But that when we're talking about a catch
Speaker 1: pulls like a catchpole and you can kind of control
Speaker 1: it and you got it where you want it. You
Speaker 1: can get it out of a trap or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just have to be careful with cats because if
Speaker 1: you put a lot of pressure on them, you can
Speaker 1: because they're a lot of times um we would try
Speaker 1: to get one leg in the catchpole to like get
Speaker 1: them around under the armpit end around the neck that
Speaker 1: way when they freaked out, you know, you weren't snapping
Speaker 1: their neck. Yeah. We we used mostly dog catchers nets
Speaker 1: and they because they were big enough to cover the
Speaker 1: entire cat. I found those to be a lot quicker.
Speaker 1: And you know, as you know south, they start hitting
Speaker 1: the catchpole, you know, swat at it constantly, but that
Speaker 1: big net, they would grab it and chew on it.
Speaker 1: But most of the time you could kind of wrestle
Speaker 1: it over and then just take up. Believe it or not,
Speaker 1: we would just find beaver sticks, chew sticks from beaver
Speaker 1: huts that had all the bark chewed off that were
Speaker 1: water logs so they were having and we would just
Speaker 1: pin the cat down, draw them in the butt with
Speaker 1: with a mobilizing drug, and then remove them from the trout.
Speaker 1: And then did you guys have pretty good luck when
Speaker 1: you're doing that type of work? Do you have pretty
Speaker 1: good luck with with turning them out and there? Oh? Yeah, fine, yeah,
Speaker 1: very very seldom would we have any issues. Um cats
Speaker 1: are pretty sensitive to their feet obviously, that's their that's
Speaker 1: their gun, so to speak, So you have to be
Speaker 1: careful foot hole trapping with bobcats to try not to
Speaker 1: injure their you know, their digits. If you do that,
Speaker 1: you could lose them. Kays are a little more resistant
Speaker 1: to foot damage. But we you know, we trapped again
Speaker 1: with the padded foot hold traps, so we very rarely
Speaker 1: had any issues. So when you did this, when you
Speaker 1: did your pH d work, what was sort of um like,
Speaker 1: what was the biggest take away from it? Everything likes turkeys.
Speaker 1: Everything likes turkeys, and this bird share space with a
Speaker 1: lot of things that kill it, whether it be adults
Speaker 1: or nest. And this now, granted, this was back in
Speaker 1: the mid to late nineties, and it was kind of
Speaker 1: startling to me how many animals were within a turkey's
Speaker 1: home range that would eat it or its nest. And
Speaker 1: since then, as most folks in the Southeast and East
Speaker 1: can attest to, predator populations have exploded since then, Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean all all science points to higher raccoon populations,
Speaker 1: higher meso mammals in general, all of the smaller mammals raccoons, opossum, skunks.
Speaker 1: Explaining the term meso mammals just a mid size just
Speaker 1: a mid sized mammal. You know, coyotes were common in
Speaker 1: Mississippi at that time, but they were just starting to
Speaker 1: invade the Eastern Atlantic States and they're still not at saturation.
Speaker 1: And a lot of the work I do cay at
Speaker 1: work as well, and we still see that their territories
Speaker 1: are not completely like puzzle pieces on the landscape. Yet
Speaker 1: there's still are voids out there where coyotes are backfilling,
Speaker 1: so we're not we're not at saturation with that predator yet.
Speaker 1: And to your question, it startled me back then how
Speaker 1: many animals were within a turkey's range that could eat
Speaker 1: it or its nest. And now the predation that we
Speaker 1: see on nest, which is about of all our nest
Speaker 1: or loss. It's crazy. That's what the thing I want
Speaker 1: to ask you about because I had heard this and
Speaker 1: I heard a ball this this is the ballpark thing
Speaker 1: that someone telling me, like as a general rule of thumb,
Speaker 1: of the eggs to hit the ground, never hatch yep
Speaker 1: of the hatchlings don't hit their first birthday. Ye of
Speaker 1: the words that hit their first birthday won't see their
Speaker 1: second birthday. Just saying a ballpark. Yeah, what we see
Speaker 1: is about twenty ish percent nest success. Now my work
Speaker 1: right now, nest success, that success, my work right now is.
Speaker 1: I do work on a lot of Eastern populations. The
Speaker 1: eastern subspecies. Rio's are a different ball game. I have
Speaker 1: some work on Rio's, but Rio's are precipitation driven, so
Speaker 1: when it's really wet, the hatch is better. But just
Speaker 1: talking about Easterns, we see about success. What what classifies success.
Speaker 1: It hatches one or more eggs, that's the success, no
Speaker 1: matter what the hell happens to him. Yes, and then
Speaker 1: it then it gets more bleak, so you have success.
Speaker 1: And then we see about a third of our broods
Speaker 1: have at least one pul that that survives the first
Speaker 1: month of life, because we tracked broods that first month.
Speaker 1: The assumption is once they get about twenty days old,
Speaker 1: they're pretty safe and that that's a good assumption for
Speaker 1: the most part. Once they start roosting off the ground
Speaker 1: when they're two weeks old, they can they can evade predators.
Speaker 1: And by the time they're you know, bannam rooster size
Speaker 1: chickens at twenty eight days, they're they're pretty hearty, little
Speaker 1: you know, little things. So it takes them two weeks
Speaker 1: where they can sleep in a tree. Yeah, they'll climb
Speaker 1: up shrubbery and things to get off the ground, but
Speaker 1: it usually takes and there's some debate. You know, turkeys
Speaker 1: are like people in some ways. Some grow a little
Speaker 1: faster than others, and that depends on how much forwards
Speaker 1: they have and the quality of that forwards. But some
Speaker 1: early researchers, like love Att Williams, who was a famous
Speaker 1: turkey researcher in South Florida, he saw that some of
Speaker 1: those Osceola's actually would start roosting off the ground eight
Speaker 1: or nine days after they were hatched. But they're in
Speaker 1: a you know, really southern latitude, lots of bugs everywhere.
Speaker 1: They grow fast, but we typically see about twelve to
Speaker 1: fourteen days they'll start roosting off the ground with mom.
Speaker 1: And at that point they're in pretty good shape, so
Speaker 1: she leaves him on the ground at night when she
Speaker 1: stays with them, she stays with them and broods them
Speaker 1: under her at night, and then once she can get
Speaker 1: off the ground, she roost with them. But again they're
Speaker 1: they're right beside her and right under her, particularly during
Speaker 1: inclement weather, they're tucked up under her. And then as
Speaker 1: they get bigger, obviously they can't do that, so they
Speaker 1: just kind of assimilate themselves and in the tree around her,
Speaker 1: and then as they get bigger and bigger and bigger,
Speaker 1: that's when they start kind of moving out on their
Speaker 1: own and you'll flush them. You know. Let's just say
Speaker 1: we walk in on my brood that's twenty five days old.
Speaker 1: There may be two or three in this tree and
Speaker 1: one in the tree beside it, and three that are
Speaker 1: on the branch under her, and so they're kind of
Speaker 1: you know, in the area around her. When when mom's
Speaker 1: on the ground with the with the clutch, do you
Speaker 1: find that like hands are getting killed more when they're
Speaker 1: on the ground with the absolutely yeah. When you know,
Speaker 1: if you think about it from mom's perspective, she needs
Speaker 1: to be off the ground as well. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: why that's why a ten pound bird sleeps in a tree.
Speaker 1: It's because of predators, so that fourteen days she's much
Speaker 1: more vulnerable to being killed while she's brooding. So it
Speaker 1: it behooves a turkey to grow fast, quick and get
Speaker 1: off the ground. So from a brood habitat perspective, they
Speaker 1: need lights and lots of fords so they can grow
Speaker 1: quickly and start roosting off the ground for sure. But
Speaker 1: of those this is the you ever heard the analogy
Speaker 1: about the golden egg. You know, the probability that one
Speaker 1: of those eggs becomes a gobbler. So take eight of
Speaker 1: your nest and they're gone. Of those, only a third
Speaker 1: of those that hatch produce one pole or more that
Speaker 1: survives the first month. So if you do the math there,
Speaker 1: what we see from about East Exis all the way
Speaker 1: over to South Carolina is that about seven of nest
Speaker 1: produced one or more poults that survive. Yes, And then
Speaker 1: you start thinking about the probability that one of those
Speaker 1: birds is going to end up being an adult tom
Speaker 1: that you hunt in the spring. The odds are stacked
Speaker 1: really steep against that that happening. It's pretty remarkable for
Speaker 1: every for every leg rope dragon, mature bird out there,
Speaker 1: hundreds have died yes, yes, and hundred of died or whatever.
Speaker 1: And that those issues are what has driven research particularly
Speaker 1: the past decade, because back in the nineties, if you
Speaker 1: picked up literature on turkeys, you would see nest success
Speaker 1: of thirty times were good turkeys were hatching everywhere. That's
Speaker 1: the whole But that's that you believe that those are
Speaker 1: true numbers. It wasn't because the research was bad. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think no, not bad. I think what we ended
Speaker 1: up doing years ago is we we weren't able to
Speaker 1: track nesting as well as we can now. We missed
Speaker 1: birds that would incubate because the GPS that we have
Speaker 1: now is so clear. I mean, we can see with
Speaker 1: utmost clarity when she starts incubating. So we missed some
Speaker 1: nests back twenty years ago because they would start incubating
Speaker 1: and we wouldn't know it. But so what you you
Speaker 1: tended to overestimate nest success because you missed some nests
Speaker 1: that we're failed, you know that failed. But but but
Speaker 1: still the numbers were better then and you consistently saw
Speaker 1: it across studies. It wasn't like one or two studies,
Speaker 1: you know, would say, oh it's most studies were showing
Speaker 1: much better nest success than we see now. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of that's one of the things that prompted the
Speaker 1: Eastern Southeastern slash states to say we have an issue
Speaker 1: because we started noticing declines in in next success and
Speaker 1: and that popped up from brood surveys. Basically all the
Speaker 1: states in the in the Southeast have brood surveys that
Speaker 1: they conduct where agency personnel and the public record how
Speaker 1: many hens they see in the summer that have poults
Speaker 1: with them, And if you look across the last twenty years,
Speaker 1: it's been declining every year without exception. So this has
Speaker 1: been a problem that's actually been ongoing, and it was
Speaker 1: right under our nose, and we didn't see it because,
Speaker 1: like we've talked about, there were turkeys everywhere and harvest
Speaker 1: was really good. And and then about the late two thousands,
Speaker 1: you know, two thousand nine, two thousand ten, the Southeast States,
Speaker 1: and then about a year or two later, the kind
Speaker 1: of the Northeast States and the Midwestern states kind of
Speaker 1: put their heads together and said, you know what, we're
Speaker 1: kind of all in this together. We're seeing fewer poults
Speaker 1: per hen or fewer hens that have poults in the summer,
Speaker 1: which the only possible scenarios there is fewer are hatching
Speaker 1: and or more broods are dying. That's the only thing
Speaker 1: that could translate to fewer birds being observed that have
Speaker 1: poults with them. And that kick started some research that
Speaker 1: I think has really opened people's eyes to the fact
Speaker 1: that this bird is is suffering in areas and it's
Speaker 1: not obviously not uniform. I mean, turkeys are doing really
Speaker 1: well in some places, particularly urban kind of suburban areas.
Speaker 1: You hear about exactly, do you think there's a lot
Speaker 1: more predators on the ground because we've had lower fur
Speaker 1: prices for thirty years. There's no question, there's no question.
Speaker 1: I mean you if you if you go back and
Speaker 1: look at you know, pelp prices. People actually trapped raccoons
Speaker 1: and made money off of them, and you can't give raccoons. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Used to be like if you find like a coon
Speaker 1: dentry in the mid eighties, it was a big damn
Speaker 1: deal and you had to you know, get there on
Speaker 1: opening day because someone else is going to get there
Speaker 1: ahead of you. There was a big raccoon nighttime raccoon
Speaker 1: hound hunting culture in Pennsylvania. Know, the guys with the
Speaker 1: hounds would mop up more than trappers. But I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you can sell a coon for forty bucks, yeah
Speaker 1: in those days. Yeah, and you can't. You can't give
Speaker 1: raccoons away at this point, so there's no motivation. And
Speaker 1: as you know, as we all sitting here and know that,
Speaker 1: you know that trade has declined. I mean, there aren't
Speaker 1: trappers being recruited into the ranks of people that would
Speaker 1: go catch for bears like there were years ago. You
Speaker 1: put all that together and and what we've learned about
Speaker 1: some of these predators, for instance raccoons, is you you
Speaker 1: will see uh five six males sharing the same home range.
Speaker 1: So this thought that well you just go trap one
Speaker 1: male and you got him. That's that's garbage. There could
Speaker 1: be half a dozen there. Um, they have all sorts
Speaker 1: of kind of unique breeding strategies. Males will den together,
Speaker 1: which is pretty interesting. Again, they share home ranges. You
Speaker 1: see females that have pretty high litter survival rates. Because
Speaker 1: what would eat a raccoon right other than a great one? Now,
Speaker 1: how does the raccoon kill a turkey? Um, we don't.
Speaker 1: We don't. See. The raccoons are a big predator of adults.
Speaker 1: They can't they can kill adults. They will kill poults
Speaker 1: basically if you think really young poults that they can
Speaker 1: kind of disrupt the brood and and get you get
Speaker 1: a polt off by themselves. But they like to hunt
Speaker 1: the nest down right, they do. But we found through
Speaker 1: some experimental work they don't actually go looking for nest.
Speaker 1: They just end up in areas where nests are and
Speaker 1: most of that is because raccoons in the spring and
Speaker 1: summer are looking for soft mast so like in the South,
Speaker 1: that would be blackberries, dewberries, you know, those types of things.
Speaker 1: They're looking for that invertebrates, um amphibians, anything that they
Speaker 1: can kind of get their hands on. And a lot
Speaker 1: of that ends up being in areas that are dense, shrubby, brushy,
Speaker 1: grassy sites. Well, turkeys end up nesting there and the
Speaker 1: raccoons stumble across the nest and and raccoons, once they
Speaker 1: find the nest, they'll they'll consume. Usually if they don't
Speaker 1: consume the entire clutch, they'll move eggs away from the
Speaker 1: nest bowl and consume them and then come back. So
Speaker 1: within short order the entire clutch is lost. Now here's
Speaker 1: a research question for you. How in the world you
Speaker 1: how can you say that you don't know that they're
Speaker 1: looking for turkeyness. We actually set up an experiment where
Speaker 1: we supplementally fed raccoons and we did this too. Look
Speaker 1: at how it's It's called area restricted searching. Basically, just
Speaker 1: think about it like this, So predators walking across the
Speaker 1: environment and all of a sudden queues in on something
Speaker 1: that hey, it's a smell, a site, a sound, something
Speaker 1: that I can eat. So they do. They start doing
Speaker 1: this kind of circuitous movements back and forth, back and
Speaker 1: forth through the same area, hunting for whatever it is
Speaker 1: that they detected. Well, we needed to figure out what
Speaker 1: that looks like in raccoons, so we set up this
Speaker 1: this experiment where we tracked raccoons and we stood there
Speaker 1: with them all night. Basically they were wild, but we
Speaker 1: stood out there with them and tracked them as they
Speaker 1: exhibited this behavior. And then we went back out on
Speaker 1: the landscape and had turkeys marked, had nesting place, you know,
Speaker 1: places where nest were located, and we tracked raccoons that
Speaker 1: we're not supplementally fed, and it clearly demonstrated that those
Speaker 1: raccoons are not going to areas where nests are and
Speaker 1: then start they don't start searching, they just start bebopping
Speaker 1: across the environment and all of a sudden they would
Speaker 1: end up in something that would look kind of like
Speaker 1: a turkey nesting area and they'd start foraging. But most
Speaker 1: of the time they ended up in areas that we're
Speaker 1: not nesting cover. They ended up in in areas that
Speaker 1: were more wet that a lot of our birds didn't
Speaker 1: nest in which led us to conclude that most of
Speaker 1: the time, when they bump into a nest, it's just
Speaker 1: them walking from one point to the next and they
Speaker 1: encounter something I suspect it smell, you know, they get
Speaker 1: some whiff of there's a bird over there on the ground.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go check it out. And of course
Speaker 1: when they when they flush a bird, I mean, turkeys
Speaker 1: are pretty they some turkeys can be pretty resilient to
Speaker 1: nest predators. They'll attack snakes, and we have pictures of
Speaker 1: Gould's birds that sit while foxes nose up on under
Speaker 1: them on the nest. Yeah, but that's not uniform. So
Speaker 1: a lot of times, you know, as you know, you
Speaker 1: flush a bird off the nest when you're hunting or something.
Speaker 1: That's what happens when a rackane approaches. They don't abandon
Speaker 1: that nest if they get bumped off of it. They
Speaker 1: will if it's We find that typically their abandonment is
Speaker 1: if it's early an incubation. If she's only tied some
Speaker 1: investment into that clutch for a few days and you
Speaker 1: flush her off, there's a pretty good chance she doesn't
Speaker 1: come back just getting flushed off, because I It's happened
Speaker 1: to me a couple of times where I've almost stepped
Speaker 1: on the nest and I'm always I've wondered, will she
Speaker 1: come back to that? Yeah? I had this a true story.
Speaker 1: I had a bird back in the nineties that had
Speaker 1: her UH radio telemetry unit was faulty, so I couldn't
Speaker 1: tell how close I was to her. And that's back
Speaker 1: in the day. We would approach to within a certain
Speaker 1: distance and kind of put a flag so that when
Speaker 1: she hatched, we could go find the nest, and inevitably
Speaker 1: I would try to this bird. I went into her
Speaker 1: her nest five days after she she started incubating, and
Speaker 1: I went to put the flag in the tree and
Speaker 1: she got up right under me, and I was like,
Speaker 1: a damn, you know, well she's not coming back. Well
Speaker 1: she came back. So one day, about twenty days in,
Speaker 1: I drive down the road, I get out of the truck,
Speaker 1: I check her. She's she's standing there and she flushed
Speaker 1: from the road. I have no idea why she's like
Speaker 1: thirty meters from the road and she flushed off the nest.
Speaker 1: And you gotta be kidding me. She did that every
Speaker 1: day from day twenty until she hatched. Every day I'd
Speaker 1: pull up there, she'd flush off the nest, or she
Speaker 1: if she didn't flush, she would run. Like I actually
Speaker 1: listened to the signal and think that bird just got
Speaker 1: up again and started walking off of that clutch and
Speaker 1: I'm thirty meters away from her. No idea why she
Speaker 1: did that. Usually, once you start flushing the bird that
Speaker 1: it's over. You know, they don't. And that makes sense
Speaker 1: if you think about it. If you're early an incubation,
Speaker 1: something flushes you, that's not a good spot. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't have a lot invested in it. Yeah, you know better.
Speaker 1: Yet you need to live and turkeys are a long
Speaker 1: lived bird relatively speaking, so they need to live to
Speaker 1: the next year. So if you haven't invested much in
Speaker 1: that clutch, you know, the sage decision is to go
Speaker 1: somewhere else and either try again or just quit. For them,
Speaker 1: if it's early enough in the season, they'll just lay another.
Speaker 1: Yet they'll just redust. Yeah, and that that depends on
Speaker 1: a lot of different things. But but yeah, how many
Speaker 1: how many attempts can they make? We've in the spring,
Speaker 1: we've had four. The most are if they try more
Speaker 1: than once. It's it's just twice. You'll get the occasional
Speaker 1: bird that will try three times, and we've had one,
Speaker 1: you know, a few that did four, but most are
Speaker 1: one or two. A minute ago, you just said that
Speaker 1: they're a long lived bird. But then when you lay
Speaker 1: out all the ways they get killed, the frequency with
Speaker 1: which they get killed, it would feel that they're not
Speaker 1: along with bird and that and that's that's part of
Speaker 1: that's part of the conundrum here. If you will, this
Speaker 1: bird is supposed to live a long time. They're supposed
Speaker 1: to live. The hens anyway, are supposed to live through
Speaker 1: multiple breeding cycles. Otherwise you you don't have a shot
Speaker 1: at being successful. So this bird needs to live years,
Speaker 1: given their high predation rates on their on their nest,
Speaker 1: in order for it to replace itself, right, because if
Speaker 1: she doesn't produce, if you think about it, if she
Speaker 1: doesn't produce one or more hen polts that survived to
Speaker 1: be her age, then the flock declines through time. And
Speaker 1: from a male's perspective, you know, these tom's, their reproductive
Speaker 1: success is driven by how many times they can breed.
Speaker 1: I mean that's they need to breed with as many
Speaker 1: hens to be successful in their life as possible. So
Speaker 1: if he only lives two years, he's he doesn't have
Speaker 1: near the reproductive success if he lives five years. So
Speaker 1: this bird is supposed to live longer than say a
Speaker 1: lot of them. I mean they're a large body birden
Speaker 1: and large body birds are supposed to live longer. And
Speaker 1: what we see with these hens is a lot of
Speaker 1: these hens have the strategy during incubation of living, they
Speaker 1: spend more time away from their nest than other hens.
Speaker 1: They may be in areas that are more open where
Speaker 1: they can see. There appears to be a strategy within
Speaker 1: every population we study where some of these hens they
Speaker 1: want to live their Their strategy is nest where I
Speaker 1: can see, evade predation if it if it shows up,
Speaker 1: and try again next year, whereas other hens forego that,
Speaker 1: and they tend to be hens that die on the nest,
Speaker 1: but they're more successful. So there's there's kind of two
Speaker 1: different strategies in these populations. The strategy of live until
Speaker 1: next year. That works if the bird lives multiple years.
Speaker 1: Oh because all right, because her strategy have lived till
Speaker 1: next year decreases the likelihood like she's more playing her
Speaker 1: own game rather than protect him. The thing that's right,
Speaker 1: she's she's more invested in herself than she is the clutch,
Speaker 1: because you know we're talking about they're like your house
Speaker 1: catches on fire. You got the ones that go in
Speaker 1: and get her kids, and you got the ones that
Speaker 1: just book. Yeah, And what we see is the birds
Speaker 1: that are less invested in their nest, they when they
Speaker 1: take recesses, when they take breaks during the day, they
Speaker 1: go farther away. They spend more time away from the clutch.
Speaker 1: And that makes sense if you think about it, because
Speaker 1: when you're sitting there, you're vulnerable, but when you're off.
Speaker 1: Turkeys have a periscope head. When they're off standing around
Speaker 1: foraging there, they're hyper vigilant. They can see, they hear.
Speaker 1: And when she's stuck there on that clutch, she's at
Speaker 1: the mercy of you know, things around her, whereas she
Speaker 1: when she's away from the clutch, she's much safer. The
Speaker 1: birds that end up dying as an aside, almost all
Speaker 1: of the birds that we have to be killed during
Speaker 1: nesting or killed at the nest, almost all of them
Speaker 1: are killed at the clutch. So there's a predator that
Speaker 1: is detecting her on the ground. Approaching her and then
Speaker 1: killing her as she's trying to escape from the nest.
Speaker 1: Almost all of them. What's an what's an old hen? Well,
Speaker 1: one problem is in the wild we unless we have
Speaker 1: banded known age birds, we don't know how old they are.
Speaker 1: We just know that they're either juveniles so they were
Speaker 1: hatched this year, or they're not. Now we've had birds.
Speaker 1: I had a bird back years ago in in Mississippi
Speaker 1: actually that we know was nine years old based on
Speaker 1: we used to put wing tags on them. And she
Speaker 1: was nine there and those in a hunted population of birds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and she was. She was pretty slick. Um. We we
Speaker 1: see routinely, you know, we'll get banned returns of Tom's
Speaker 1: that are six, seven, eight years old. We had one
Speaker 1: that was d populations. We had one the other last year,
Speaker 1: like Sneaky Pete that was that was eight. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we we get some older birds. But Buying he had
Speaker 1: a gobbler and a hundred population lived to be eight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the hell's he doing. He's pretty slick. He doesn't make
Speaker 1: a lot of noise. No, No, he's probably not doing
Speaker 1: too much breeding. If he is, he's he's using an
Speaker 1: alternative strategy for sure. You know, he's one of those
Speaker 1: gobblers that gobbles and then catches his you know, sticks
Speaker 1: his his foot in his beak if you will, to
Speaker 1: shut himself up, you know, don't don't call too loud,
Speaker 1: don't call it too often. Uh. Yeah, he's got a question. Well,
Speaker 1: yeah we are. You have you know, I want to
Speaker 1: do the question you just wrote, but because I think
Speaker 1: it has to do with that how hunters think they
Speaker 1: can still reliably age males. Sure. Um, I was just
Speaker 1: gonna ask, like what environmental? Um, what's the word I'm
Speaker 1: looking for? Uh? What makes it? What makes a long
Speaker 1: turkey spur subspecies? For one thing that's a an overriding
Speaker 1: factor is you tend to see patterns across the different
Speaker 1: subspecies as elways have the longest by far, and then
Speaker 1: Easterns and then your western subspecies tend to be much shorter.
Speaker 1: Can I tell you why that is? Sure? In hunting
Speaker 1: lower it has to do how rocky the ground is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: is that legit? I think there's some truth to that.
Speaker 1: I also think it's some of it and telling people
Speaker 1: that for a long time. I think some of that
Speaker 1: is probably just lower you know, Um, you know, if
Speaker 1: you as far as aging goes. And and I may
Speaker 1: be crucified for saying this, but I'm right, Um, you
Speaker 1: don't want to. If you if you go back and
Speaker 1: look at texts from years ago, they would tell you
Speaker 1: spur length as a reliable age indicator and it is not.
Speaker 1: We Oh no, that not true. You can tell he's one,
Speaker 1: he's two, he's three, he's four. I can promise you.
Speaker 1: You can't. You cannot. We We have known aged birds
Speaker 1: that that we're banded as Jake's that end up at
Speaker 1: two years old with inch and a quarter spurs, some
Speaker 1: with seven eighths inch spurs. We see we had a
Speaker 1: five year old killed that had three quarter inch spurs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but harmon now, because he ground him down on rocks
Speaker 1: he was he was an Eastern. He was an Eastern,
Speaker 1: so not many rocks. But is it true or not
Speaker 1: true that it takes him to be and I know
Speaker 1: this is gospel did when he gets a pointy spur
Speaker 1: that you can prick your finger with, that's because he's three.
Speaker 1: That is false. So what you're saying is it's kind
Speaker 1: of the same as guys looking at antlers and being
Speaker 1: like that buck's four. Yes, because he's a six point yes,
Speaker 1: and you and the other thing you have to think about.
Speaker 1: Just like you know with deer, you're dealing with genetic issues.
Speaker 1: You're dealing with body condition and things that that would
Speaker 1: facilitate one animal growing bigger faster than another. So the
Speaker 1: bottom line is spurs are not. I mean about the
Speaker 1: only thing a spur will tell you is you're looking
Speaker 1: at a really young bird or not. That's pretty much
Speaker 1: all I can tell you. What about beard, beard is
Speaker 1: useless about. The only thing beards will tell you in
Speaker 1: general is if you combine them with the primaries on
Speaker 1: their wings having bars and or their tail feathers, you
Speaker 1: can pretty much back your way into that's a jake
Speaker 1: and therefore his beard is quite short versus that's a
Speaker 1: tom and he has a longer beard. Because you see
Speaker 1: all sorts of issues with beards. You see freezing, you
Speaker 1: see might you see um birds that are in brushier
Speaker 1: climates tend to wear their beards off more than other
Speaker 1: populations of beards really don't tell you a whole lot
Speaker 1: beyond which you can get from their primaries and their
Speaker 1: their tail fans. Here's why a little bit that's a lie,
Speaker 1: Because have you ever seen a jake throw like a
Speaker 1: nine inch beard. No, And that's what I'm saying for
Speaker 1: in general. You look at that, you know, four or
Speaker 1: five inch beard, and you're probably looking at a jake
Speaker 1: just confirmed. Like that's what I teach students. Just always
Speaker 1: confirmed with their tail feathers and their primaries. If those
Speaker 1: last two primaries are barred, have have barring all the
Speaker 1: way to the end of those primaries, and they have
Speaker 1: a little tiny beard that's an adult that just has
Speaker 1: a short beat. When jake the center feathers too, it's
Speaker 1: a two centers out or two primaries of their wing
Speaker 1: are not barred. They have black in tips. You don't
Speaker 1: know that one. And then their tail fans. Is that
Speaker 1: true about the tail fans? Yeah, that because they mold
Speaker 1: beginning with the center feathers of the tail, so there's
Speaker 1: eighteen feathers there, so they begin molting from the center
Speaker 1: and then they mold out. So that's what causes that
Speaker 1: notched looking appearance. Two longer feathers. So the later you
Speaker 1: kill a jake in the spring, the more likely he
Speaker 1: is to have the notch is bigger. It's not just
Speaker 1: the center two feathers, it will be the four or six,
Speaker 1: and then by the summer he's replaced all eighteen of
Speaker 1: those feathers, and the notch gets more pronounced. As the
Speaker 1: spring goes on, it gets wider. The width of the
Speaker 1: notch gets wider because he's molding those outer most I
Speaker 1: wish we could feathers. I wish we could explain this
Speaker 1: to people. Uh, I wish we could explain this. I
Speaker 1: think he's doing a fine job. People who never even
Speaker 1: looked at a turkey's tail. I have a fan on
Speaker 1: my desk. Yeah, So just look if you if you
Speaker 1: want to kind of think about it visually, just look
Speaker 1: at the tail from the front when he's fanned out,
Speaker 1: when he's fanned out, and look at the center to
Speaker 1: that are directly over his back goes straight up from
Speaker 1: the base of his tail. That's the two that he starts.
Speaker 1: That's the first two hemlts. So, but that means they're
Speaker 1: longer short, they're longer. So he molts from a juvenile
Speaker 1: plumage into his adult plumage, and the adult plumage is
Speaker 1: the longer feathers. So he's replacing shorter feathers with longer feathers.
Speaker 1: And as he replaces the shorter feathers working out from
Speaker 1: the center. That's why that notch gets wider and wider
Speaker 1: and wider, because it's working. It's what the longer feathers
Speaker 1: are replacing the shorter feathers as you work to the
Speaker 1: outside of the fan as it's fanned out. Yeah so yeah,
Speaker 1: uh but well he ever, by the end of the season,
Speaker 1: he'll he'll never like the way most seasons work. He's
Speaker 1: always gonna have lopsided tail. Yes, as a jake. He
Speaker 1: won't get there during season. Yeah, they get there during
Speaker 1: the summer. They finished that molting of their tail during
Speaker 1: the summer. They also mold those primaries during the summer,
Speaker 1: so by the time they pop in as a two
Speaker 1: year old, they have the full fan that we know,
Speaker 1: and their primaries are all barred. Um. And that's diagnostic. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is old proof. That's the that's the two ways
Speaker 1: you know, I teach students. Don't worry about the spur,
Speaker 1: don't worry about the beard. If you want to look
Speaker 1: at them, great, But if you really want to age turkeys,
Speaker 1: you look at their primaries and their tail fan. And
Speaker 1: that's only the agent one year or more than one year. Ye, yep,
Speaker 1: because what turkeys do they You know, once they go
Speaker 1: through that first malt to become an adult, they then
Speaker 1: continuously molt a little bit of time, so they they're
Speaker 1: always going to look like an adult once they're about
Speaker 1: a year and a half old. So you can't tell.
Speaker 1: You can't tell a four year old from five year old.
Speaker 1: Yeah he's got big spurs. Yeah, big long beard, big
Speaker 1: big long beard, big long spurs or not maybe short beard,
Speaker 1: short spurs. It's a crap shoot. Hey, who pays for
Speaker 1: all the research? Mostly state agencies. Um, most of my
Speaker 1: work is is funded by Pittman Robertson funds that yeah,
Speaker 1: that that hunters are contributing to their state coffers. That
Speaker 1: money then goes to agencies which ear market for partially
Speaker 1: for research, and then I work under contracts with state
Speaker 1: agencies to do the work. Nonprofits like you know n
Speaker 1: WTF they also provide a little bit of money, but
Speaker 1: buying large We're talking these are hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of dollars to do these studies and it's mostly
Speaker 1: almost entirely driven by agency funding. That's great. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: you've been doing a lot of work on gobbling. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: there's a thing that a lot of times people will
Speaker 1: come like hunters, dudes like me will attribute low gobbling
Speaker 1: on some particular weekend, no one was gobbling because there's
Speaker 1: a lot of hunting pressure. But what brings that to,
Speaker 1: what makes me curious about that, is that I remember
Speaker 1: talking to uh former turkey researcher. No, no, no, he
Speaker 1: was a state agency guy who did a ton of work,
Speaker 1: but he had to do some turkey work. He was
Speaker 1: talking about they had they had collars one time on
Speaker 1: five gobblers or transmitted GPS units glued into the feathers
Speaker 1: I believe on five gobblers and they were fine. All
Speaker 1: winner spring came, they all got killed by bobcats. Um,
Speaker 1: you were just mentioned that great horned owls. We'll smack
Speaker 1: them more once they started goblin. So if all these predators,
Speaker 1: like native predators that the turkeys have always coexisted with,
Speaker 1: if all these predators are queuing in on gobbling and
Speaker 1: it makes the tom's more vulnerable, is the added pressure
Speaker 1: of humans queuing in on gobbling enough to like tip
Speaker 1: the scales. Yes, it is absolutely what we see. So
Speaker 1: we tried gobbling using these songmaters. They're called songmaters are
Speaker 1: just boxes that we put in a tree. We put
Speaker 1: a microphone thirty feet up to get above kind of
Speaker 1: the vegetation you know, on the ground, and that thing
Speaker 1: listens all all day and it records all ambient sound
Speaker 1: in an area of several hundred yards around it. And
Speaker 1: then we run that can detect like there's software that
Speaker 1: picks the gobbles out of that exactly. So we run
Speaker 1: the data through a software package. It extracts the gobbles out,
Speaker 1: and like we were talking talking about earlier, it also
Speaker 1: extracts crow calls and alcohols. And so we go through
Speaker 1: and we listen to verify that it's a gobble or not,
Speaker 1: and then we can track gobbling activity, you know, through
Speaker 1: time from weeks before the season starts to to the end,
Speaker 1: and we we do it all the way until the
Speaker 1: end of June. And what we see very clearly is
Speaker 1: that birds start gobbling in at least in the southeast,
Speaker 1: they start gobbling first of March. It really ramps up
Speaker 1: before the season starts, and then when hunting starts, it
Speaker 1: takes a nose dive and if it's heavily hunted sites,
Speaker 1: it may stop like entirely stopped. And if it's not
Speaker 1: a heavily hunted site entirely stopped. Yes. Yeah, we just
Speaker 1: published two papers. They're not even ripping one in the dark. No.
Speaker 1: In fact um two papers that we just published. Um,
Speaker 1: we showed the gobbling activity in there and it by
Speaker 1: April fift On that side, it was to study sites.
Speaker 1: With the exception of just a couple of days where
Speaker 1: we detected a dozen or so gobbles, it was zero,
Speaker 1: Like these birds stopped gobbling, And then you think it's
Speaker 1: because hunting. There's no question. Is it because the ones
Speaker 1: that like the gobble lot got killed or or one
Speaker 1: individual Turkey's like, man, I'm gonna chill out because every
Speaker 1: morning I got some dude standing below my tree. It's both.
Speaker 1: If you think about it, all times are not being killed, right,
Speaker 1: so even though we see from pretty high harvest rates,
Speaker 1: they're not all dying. What's happening is it's a combination
Speaker 1: of vocal birds are being shot, vocal birds are being
Speaker 1: disturbed and deciding okay, I'm I'm done, and other birds
Speaker 1: are just taking the strategy of you know what, it's
Speaker 1: not worth it. Every time I i'd start calling, I
Speaker 1: get a dude that walks under me and starts yelping,
Speaker 1: or I get a cat that chases me, or I
Speaker 1: get a coyote that comes into the pasture and runs
Speaker 1: me off, or I get an owl or whatever, and
Speaker 1: through time it just the bird. I think the bird
Speaker 1: see such a predation risk that they the adopt a
Speaker 1: different strategy, and that strategy is called less move about
Speaker 1: their range, I suspect strut more drum more, try to
Speaker 1: use more subtle cues and or go to places where
Speaker 1: they know they're going to interact with hens and just
Speaker 1: do it quietly. And that that's what we see. The
Speaker 1: interesting thing is on we also have gobbling data on
Speaker 1: a non hunted side the Savannah River site, which is
Speaker 1: one of the very few places in the South and
Speaker 1: Southeast that that there's no hunting and it is like
Speaker 1: a park or it's a UM, it's a nuclear plant. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's Department of Energy. So it's about two hundred thousand acres,
Speaker 1: very limited hunting on one little chunk of it and
Speaker 1: no hunting on the rest. And we see that gobbling
Speaker 1: does not do that. They got wall spring as you
Speaker 1: would expect. And we also have a wildlife management area
Speaker 1: where they're only allowed to hunt two days and I
Speaker 1: bet you you can predict before I say it what happens.
Speaker 1: They gobble their heads off during the week, and then
Speaker 1: when hunters show up on Friday and Saturday, gobbling tanks
Speaker 1: no way, really and just the increased activity. And then
Speaker 1: they picked back up around Tuesday and Tuesday, Thursday, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Speaker 1: Thursday is pretty good, and then Friday it tanks again.
Speaker 1: And you see this pattern through the season, just like that.
Speaker 1: There's there's no question this bird detects. It perceives the
Speaker 1: risk that we put on them on the landscape when
Speaker 1: hunting is at a heavy rate, you know, when there's
Speaker 1: lots of hunters out there. There's no question. The data
Speaker 1: clearly show that they perceive that as a risk and
Speaker 1: they behave accordingly. Are there are we part of the problem?
Speaker 1: I mean, of course probably problects. We kill turkeys, but
Speaker 1: do our activities I guess it would be this. Are
Speaker 1: there hens that don't get bred because we're interrupting their
Speaker 1: cycle too much during the breeding season. We don't see
Speaker 1: many hens that don't initiate clutches, so they're being bred. Um.
Speaker 1: What we do see is that there are some infertility
Speaker 1: rates and some populations where some of the eggs, you know,
Speaker 1: say one or so in every clutch is infertile. We
Speaker 1: also see which I think is more problematic that and
Speaker 1: some of these populations that are that are heavily hunted.
Speaker 1: The nesting season is taking six d five to eighty
Speaker 1: or ninety days, and meaning these hens are starting to breed,
Speaker 1: say late March, early April, and there are still clutches
Speaker 1: hitting the ground in July, which puts those hens in
Speaker 1: the bed, but it puts those poults in the bed spot, right.
Speaker 1: It puts the poults in a bad spot if dodn't
Speaker 1: end up time to get big. And if you think
Speaker 1: about it from a predator standpoint, it puts nest on
Speaker 1: the landscape scattered through time instead of a big pulse
Speaker 1: of nest out there at once predator. That's called the
Speaker 1: predator swamping. So there's no swamping in in our population.
Speaker 1: So what happens is you have for instance, I just
Speaker 1: showed I just gave a talk at the in Arkansas
Speaker 1: to their commission, and I showed a figure where we
Speaker 1: tracked the same group of hens throughout the nesting season.
Speaker 1: There's one bunch of hens that were one social group.
Speaker 1: They were all caught together, so they're all kind of
Speaker 1: one group. And the first hen starts and she loses
Speaker 1: he clutch, and she tries again a few weeks later
Speaker 1: and she loses that clutch, and she tries again a
Speaker 1: third time. It was sixty five days across that period. Well,
Speaker 1: she didn't start until the I think it was April.
Speaker 1: The third or fourth was the first day. So if
Speaker 1: you think about it, she's on into June before she's
Speaker 1: trying a third clutch, and even if that hatches, those
Speaker 1: birds are behind the eight ball compared to a clutch
Speaker 1: that hatches April. Yeah, I've got a question related to
Speaker 1: that breeding disruption regarding like how seasons are structured, because
Speaker 1: you'll hear people say in many states the season starts
Speaker 1: too early, like in Pennsylvania doesn't open until May one,
Speaker 1: so they've got all of April to do their thing.
Speaker 1: And I think they do that to give them time
Speaker 1: to breathe. Yes, but here in Montana it starts, what
Speaker 1: you honest like April, and granted it's you know, a
Speaker 1: different climate, but do you do you think that those
Speaker 1: early stufs or could be a problem. Yeah, how much
Speaker 1: time do you um yeah, so I think some historical
Speaker 1: perspectives would be good. So back thirty years ago, there
Speaker 1: was a guy named Bill Heally, who's who's retired now.
Speaker 1: He he was a famous turkey researcher and he's a
Speaker 1: great guy. And he this was seventies eighties nineties. He
Speaker 1: was asked by the Northeast States to write a set
Speaker 1: of recommendations for timing hunting seasons. And he very clearly
Speaker 1: noted in this document that is widely used and sighted
Speaker 1: that you do not shoot this bird in the spring.
Speaker 1: You do not shoot Tom's until most and he left
Speaker 1: out a bit vague most breeding has occurred. And he
Speaker 1: goes on to say, to make sure you've you've hit
Speaker 1: the sweet spot just time it went incubations, you know,
Speaker 1: peaks and inkubation. So the bottom line is start removing
Speaker 1: Tom's when a lot of your hens are already bred
Speaker 1: and on the nest. That reduces a legal kill of
Speaker 1: hens because their secondary and those toms have already bred
Speaker 1: those hens. So there are some that are expendable at
Speaker 1: that point. And by and large the Northeast States accepted
Speaker 1: those recommendations. If you just mentioned Pennsylvania, Michigan, a lot
Speaker 1: of the Northeast states. There their seasons don't start until May,
Speaker 1: and the Southeast states have largely entirely ignored that. If
Speaker 1: you look across the South, seasons open three to four
Speaker 1: weeks before peaks and incubation, and that's uniform across states,
Speaker 1: with very few exceptions. Louisiana has a little later opening date,
Speaker 1: Arkansas has a later opening date, but by and large
Speaker 1: you have states opening weeks and weeks before incubation peaks.
Speaker 1: And what that does the research. We're just trying to
Speaker 1: grow kind of put our heads around this. But here's
Speaker 1: my thinking. So and and Bill pointed to this in
Speaker 1: his writing. So, you have these dominant toms, and we
Speaker 1: don't know who they are. We don't know who the
Speaker 1: dominant toms are in the population, but what we clearly
Speaker 1: do understand is that you have these groups of tom's
Speaker 1: that breed a group of hens. Right, So you um,
Speaker 1: so turkeys use a mating strategy that's like a leck.
Speaker 1: So you know what sage grouse do, right, Okay, So
Speaker 1: sage grouse are all out displaying for each other and
Speaker 1: all the males are there together so they can see
Speaker 1: each other. But what turkeys do is more of an
Speaker 1: exploded leck. And all that means is you take that
Speaker 1: sage grouse leck and kind of blow it up on
Speaker 1: the landscape where you've got pockets of turkeys across the
Speaker 1: landscape and they maintain contact with each other through gobbling.
Speaker 1: They don't see each other like a sage grouse, they
Speaker 1: hear each other and that gobbling activity maintains those legs.
Speaker 1: So if you go out and you hunt Miriam's or
Speaker 1: Rio's and even Eastern's, if if there's a lot of birds,
Speaker 1: you'll hear this. Gob will over here, Goble over there,
Speaker 1: goble over there. That's those exploded legs that are calling
Speaker 1: to each other saying I'm still here, I'm still here.
Speaker 1: So each one's kind of got his zone and telling
Speaker 1: each other, yes, don't come here. I'm here, and I
Speaker 1: have my hands with me, and I'm going to breed them.
Speaker 1: Within that group of Tom's that are that are in
Speaker 1: that little exploded leg, there's one breeder. There's a dominant breeder,
Speaker 1: and the others are not always breeders, and in some
Speaker 1: cases are not breeders. So you have one Tom and
Speaker 1: he is the breeder. He's breeding with those hens that
Speaker 1: are around him and his brothers, his siblings or Tom's
Speaker 1: that he grew up with as a poult. So he
Speaker 1: was hatched and and amalgamated into the same brood back
Speaker 1: years ago. He's been spending times with these, these other
Speaker 1: Toms since he was a pol. These are the groups
Speaker 1: of Jake's that you see on the landscape running around.
Speaker 1: Those group of Jake's all hung around together, and then
Speaker 1: they get older together, and as they get older together,
Speaker 1: they have an established hierarchy. There's one guy that's at
Speaker 1: the top of this ladder and we've all seen this,
Speaker 1: I mean, and they fight constantly to maintain these these hierarchies.
Speaker 1: So you have this one breeder and you have this
Speaker 1: group of hens. And if we go in, say a
Speaker 1: month early, and we removed that dominant Tom, which we've
Speaker 1: we've clearly seen early in the season, dominant Tom's are
Speaker 1: more easily harvested than they are later in the season.
Speaker 1: There's been a number of studies showing that. So if
Speaker 1: we go in and we removed that dominant Tom, and
Speaker 1: I'll be honest, I'm guilty of this. I used to
Speaker 1: think years ago, well, hell, the next guy will just
Speaker 1: step up. That's not how it works. So this. This
Speaker 1: researcher Bill um I spent some time in his house
Speaker 1: with he and his wife. He used to imprint birds
Speaker 1: to himself, right, He imprinted them as polts, and then
Speaker 1: they moved around. He basically took these turkeys and he
Speaker 1: observed them. And what he told me was that these birds, you,
Speaker 1: they have their pecking orders like a ladder. There's a
Speaker 1: guy on the top step and then there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of steps under him. If you remove the top step,
Speaker 1: the second bird just doesn't step up. They tear the
Speaker 1: whole ladder apart, and they start over. And somebody figures
Speaker 1: out who's the dominant tom? No kid, And meanwhile, what
Speaker 1: is the hen doing? Okay, so you remove the dominant tom,
Speaker 1: that's the one through sexual selection, she's already picked that's
Speaker 1: the top guy. So if you remove him too early,
Speaker 1: you're expecting her to just say, well, okay, well hell
Speaker 1: he's good enough. Number two is fine. That's not the
Speaker 1: way sexual selection works. So you see this in prairie chickens,
Speaker 1: You see it in fallow deer, you see it in
Speaker 1: sage grouse species that use lecking strategies. If you just
Speaker 1: go in and remove a bunch of these males. The
Speaker 1: females don't just breed with the next guy standing there.
Speaker 1: They go evaluate everybody all over again, which they've been
Speaker 1: doing for weeks before we we shoot them, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden he's gone. On, Well, if he's gone,
Speaker 1: I need to go back through my checks and balances
Speaker 1: and figure out who's the most fit tom standing here,
Speaker 1: and then I'm going to breed with him. It just
Speaker 1: doesn't happen the next day. What about our dear? Different
Speaker 1: than that, the work on fallow deer is shown. They
Speaker 1: do the exact same thing, so they re shuffled that
Speaker 1: they do. And the work on fallow deer is shown,
Speaker 1: which is kind of crazy, is that some of these
Speaker 1: females delay breeding so long that they actually some don't breed,
Speaker 1: like they just can't figure out who the best buck is,
Speaker 1: so they just stop and they move on. And again
Speaker 1: we don't see that in turkeys. We we see that
Speaker 1: most of them try. They lay a clutch of mostly
Speaker 1: fertile eggs, so they're being bred. But the thinking and
Speaker 1: there I'm not just I'm not the only one that's
Speaker 1: tuting this. There there are there are many managers in
Speaker 1: the South and East in particular that have discussed us
Speaker 1: over the past few years that that maybe what we're
Speaker 1: doing is we're disrupting breeding to the point where they're
Speaker 1: there are these subtle effects to populations that are contributing.
Speaker 1: They're not the cause, but are contributing to some of
Speaker 1: these declines we're seeing because we're taking these dominant toms
Speaker 1: out of these legs too early, and in so doing,
Speaker 1: we are compromising the hen's ability to pick the best tom,
Speaker 1: who theoretically also has the most fit sperm, and we're
Speaker 1: removing him because what she's supposed to do is she's
Speaker 1: supposed to breed with the dominant tom, and then she's
Speaker 1: supposed to be able to go find other dominant toms.
Speaker 1: So there's good evidence showing that these hens will visit
Speaker 1: multiple legs. They don't just stay there. Some of them
Speaker 1: will actually go and find other times and copulate with them.
Speaker 1: So what she's doing there is she's taking sperm and
Speaker 1: she's storing at which turkeys do they store sperm? And
Speaker 1: I basically liken it to tupperware containers they're putting storm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they think about his turkey tupperware. You've got all these
Speaker 1: tubules inside of her body that are storing sperm, and
Speaker 1: when it's time to produce a clutch and laying eggs,
Speaker 1: she her body allows that sperm to be released. There
Speaker 1: is there is mate competition right there. The best sperm wins, right,
Speaker 1: the most viable because she's got sperm from multiple males,
Speaker 1: multiple maybe, and if she does, then that should confer
Speaker 1: her better fitness and her clutch better fitness. We see
Speaker 1: this in mallards, we see it in the waterfowl war
Speaker 1: is replete in science showing this. They're supposed to be
Speaker 1: multiple males and clutches, And there's some turkey work previously
Speaker 1: showing that a lot of clutches in a in a
Speaker 1: population of Rio's that wasn't hunted did have multiple times.
Speaker 1: We're collecting this data now in hunted populations and we
Speaker 1: don't have the results yet, but hopefully we will soon.
Speaker 1: But I kind of use the analogy if you were
Speaker 1: to ask a duck hunter, if I were to give
Speaker 1: you the opportunity to go to North Dakota and shoot
Speaker 1: mallards in May, what would you think? And then the
Speaker 1: analogy is, well, that's when they're in their courtship flights, right,
Speaker 1: So you have five or six drakes that are flying
Speaker 1: around harassing one hen, and she's supposed to be able
Speaker 1: to pick the best males out of that courtship flight,
Speaker 1: and she will breed with more than one male. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't even consider harvesting males out of courtship flights. You
Speaker 1: killed deer during their courtship different, different mating system. So
Speaker 1: if you if you look at turkeys, they're the only
Speaker 1: game bird in the conterminous United States that are hunted
Speaker 1: while they're breeding. They're the only one. So should we
Speaker 1: be hunting them in the summer. No, No, we just
Speaker 1: need to this. I think the science is going to
Speaker 1: demonstrate that we just need to be more thoughtful, which
Speaker 1: we were warned about years ago. Again, this is this
Speaker 1: is not new that we need to time our seasons
Speaker 1: more commensurate with the bird and not our own desires.
Speaker 1: I want to get out there as soon as the
Speaker 1: snow melts. Yes, yeah, and you know I've been there.
Speaker 1: It's like, well they're gobbled out, they're bread out, and
Speaker 1: and here, you know, like we're pretty extreme north. I
Speaker 1: mean we're you're dodging snow patches and being in snowstorms.
Speaker 1: They haven't even started breeding yet. But I've been out
Speaker 1: turkey homever. This is not a liquid well even down
Speaker 1: to Missouri, remember, not a liquid green. And I think
Speaker 1: it ultimately hinges on the harvest rate because if you
Speaker 1: go into a population up here and let's just say
Speaker 1: you kill two or three percent of all your tom's
Speaker 1: a month before breeding, who cares? Probably but at least
Speaker 1: higher now in these southern populations and Eastern populations. If
Speaker 1: you're going in and removing thirty, forty, even fifty of
Speaker 1: your tom's which we see on some areas prior to
Speaker 1: breeding or during the kind of the midst of breed eating. Frankly,
Speaker 1: to me, it's nonsensical to think it wouldn't have some effect.
Speaker 1: It's just what effect does it have? That's kind of
Speaker 1: what we're trying to put our hands around. You Know.
Speaker 1: What I think listening to you is important for people
Speaker 1: is because you're not a state agency person, right, but
Speaker 1: you're a turkey hunter I am, And because the state
Speaker 1: agency guys gotta be careful not to piss everybody off,
Speaker 1: and you can, you can afford to piss people off.
Speaker 1: I can, But then we know your motivations are pure
Speaker 1: because you like to hunt turkeys, That's why I give
Speaker 1: what you say extra validity. I appreciate that, and I
Speaker 1: that is true. I mean I kind of look and
Speaker 1: be the bearer of bad news. It's not gonna screw
Speaker 1: your your voicemail is not gonna blow up with irate
Speaker 1: it will customers. I mean, I have people that attack
Speaker 1: me on social media every week. I post every every Tuesday,
Speaker 1: Turkey Tuesday. I post, you know, science tidbits every Yeah.
Speaker 1: What are they? Yeah, I want to talk about Turkey Tuesday.
Speaker 1: But what are they? What's the what? They don't think
Speaker 1: you like to hunt turkeys? They I think, you know, honestly, Steve,
Speaker 1: I think there's people out there that look at biologists
Speaker 1: in general. And You've had I've listened, I've listened to
Speaker 1: some of your previous podcasts, and and I think people
Speaker 1: look at me or Jim Heffelfinger or some of these
Speaker 1: people that that are biologists and they think, well, they
Speaker 1: don't hunt. They're not hunters. They don't They're not in
Speaker 1: the trenches where we are. And like I said, I
Speaker 1: grew up hunting. I mean the reason I'm where I'm
Speaker 1: at is because I loved to hunt everything, and I
Speaker 1: was a steward of the outdoors, like I soaked up
Speaker 1: everything I could, and then I fast forward, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty five years and I look at my my eighteen
Speaker 1: year old I'm thinking, is he going to have the
Speaker 1: opportunities to hunt turkeys or any species that I had?
Speaker 1: And and if if I shake my head and say no,
Speaker 1: then it's a failure on my part. It's a failure
Speaker 1: on our part to grasp what effect we may be having.
Speaker 1: And I tell people, you know, we turkeys and other
Speaker 1: species are facing all sorts of problems. It's not just
Speaker 1: it's not a hunting issue. Habitat and predators and these
Speaker 1: things we've talked about. But to me, we have to
Speaker 1: do due diligence and understand what effect we might be having,
Speaker 1: and if there's something we can control, then we need
Speaker 1: to try. Because I really look at a lot of
Speaker 1: the species that we hunt and I think, if if
Speaker 1: they're not here when my grandkids come along, and the
Speaker 1: numbers that they are now or were, then it's been
Speaker 1: a failure on my watch. And that's that's tough to take.
Speaker 1: It's tough to stomach, especially I think when you're when
Speaker 1: you're pointing at when you're looking at a game management problem,
Speaker 1: and you're finding solutions that don't entail screwing ourselves over. Um,
Speaker 1: that's not that hard of a Pilba swallow, right, right right.
Speaker 1: Someone's not coming and saying like, listen, man, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying let's stop on Turkey's. I'm saying, let's think about
Speaker 1: our start dates. Yeah, let's be a little more smarter
Speaker 1: about season structure. I don't know why that should be
Speaker 1: met with a bunch of hostility, well, especially when the
Speaker 1: end result possibly it could be that instead of a
Speaker 1: two tricky bad bad limit, you might have four or
Speaker 1: you know, I think I think there's a number of
Speaker 1: issues there. One is just you know, we're greedy. I mean,
Speaker 1: human beings are greedy. It comes down to a lot
Speaker 1: of Yeah, it's a lot of what this is what
Speaker 1: I want, And what I hear from hunters is well,
Speaker 1: they're gobbled out. If we don't get to hunt them early,
Speaker 1: they I'm not going to get the opportunity. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: So I try to couch this to people, and I
Speaker 1: I think about it in my own as as a person.
Speaker 1: I think, okay, so in Georgia, I get about five
Speaker 1: or six weeks to hunt, and if you told me
Speaker 1: you only get four, but ten years from now. Instead
Speaker 1: of going and hearing one bird, which is about what
Speaker 1: I hear, or two that I could hear four, I
Speaker 1: personally would look at that and go, I'll take that
Speaker 1: all day long. Um. But the complaints I hear a
Speaker 1: lot are, well, you're taking my opportunity. I've been allowed
Speaker 1: to hunt turkeys for six or eight weeks, my entire
Speaker 1: life or whatever. And I get that. But in the
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, I look at it
Speaker 1: from the standpoint of the resource and I think, again,
Speaker 1: we have to do due diligence. And you know, turkey hunters,
Speaker 1: I'm biased, are one of the most cerebral hunters out there.
Speaker 1: I mean they're they're hunting at the time of the
Speaker 1: year when you don't hunt other things, so they are
Speaker 1: solely focused on this bird. And you look at all
Speaker 1: the gear and the technology. These folks really get into
Speaker 1: this and they think about it. And I don't talk
Speaker 1: too many that don't perceive an issue, even folks in
Speaker 1: in that hunt Rio's and Miriam's outfitters that I've been
Speaker 1: with that look at this and think and in conversations
Speaker 1: they go, you know what, come to think of it.
Speaker 1: I hear a lot fewer birds than I did ten
Speaker 1: years ago or twenty years ago. Still here a lot
Speaker 1: of birds. I don't hear or see the number of
Speaker 1: birds that I used to see. And I've heard some
Speaker 1: other agency biologists in the Southeast. One is a really
Speaker 1: good friend of Mount Charles, and I've heard him saying
Speaker 1: in open forums, if you don't have a problem right now,
Speaker 1: just wait, just give it some time. If you're not
Speaker 1: seeing declines in your area, just just wait. So how
Speaker 1: like how precipitous are the declines, like in certain areas,
Speaker 1: and like how widespread are the declines? Like is there
Speaker 1: certain regions of the country that are seeing more declines
Speaker 1: that others? Like how how how is it spreads the
Speaker 1: productivity declines, which back to what we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: the poltz per him has gone down threefold in like
Speaker 1: in what places are across the all of the Southeastern states,
Speaker 1: several of the eastern more kind of eastern Northeastern states,
Speaker 1: they're also seeing that decline in productivity. What they're not
Speaker 1: seeing buying law larger drastic declines and harvest. I suspect
Speaker 1: they may at some point, but we'll see and then
Speaker 1: several Midwestern states have shown the same trend, but it's
Speaker 1: a little different in the Midwest because you tennessee turkeys
Speaker 1: more in a in that agricultural belt or more in
Speaker 1: kind of pockets, and they're not they're not heavily hunted
Speaker 1: in some places, and and they are and others, And
Speaker 1: we don't have a good grasp on reproduction and Rio's
Speaker 1: and Miriam's and Goulds, we just we don't have those
Speaker 1: broad data sets we do. They roam and larger chunks
Speaker 1: of land, they're they're less visible. Well, if you think
Speaker 1: like Rio's, for instance, a lot of them live on
Speaker 1: on private lands that are large tracts, and they're they're everywhere.
Speaker 1: And what we do find from we've banded thousands of
Speaker 1: Rio's in areas that are hunted, and we see really
Speaker 1: low harvest rates in general, some really high in pockets,
Speaker 1: but by and large across the landscape, really low single
Speaker 1: digit percent. And in the Easterns we see in Easterns
Speaker 1: we see thirty plus percent on almost every population. You've
Speaker 1: got a couple for you. I don't even know what
Speaker 1: I don't even know what the hell one means. Um
Speaker 1: did a sports question, No, oh, you're looking at I
Speaker 1: had I had written down Arkansas versus Wisconsin. It seems
Speaker 1: like this is just in my little world. But it
Speaker 1: seems like you hear a lot of griping recently out
Speaker 1: of Arkansas for what's going on with their turkey population.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are saying that it's just down
Speaker 1: and out, and then you go to and then in
Speaker 1: Wisconsin they're killing like what fifty thousand turkeys annually and
Speaker 1: just you know, it seems to be nuts like, what's
Speaker 1: what's sort of like the I can it be possible
Speaker 1: to put it in a nutshell to say, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is why one's doing great and one's not. Yes, and no,
Speaker 1: the yes would be in Arkansas, what you've seen is
Speaker 1: a strong precipitous decline in productivity that's been happening for decades.
Speaker 1: This is not just something that started. It's been twenty
Speaker 1: years plus declining productivity to now we're in Arkansas. In
Speaker 1: some areas they're less than one pulp per hen, which
Speaker 1: means the flock has to be declining because a lot
Speaker 1: of the poults you see are are males. So in
Speaker 1: Arkansas you have a productivity problem to the point where
Speaker 1: their harvest has declined. They've gone through a number of
Speaker 1: season changes. In fact, they've changed their season twenty times
Speaker 1: in the past thirty years, trying to come up with
Speaker 1: a sweet spot, and that that was one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I was there The other last week was to
Speaker 1: talk to their biological staff about why would you even
Speaker 1: consider moving a season later? Like we've the things we
Speaker 1: just talked about, those are the things that I think
Speaker 1: people need to hear so that they understand why an
Speaker 1: early season could be problematic, not saying it is, but
Speaker 1: why it would be from the broader sense. So Arkansas
Speaker 1: is now trying to move to a much later opening
Speaker 1: date and hopes that most of their breeding has occurred.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think what they were considering as an
Speaker 1: April nineteenth opener, which for the Southeast is really late,
Speaker 1: that that's by far would be the latest except for
Speaker 1: some pockets in East Texas that have a later April opener,
Speaker 1: you know, Wisconsin. I think two things. One, you tended
Speaker 1: to see that turkey hunting exploded in the Southeast long
Speaker 1: before it did elsewhere, and the Northeast states are just
Speaker 1: now getting, you know, really heavily hunted populations. They've got
Speaker 1: a lot of times. They've got a lot of birds
Speaker 1: out there, and to my buddy Charles's point, maybe they
Speaker 1: just need to wait because if you if you keep
Speaker 1: on down this road, you may see problems. Now that
Speaker 1: the good thing about Wisconsin is their their season dates
Speaker 1: are more appropriately time with the bird. But they also
Speaker 1: lay to kill a shipload of them. Yes, and you
Speaker 1: have says that right in the REGs. Yeah, yeah, Um.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the bag limit specifically is in
Speaker 1: Wisconsin is, but in some stace like Alabama's five, I
Speaker 1: should tell you it's interesting Wisconsin. They I never thought
Speaker 1: about how it's interesting until right now. And it might
Speaker 1: be to do with timing out the breeding because they
Speaker 1: got what a B C D E F seasons seeks
Speaker 1: a season opening day is very competitive to draw a
Speaker 1: tag from, not especially non resident You could try for
Speaker 1: years in that get day, very limited hunting pressure. By
Speaker 1: the time you get to see which is three weeks
Speaker 1: in right, then you can pretty much rest assured you'll
Speaker 1: get after d you can hunt all the damn seasons, right,
Speaker 1: So they're greatly limiting in some way, putting a throttle
Speaker 1: on how many people are out there pounding them. Opening day,
Speaker 1: which is what for a second week in April, where
Speaker 1: the hell it is? Yeah, very few people. And then
Speaker 1: by the time you're into mid late May, they just
Speaker 1: open the floodgates, but a lot of people are burned
Speaker 1: out by then. You already got a And their assistant
Speaker 1: game bird coordinator is a former student of mine. She
Speaker 1: actually studied at at Louisiana State University, but I was
Speaker 1: on her graduate committee and and she has sent those rags.
Speaker 1: Some of the southern states do something similar to that,
Speaker 1: like Missouri has there when their season opens, you can
Speaker 1: only kill one bird the first week or so. South
Speaker 1: Carolina just changed their regulations to mimic that they're still
Speaker 1: opening the first of April, but you can only theoretically legally,
Speaker 1: you're only supposed to kill one bird early and then,
Speaker 1: and obviously that's to delay some harvest on into the
Speaker 1: you know, the later part of April. Other states are
Speaker 1: just moving the season, the entire statewide season. I suspect,
Speaker 1: given the momentum that I've seen in the discussions that
Speaker 1: I've seen recently, I think most states, at least in
Speaker 1: the Deep South, are considering trying to entertain discussions about
Speaker 1: bumping it later even if that only means days, and
Speaker 1: you'll get about, you'll get you'll catch they'll catch a
Speaker 1: bunch of grief too. Absolutely hid biologists. Yes, hit him
Speaker 1: with the other question back to goblin, because a lot
Speaker 1: of some of these states you can't hunt afternoon or
Speaker 1: one or four. I mean we've hunted at least three
Speaker 1: different states. I think California was like four pm when
Speaker 1: we hunted it, Missouri's noon or one. I think what
Speaker 1: else do we hunt? Last year it might have been
Speaker 1: like one. We had a quit in time, Pennsylvania's noon
Speaker 1: the first two weeks. It helps, It keeps to be
Speaker 1: a sane man. But I don't. I don't like it
Speaker 1: when I'm there, But man, it keeps you sane, right,
Speaker 1: get rest? If not, did you pull your eighteen hour days?
Speaker 1: The proponents, usually we've talked to, like it because they
Speaker 1: think that it helps the goblin. Limits of pressure helps
Speaker 1: the goblin. What are your thoughts on that? What are
Speaker 1: they trying to solve? I suspect just pressure. We don't
Speaker 1: see a lot of gobbling in the afternoon anyway, um,
Speaker 1: but I suspect that when they do, you can't kill
Speaker 1: them anyway. They're hard to kill. At night. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you what gone the last hour a day. You know,
Speaker 1: here are some goblin. I get it, but you get
Speaker 1: you can't help but get all fired up. But if
Speaker 1: you like review your life, it's not a lot of
Speaker 1: death dealing happens at five pm. Yeah, see he's by
Speaker 1: five pm. If he's an hour from the tree, he's already.
Speaker 1: He has them, he has an agenda. I have had
Speaker 1: tremendous success killing birds one, two or three o'clock in
Speaker 1: the after If you can get them to gobbl it's money.
Speaker 1: I suspect the states that just open later or have
Speaker 1: that type of season, they're just trying to keep hunters
Speaker 1: out of the woods and keep the disturbance to a minimum.
Speaker 1: I honestly can't answer your question. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that translates to any change in Turkey behavior, because one
Speaker 1: the populations we study don't really they don't have that.
Speaker 1: And to like I said, very little gobbling happens in
Speaker 1: the afternoon anyway, So I don't we would. It would.
Speaker 1: The signal would have to be so strong in our
Speaker 1: data set for us to be able to detect it,
Speaker 1: because such little gobbling is in that time. You know,
Speaker 1: there's not that much disturb anyway. And plus you're saying
Speaker 1: that there's the daily hunter disturbances there anyways of every morning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to untangle that too. And most of our what we
Speaker 1: see is most of the gobbling more than se is
Speaker 1: either in the tree or within the first hour after
Speaker 1: they fly down, so they're gobbling early and shutting up.
Speaker 1: Has anyone done a study like this, um to capture
Speaker 1: this sentiment that i'mna lay out for you, Like, imagine
Speaker 1: that you put out an electronic collar the hand call
Speaker 1: and you could somehow measure how many gobblers came within
Speaker 1: some specified uh distance of the electronic caller, and then
Speaker 1: you watch that play out over the spring and measure
Speaker 1: that like as the season wears on our gobblers meaning
Speaker 1: do they get do they get harder and harder to
Speaker 1: call as a season wears on because they're scared of
Speaker 1: getting shot? Or is it some other thing at play?
Speaker 1: If there has been work in that vein, I don't,
Speaker 1: I'm not aware of, dude, I would be tutting that
Speaker 1: on top of my list of ship to study. I
Speaker 1: think we see that in a lot of populations anyway,
Speaker 1: because if you if you go to the east or southeast.
Speaker 1: You see scouting. Scouting starts weeks in advance, and I hear,
Speaker 1: you know, horror stories I read on social media all
Speaker 1: the time, and you know, hey, I was out scouting.
Speaker 1: It's a week before the season. Dude, pull it into
Speaker 1: the cold sack up the road from me, hit the box,
Speaker 1: call five times, bird gobbled. Then he walked in spooked
Speaker 1: the bird type of thing, the flip flop flush here
Speaker 1: has already been out scouting, scaring them all up. Didn't
Speaker 1: make one call though, just looking, so I think we
Speaker 1: can see where they're at. You you may, I suspect
Speaker 1: there's some truth to the notion that the more we call,
Speaker 1: because our calling is often to associated with some type
Speaker 1: of disturbance, whether we try for that to occur or not,
Speaker 1: that the bird realizes through time that is not a
Speaker 1: hen and even if it is, I'm going to be
Speaker 1: really cautious. And and we see this in some of
Speaker 1: our data where we track hunters and tom's at the
Speaker 1: same time. So we put GPS units on the toms,
Speaker 1: and then we give the hunters my next question, and
Speaker 1: we actually see birds that show up at the site
Speaker 1: a hunter was at three or four hours later. So
Speaker 1: the hunter has already left, he's gone, or she's already
Speaker 1: back at the truck and going to work, and the
Speaker 1: tom shows up come sniffing around at one pm. Oh
Speaker 1: that's a question I was gonna ask you, like, if
Speaker 1: you if you're in the morning calling to a bird
Speaker 1: and he just like drifts away, is it is it
Speaker 1: smart to just sit there? Yes? What we we have repeated, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have repeated examples of birds that end up where
Speaker 1: a hunter was hours hours later. Well that goes back
Speaker 1: to what you were talking a guy about that. He
Speaker 1: talked about how they'll come come back hours after right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because he heard yeh, he marked you even though he's
Speaker 1: got he got like his morning agenda. And then later
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, but you know what, I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: and check on that one. If you think about it,
Speaker 1: it makes complete sense. What we're asking these birds to
Speaker 1: do is against their ecology. The tom's are supposed to
Speaker 1: stand there and display, and the hens are supposed to
Speaker 1: go to them. Okay, so that is true that one
Speaker 1: of my in nature, the hen should always go to
Speaker 1: the gob. Yes, think about the leck. Back to the leck.
Speaker 1: Those males stand there and display and the hens come
Speaker 1: to them. We're asking them to flip that. So if
Speaker 1: you think about the tom that wanders off, he's not
Speaker 1: wandering off. He's going about his business even if he's
Speaker 1: not gobbling, and he's displaying and he's doing his other
Speaker 1: things because in his world, she's supposed to seek him out.
Speaker 1: And then three hours later he goes, you know what,
Speaker 1: I haven't scored any opportunities doing the route I was
Speaker 1: going to take, So I'm going to go over there
Speaker 1: and and covertly kind of check this area out and
Speaker 1: see if she's still there. And he doesn't need to
Speaker 1: gobble to do that. All he's gotta do is strutt
Speaker 1: and drum and and look, and if he doesn't see her,
Speaker 1: he high tails it out of there. He moves on.
Speaker 1: How well do you think he uh like spatially, how
Speaker 1: tight is he thinking as far as where he thinks
Speaker 1: she is? Ye, Turkeys have an incredible sense of place.
Speaker 1: They they know And this comes from conversations I've had
Speaker 1: with with Bill who imprinted those birds. He would take
Speaker 1: these birds out and let them forge, and then he
Speaker 1: would take them back. He was the hen. He would
Speaker 1: take them back to their pen and put them up
Speaker 1: at night. And when birds would get lost. He put
Speaker 1: radios on them, so his pet birds, he had radios
Speaker 1: on them, so he would go find them the next
Speaker 1: morning and and help them come back home. And what
Speaker 1: he found is they didn't need any help. So they
Speaker 1: would take this this kind of circuitous route while they
Speaker 1: were foraging, and they'd end up lost, if you will.
Speaker 1: At night the next morning, they walked a straight line
Speaker 1: distance directly back to the pen, like they knew exactly
Speaker 1: exactly which path to take, because they knew exactly where
Speaker 1: they were going. And what he likened it to, he said,
Speaker 1: they have an incredible sense of place. They hear, they
Speaker 1: know exactly Their mapping system is so acute. They know
Speaker 1: exactly where they think you are, or where they're roost
Speaker 1: it or whatever resources are there, and they know exactly
Speaker 1: how to get there. So at any given point in time,
Speaker 1: if that tom decides he's going back to the place
Speaker 1: where that hunter is, he knows exactly where that spot is.
Speaker 1: Is it safe to say they won't leave their lexs
Speaker 1: zone like to go into another gobbler's territory. Like if
Speaker 1: you're let's say you're you're hunting and you hear a
Speaker 1: gobbler on one ridge, and then a quarter mile pass
Speaker 1: at there's a gobble on another ridge. Like, would that
Speaker 1: second gobbler come into another gobblers zone? If if their
Speaker 1: home range encompasses those other birds, which in some cases
Speaker 1: they do and in some cases they don't. If their
Speaker 1: home range didn't encompass those birds, it's very likely they're
Speaker 1: not going to just go wandering. They're going to stay
Speaker 1: in their range and continue to signal, because that's the range.
Speaker 1: We do see some tom's that makes some kind of
Speaker 1: you know, weird move months, particularly when hunters bumped them
Speaker 1: or something. But by and large, this is not a bird.
Speaker 1: This is not an animal that's just going to abandon
Speaker 1: its home range and start wandering around. So I think
Speaker 1: what's happening is you see, like to your points, you've
Speaker 1: got birds here gobbling and over here gobbling. Well, when
Speaker 1: this pocket of birds stops gobbling, why would the other
Speaker 1: birds gobble If they don't have to go, if there's
Speaker 1: no gobbling near them, what's their incentive to gobble? So there,
Speaker 1: once they do, let's say mid morning, start maybe looking
Speaker 1: for a hen that they heard a little further away,
Speaker 1: and they're just going back to check that area. They're
Speaker 1: only gonna do that, like with a with a noise
Speaker 1: that they heard in their own I'm not only but
Speaker 1: primarily yeah, absolutely, talk about what you guys found looking
Speaker 1: at When you put a GPS track and devices on hunters,
Speaker 1: what do hunters do? They hang around the road, You
Speaker 1: don't say they Almost all hunter locations we found were
Speaker 1: within a hundred yards of a road or a path.
Speaker 1: But I mean, like, but in some states, the hell you?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's hard to get that, and we haven't.
Speaker 1: That work has all been Southeastern Eastern stuff, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean it's hard to There's a lot of roads
Speaker 1: there are, and people know they can skirt down this
Speaker 1: firebreak and hear birds, so they stick to the roads,
Speaker 1: they stick to the paths. And what we found recently
Speaker 1: with some work is when the season starts, turkeys and
Speaker 1: hunters do the same thing. So folks start going to
Speaker 1: places where turkeys are because they scouttered them out or whatever,
Speaker 1: and then we see this clear divergence after a week
Speaker 1: or so of the season. Turkeys are doing one thing
Speaker 1: and hunters are doing something else. In fact, the turkeys
Speaker 1: are moving away from hunting pressure into human habitation or
Speaker 1: into like remote areas just into other parts of their
Speaker 1: range where they're not being disturbed as often. But how
Speaker 1: do you typify what they like to go towards just
Speaker 1: away from roads, just away from roads into subdivisions, no,
Speaker 1: just away from roads. And and that's not all birds.
Speaker 1: We see some birds that just hunker down and stick
Speaker 1: it out, and presumably they just quit gobbling and they
Speaker 1: just hunker and stay there. But we see this divergence
Speaker 1: and behavior where by the middle of the season, hunters
Speaker 1: are doing one thing. They're still sticking to the roads,
Speaker 1: they're behaving the same as they did two weeks prior.
Speaker 1: Turkeys have changed their strategy, and then by the end
Speaker 1: of the season they come back together because hunters buying
Speaker 1: large quit towards the end of the season, and turkeys
Speaker 1: realize it because there's not as much pressure, so they
Speaker 1: go back to doing what they were six weeks earlier.
Speaker 1: Pretty interesting, definitely pressure sensitive. We gotta email, no, no,
Speaker 1: it was here. If it's the article. I think it
Speaker 1: was the article someone sent us that in this state
Speaker 1: here in Montana, they have had I think in the
Speaker 1: last two years, like twenty four requests you know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about of citizens demanding GPS tracking data on
Speaker 1: game animals, and they have a little choice but to
Speaker 1: give it to them. They have, and they're so people like, hey,
Speaker 1: I want to know where there's a bull elk in
Speaker 1: such and such area where and its radio collar? And
Speaker 1: apparently apparently the way it works, they have to divulge
Speaker 1: it its public information. Sure have you guys had that? No? No,
Speaker 1: we have. People want to know where your turkeys are? No,
Speaker 1: we have not, because you can tell them exactly where
Speaker 1: they are. We can, we can tell them with certainty.
Speaker 1: Now we have. In the past, in the interest of
Speaker 1: getting data, we have put on I have personally put
Speaker 1: hunters on birds trying to see how the birds would
Speaker 1: respond to hunting pressure. When I was putting a really
Speaker 1: good turkey hunter on them and found some pretty bizarre,
Speaker 1: crazy thing like what I had this one bird that
Speaker 1: the youth season opened, and I put a kid and
Speaker 1: a really good guide, a biologist, turkey hunter, really good
Speaker 1: guy that he's a killer, put them too on this bird,
Speaker 1: gave him the GPS, basically said put this in your
Speaker 1: GPS and you're going to be a hundred yards from
Speaker 1: him when he when he gobbles the bird. Um came
Speaker 1: up to him several times during the morning, they never
Speaker 1: saw him, and he ended up spooking and moving north
Speaker 1: about a half mile, and then he hung out and
Speaker 1: he stayed there all week. And then when the general
Speaker 1: season opened the next weekend, I put another hunter on him,
Speaker 1: and the hunter went in neew exactly where the bird
Speaker 1: was a bump the bird. After he flew down, the
Speaker 1: bird saw him. He traveled a mile and a half
Speaker 1: to the north to to an area that was about
Speaker 1: two yards from the check station, and and he stayed
Speaker 1: there for weeks until a guy killed him who was
Speaker 1: fighting with his wife. And took off and from the
Speaker 1: aft for the afternoon to get away from home, went
Speaker 1: to the check station, parked his truck, walked over the
Speaker 1: levee to just I'm just going to sit in the woods.
Speaker 1: Didn't call, put his face mask on, was playing on
Speaker 1: his phone, and he hears a bird gobble and he
Speaker 1: calls him once and he kills him. We're already fighting
Speaker 1: about I didn't have probably turkey hunt. Yeah, yeah, we've
Speaker 1: we've seen some pretty you know, we've seen some pretty
Speaker 1: bizarre behaviors, whereas some of these other times frequently encountered hunters.
Speaker 1: I'd love to know what they're fighting and and they
Speaker 1: just hunkered down like we had this. We have this
Speaker 1: one time. I cannot tell you how many hunters he
Speaker 1: ran into and none of them ever saw him. We'd
Speaker 1: interview the hunters when they come out of the w
Speaker 1: m A, so we had their GPS data, we knew
Speaker 1: where they were, and we knew where the toms were,
Speaker 1: and we'd interview him. So how many birds did you hear?
Speaker 1: How many hunters did you see? You know, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And we had this one gentleman who who was right
Speaker 1: there the bird was and he's like, I didn't hear
Speaker 1: a bird all morning, I didn't see a bird nothing,
Speaker 1: And he was literally under this bird all morning. The
Speaker 1: bird was right there where he was, and he never heard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but when they're not that's the thing, man, When they're
Speaker 1: not calling and not out chasing around, they're just they're there.
Speaker 1: That's the thing I always tell myself when you're hunting
Speaker 1: turkey's in the the middle of the day, it's like, dear,
Speaker 1: you be in some spot hunting deer in the middle
Speaker 1: of the day and be like he is laid up
Speaker 1: in a briar patch and you're never gonna get like
Speaker 1: you're not gonna get onto him. He's laid up in
Speaker 1: a briar patch. You're not gonna get a shot at
Speaker 1: him laying there. If you try to go in there,
Speaker 1: you're gonna blow him out. It's like he's essentially untouchable.
Speaker 1: But with turkeys it could be too. In the afternoon,
Speaker 1: like that's some of bitches out right now eating yep,
Speaker 1: loafing around. He's out perfectly visible somewhere on his feet
Speaker 1: unless he sees you first. And what I'm saying, but
Speaker 1: he's not. It's like he's findable and what we see
Speaker 1: a lot of turk he's due during the middle of
Speaker 1: the day as they don't move much. They forage in
Speaker 1: the morning, and then they settled down into a relatively
Speaker 1: small area during the middle of the day and they're
Speaker 1: just hanging out, and then they pick it back up
Speaker 1: in the afternoon. So I think a lot of these
Speaker 1: times during the middle of the day when you happen
Speaker 1: to strike one is you just happen to end up
Speaker 1: close enough to him where he was comfortable in that
Speaker 1: little loafing area. He may periodically get up and feed
Speaker 1: or strutt or whatever, and you just struck gold and
Speaker 1: hit him and got him in the right and he's
Speaker 1: there because he's loafing there, because he's comfortable there. So
Speaker 1: you happen to get, just by dumb luck, get close
Speaker 1: enough to him where you could strike accord with him,
Speaker 1: and then you kill him. I think that's a lot
Speaker 1: of it. We're in New Mexico. We're coming down that
Speaker 1: narrow little cane. We're coming out into sort of where
Speaker 1: maybe a couple of draanges sort of I don't know
Speaker 1: if they came together. We're departing each other, but it
Speaker 1: opened up, you know, into like a fighter zone. Were
Speaker 1: they actually part they don't part each other, well, depends
Speaker 1: on what way you're moving up and down on him
Speaker 1: going down. So another drainage was coming in from our
Speaker 1: left is a is a big wide open Tell him
Speaker 1: what we were looking at seconds earlier, Yeah, a turkey
Speaker 1: carcass that we believe was you know, taken out by
Speaker 1: a cat, some kind of cat, but somebody had eating him. Anyways,
Speaker 1: it was like we were in a narrow drainage can
Speaker 1: you eat sort of thing, And so we're a group
Speaker 1: of us five or six probably were fairly well hidden
Speaker 1: from this bigger opening, and right when the first two
Speaker 1: or three of us sort of popped out and you
Speaker 1: could see a couple hundred yards not far away, almost
Speaker 1: within shotgun range, there's a gobbler. And what does he
Speaker 1: do because he thought he was he had caught us
Speaker 1: early enough that he just sunk, I mean, just melted
Speaker 1: his head and neck out on the ground, you know.
Speaker 1: And something just thinking when you're talking about that guy
Speaker 1: that was right on top of that turkey. If the
Speaker 1: turkey was on the ground, he very well just could
Speaker 1: have sunk into the ground and just laid there for
Speaker 1: two hours. What How big is the turkey's home range?
Speaker 1: Several thousand acres in the east southeast. As you move
Speaker 1: in the Western States, much bigger, and in fact, like
Speaker 1: Miriam's have and Rio's to a lesser extent, they have
Speaker 1: fairly large ranges that can change by season. So you'll see,
Speaker 1: you know, birds that disappear from areas in the winter
Speaker 1: and then show back up in the spring. And ask
Speaker 1: about migrations as well, because I feel that here they
Speaker 1: migrate absolutely, they follow the snow line that they do,
Speaker 1: and they they have much broader ranges. But if you think,
Speaker 1: like you know, Easterns are four species and the forest
Speaker 1: don't change that much from year to year, so they
Speaker 1: tend to have several thousand acre home ranges. If you
Speaker 1: encompass the entire year, how many trees take your average gobbler,
Speaker 1: how many trees does he have that he will roost in?
Speaker 1: And does he have well he does at randomly add
Speaker 1: trees to that list or does he like got like
Speaker 1: I rust they're they're, they're there and there and that's
Speaker 1: where roost. Each bird has roosting areas that they go to.
Speaker 1: They don't necessarily use the same tree every time they
Speaker 1: go there, at least Easterns. Rio's and Miriam's obviously, roost
Speaker 1: are limited in some of those populations, so they go
Speaker 1: back to the exact same tree, but Easterns don't do that.
Speaker 1: We see that almost every gobbler has a handful or
Speaker 1: more range areas that they use, but they don't use
Speaker 1: them back to back nights during the spring. They tend
Speaker 1: to use a roost site here, and then they moved
Speaker 1: to a different roost that night, and then they moved
Speaker 1: to a different roost the following night. But other birds
Speaker 1: will come to the roost that they abandon. Oh that
Speaker 1: explains a little bit because I read in Colorado they
Speaker 1: did a study and there's only a thirteen percent chance
Speaker 1: that the turkey roost and that these gobblers, there's only
Speaker 1: a thirteen percent chance that heat roost in the same
Speaker 1: tree two nights in the world. That's right, And if
Speaker 1: you think about it, you know, back to these legs,
Speaker 1: they're very likely or places that are good for sound
Speaker 1: sound to travel, and they're they're somewhat static. Unless there's
Speaker 1: clear cutting or something that changes the forest, they're probably
Speaker 1: fairly static. So there are certain places where I hear
Speaker 1: this all the time. I've been hearing turkeys there for
Speaker 1: twenty years. Yep, you have, and you didn't hear the
Speaker 1: same birds night after night. What you actually heard was
Speaker 1: that this bird moved and his buddy came in and
Speaker 1: roosted in that same area. Because these birds know there's
Speaker 1: certain places where sound carries, and that's why they're gobbling.
Speaker 1: They're gobbling to hear each other and to attract hens.
Speaker 1: So there's probably some places that are just good roost areas.
Speaker 1: So what do you think the odds are that, Uh,
Speaker 1: on Monday I went out, season wasn't open, or or
Speaker 1: let's just say, you know, it was evening, and I
Speaker 1: went out and roosted a bird, heard him on a ridge,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't hunt for two or three days. I
Speaker 1: go back in there three days later in the morning,
Speaker 1: on that same ridge, there he is, goblin. Where the
Speaker 1: odds that that's the same bird I roosted three nights early.
Speaker 1: If it was three nights later, there's a decent chance
Speaker 1: that may be the same bird. If it was the
Speaker 1: next night, there's a better chance it's not. There's a
Speaker 1: better chance that he's somewhere else than him being there
Speaker 1: two nights in a row. Now, turkeys are like people,
Speaker 1: and they're like deer and everything else. They're all different.
Speaker 1: So we do. We've had some times that man, they
Speaker 1: were they were money, going back to the same spot
Speaker 1: every night for three or four nights in a row,
Speaker 1: sneaky pete. But by and large across the population, that's
Speaker 1: not a strategy they use. And which is what's interesting
Speaker 1: is if you they don't do that from the time
Speaker 1: their poults, I mean, brood hens don't roost in the
Speaker 1: same spot two nights in a row. They move roost
Speaker 1: every night, And if you think about it, that makes
Speaker 1: sense from a predation standpoint. Don't go signal in the
Speaker 1: same spot every night because you're just attracting undue attention.
Speaker 1: Move around a little bit, and don't pigeonhole yourself to
Speaker 1: the same place, you know, like rio's have to do that.
Speaker 1: They have limited roost sites, and there may be four
Speaker 1: or five trees and an entire home range that are
Speaker 1: roost locations, and they go back there every night. But
Speaker 1: Rio's roost in large numbers, and in large numbers their safety.
Speaker 1: There's more eyes, there's more ears, there's more predator detection.
Speaker 1: You got an eastern that's standing there with him and
Speaker 1: his buddy is right down the ridge and there it's
Speaker 1: just two of them. Just so people who aren't familiar.
Speaker 1: Rio's have limited roosting because they're riparian. That limited the
Speaker 1: ripe parian areas, that's right. They could be surrounded by
Speaker 1: pine ridges, arid area with no trees, yes, And and
Speaker 1: you're seeing across the rio range cotton woods are really
Speaker 1: important tree species for them, and in many areas you're
Speaker 1: seeing widespread loss of cotton woods to disease issues, and
Speaker 1: that's causing a drastic reduction and roost availability to the
Speaker 1: point where some of our rio's only have we have
Speaker 1: several marked birds that have only had to roost in
Speaker 1: their entire home range. So you flip a coin, they're
Speaker 1: going to be at one of those two clumps of
Speaker 1: cotton woods every night. You know what you're talking about
Speaker 1: having a great tree where people can hear you. Um.
Speaker 1: You see that with blue grouse Alaska when you can
Speaker 1: you can hunt them in the spring on their calling
Speaker 1: and you go and find them, and sometimes they'll be
Speaker 1: like you got like a big main ridge and there's
Speaker 1: a finger ridge coming off at that finger ridge and
Speaker 1: have kind of a hump that sticks out. It would
Speaker 1: be some giant tree leaning out over that thing. And
Speaker 1: then he's up on that thing and he's just broadcast
Speaker 1: into the world. Man. You know, he's just like hanging
Speaker 1: out looking out over everything, you know, And you get
Speaker 1: up there and be like, I bet you he's got
Speaker 1: to be in that tree, right, And he's in just
Speaker 1: some crazy tree where he's like like got a megaphone
Speaker 1: up there. That's interesting. That is the one other burden
Speaker 1: big bird that you can hunt during this ring. But
Speaker 1: it's limited in scope, very limited. It's only a few weeks.
Speaker 1: And I suspect how many harvested during the spring. I
Speaker 1: don't I think that it's we went. It's a tough
Speaker 1: punt and it's like that, it's like everything, like everything's
Speaker 1: at a forty five degree angles. Yeah. We took like
Speaker 1: a forty five minute boat ride to go to a
Speaker 1: remote island to, you know, to hunt him. So I
Speaker 1: don't think there's a ton of pressure. I wouldn't think so.
Speaker 1: But man, it's like it's great if I had to,
Speaker 1: if I could do that, or hunt turkey's. I have
Speaker 1: a hard time decide. I've never hunted the blue grouse,
Speaker 1: but I tried for sure. It's fun, man, But you
Speaker 1: gotta go with our friend Barb whatever. Just show you
Speaker 1: what's up. Not you driver, you you pull your hair out.
Speaker 1: I could I could see that being very being very frustrating,
Speaker 1: just thinking about what you just said. Steep inclines a
Speaker 1: lot of work and then it doesn't pay off well,
Speaker 1: kind of like that, like when you hear a turkey
Speaker 1: guy we start getting close, you kind of be like, well,
Speaker 1: he must be right over there. These things, the sound,
Speaker 1: the noise they make, which is you can't place it. Oh,
Speaker 1: so it's unplaced, breaks down in the environment. You're just like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, somewhere within a hundred yards me,
Speaker 1: there's a bird doing that noise. I don't know what direction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would make sense. It's more like, um, it's like
Speaker 1: you kind of feel it, canaring it or feeling it.
Speaker 1: You kind of know he's drumming over in that area,
Speaker 1: but out a rough grouse drum. The drumming is a
Speaker 1: little different from where you thought it was. I had
Speaker 1: it right there, and in reality it's right over there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can basically be like within a hundred I can
Speaker 1: tell you within about a hundred eighty degrees where yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what else we got, Johnnie, I just want to follow
Speaker 1: up a little bit more on the predator populations, like
Speaker 1: outside of low fur prices, what else is causing the
Speaker 1: big boom we see? Snakes are a huge predator of
Speaker 1: of eggs and poults, and I don't remember seeing that
Speaker 1: when I was a student. If you look at many
Speaker 1: areas of the of the United States, particularly that you
Speaker 1: know where I do most of my work, it's become brushier, shrubbier, woodier,
Speaker 1: less prescribed fire less land disturbance, um pine monoculture, edges, fragmentation,
Speaker 1: and snakes benefit from that. So we see snakes account
Speaker 1: for nest loss on some sites. Yeah, yes, rat snakes
Speaker 1: and they killed the poults. Uh. And a friend of
Speaker 1: mine who's A who's yeah, who's our hurt guy at
Speaker 1: u g A has has told me that rat snakes
Speaker 1: all snakes down. Yeah. He said that rat snakes are
Speaker 1: really savvy sage predators that they tend to revisit nest.
Speaker 1: So if they go and they eat three or four
Speaker 1: eggs in this area, they'll go back and keep searching
Speaker 1: and keep searching and keep searching until they get all
Speaker 1: the eggs. Yeah. So if you think about it, even
Speaker 1: if she's laying right, if she hasn't finished the clutch
Speaker 1: and the snake shows up and picks all four at
Speaker 1: snakes going back to that clutch before it's over satting,
Speaker 1: you know, all said and done. The Old Testament is right, man. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and and John was telling me that buddy of mine,
Speaker 1: he was like, man, if if the the eggs are there,
Speaker 1: they're going to find them. So how do you think
Speaker 1: they're finding them from smell? They keen sense of smell
Speaker 1: as a snake has it. They also are visual predators.
Speaker 1: They sit in shrub mid story understory, and they watch
Speaker 1: and there's they got good long, they got long some
Speaker 1: type of long range type of vision that they know
Speaker 1: something is there. And I think probably what's happening is
Speaker 1: as these birds are leaving their clutches for recesses right there,
Speaker 1: moving away and back and forth, that through time the
Speaker 1: sense the key the snake keys in on that nest
Speaker 1: site and it doesn't take that many days. And if
Speaker 1: they're numerically more of these snakes, then there were that
Speaker 1: just through the law of averages, more nests are going
Speaker 1: to be eaten. So to your question that snakes are
Speaker 1: are an important predator by far, and there's more of
Speaker 1: them because the habitat is good for them. Yes, Basically,
Speaker 1: what we've done is create a landscape that's better for
Speaker 1: predators than turkeys basically in many areas. Here's my last
Speaker 1: question for you. Why do uh why did turkey? When
Speaker 1: you shoot a turkey sometimes his buddies beat the hell
Speaker 1: out of him. How is their desire to get each
Speaker 1: other when they're down higher than their desire to get
Speaker 1: away from a loud, sudden gunshot, Like, what is it
Speaker 1: in them that's so keyed up to wait for a
Speaker 1: moment of weakness. That's their social hierarchy. That's that pecking
Speaker 1: order where Turkey I was. I've been told turkeys they
Speaker 1: fight from the time they're young, and they never forget
Speaker 1: a grudge. They carry a grudge their entire lives. So
Speaker 1: they're around these other birds that have beaten them, and
Speaker 1: when you shoot that bird, he is suddenly vulnerable, even
Speaker 1: if you're the dominant. But they make that decision so
Speaker 1: fast because this is ingrained. This is what structures their populations.
Speaker 1: These social hierarchies start from day one of a of hatching,
Speaker 1: and they this is the ladder. That ladder has dictated
Speaker 1: their entire lives. So when that ladder, when one of
Speaker 1: those steps gets broken, the guy that's under that's the
Speaker 1: step below immediately sees that as a sign of weakness
Speaker 1: and he is going to attack that bird that's socially
Speaker 1: above him and win so that he can move up
Speaker 1: a step and he kill it. Well, he's well, they
Speaker 1: don't really kill each other. They just beat the hell
Speaker 1: out of it. You never see one actually get like,
Speaker 1: let's say they're in a fight and he gets or whatever.
Speaker 1: A bird gets weakened by something. Will they ever harass
Speaker 1: it to the point of killing it. Oh well, they will.
Speaker 1: They will injure each other to the point where they
Speaker 1: can suffer mortalities from it, because then it's just it
Speaker 1: just compounds against They spur each other, they cut each other.
Speaker 1: They if they get injuries, the other birds pack at
Speaker 1: those injuries if it's on the head. So you kind
Speaker 1: of have to isolate birds that are injured if they're
Speaker 1: in captivity, because they'll they will hurt each other. So
Speaker 1: when these tom see the other their buddy on the ground,
Speaker 1: that's an opportunity to move up in the pecking order.
Speaker 1: That's what they're doing. And they're able to make that
Speaker 1: call like that instantaneous because that that pecking order has
Speaker 1: structured their life from the time that they were little.
Speaker 1: So that's all they know. See, I looked to think
Speaker 1: that something happened to me. Yanni went just instantaneously. I've
Speaker 1: seen him looking at the funny out there like a
Speaker 1: trip and he just jumps out like Seth, Seth, I
Speaker 1: know you know how to do that turniquet, but you
Speaker 1: don't need to do it that not that put it
Speaker 1: around his neck. We never we never got back to Shoplin.
Speaker 1: We gotta have him back. We didn't get to Turkey
Speaker 1: Tuesday either. Oh no, we're gonna do that. Okay, tell
Speaker 1: people about Turkey Tuesay. I like Turkey Tuesday. Yeah, Turkey
Speaker 1: Tuesday started, So I go check it out by Slay.
Speaker 1: I gotta click. I gotta click the file with button?
Speaker 1: Please do that? Would that would help? Yeah? I just
Speaker 1: opened up Instagram. Yeah, so it's at wll Turkey Doc
Speaker 1: on Twitter and Instagram wal Turkey Doc. There are Wild
Speaker 1: Turkey Doc Mike Chamberlin. I'm opening to page. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: every Tuesday I fall back. I like it already because
Speaker 1: I'm seeing like diagrams and charts and yep, yep. That's
Speaker 1: no grip and grins, not yet. That's my ways a
Speaker 1: duck grip and grin. That's my way of putting a
Speaker 1: little bit of science out to people who may not
Speaker 1: see it and in a digestible way where they can
Speaker 1: appreciate why we do research and what it means. Oh,
Speaker 1: here's a here's a diagram, just for instance. It's a
Speaker 1: chart showing um prescribed burns. Yeah. How how how the
Speaker 1: scale of fires affects turkeys? Yep, yep. And that's a
Speaker 1: modeling word that came about to a point you made earlier.
Speaker 1: Um former student works as a state agency biologist. He
Speaker 1: posts on Facebook and he absolutely gets chewed alive and
Speaker 1: it really made me mad because he couldn't respond. And
Speaker 1: I said, right then, I was like, you know what,
Speaker 1: every week, I'm going to put something out there because
Speaker 1: I can respond. I have academic freedom and I can
Speaker 1: I can go back and forth. And it was so
Speaker 1: clear to me when Jeremy, who's the Turkey coordinator in Arkansas,
Speaker 1: when he made that post he couldn't respond to the
Speaker 1: two people that were criticizing him because they were misinformed.
Speaker 1: And right there, I said, you know what, I don't
Speaker 1: get paid to do this, to to to post on
Speaker 1: social media. I don't get credit for it per se.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to do this because this is a
Speaker 1: form where people can digest what I do. Now, if
Speaker 1: I can just take the ability to to to give
Speaker 1: it to him in a easily degestible way where they
Speaker 1: can appreciate what research is being done and why it's
Speaker 1: important to them, then every week I'm going to post
Speaker 1: something and I'm going to get as much momentum started
Speaker 1: as I can so that people understand the issues facing
Speaker 1: this bird and it's it's been great. I mean started,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, it started slow, but recently it's
Speaker 1: really exploded. And it's awesome because I get people that
Speaker 1: that don't see academic work. They have no idea that
Speaker 1: I even exist. They don't they don't know what I'm doing,
Speaker 1: that I've been studying this birth for twenty five years.
Speaker 1: They have no idea who I am, they don't know
Speaker 1: the research it's ongoing. But when they see those posts,
Speaker 1: they suddenly realized that there's something and being done that
Speaker 1: I can relate to, and I think is is relevant
Speaker 1: to me as a hunter and a land manager. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to follow it. And if every post is
Speaker 1: not to their liking, fine, But I also respond to
Speaker 1: the naysayers, people that are critical of me or the work.
Speaker 1: I try to go back and revisit those posts and
Speaker 1: try to help explain two people that may not understand
Speaker 1: the science and what we're doing why it's important to them.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at I'm looking at your March third post
Speaker 1: right now, and it's a map. It's a satellite photograph
Speaker 1: of an area that's sixteen square miles and on it
Speaker 1: are six thousand one yellow dots all GPS locations where
Speaker 1: in turkey hangs out. So she's using she's using sixteen
Speaker 1: square miles, but the dots show of that where she
Speaker 1: likes to be. Yes. Think about that map, and there's
Speaker 1: big areas where she doesn't do ship she never goes,
Speaker 1: and there's big areas where she really really likes it. Yep,
Speaker 1: she has to maintain a sixteen square mile home range
Speaker 1: to be able to find those pockets. That's a problem.
Speaker 1: That bird should only maintain a couple of square miles.
Speaker 1: Back years ago, we didn't see sixteen square mile home ranges.
Speaker 1: The only reason a bird that's scaled to be the
Speaker 1: size of a turkey would move sixteen square miles is
Speaker 1: because they have to doesn't have So she's trying to
Speaker 1: balance energy to intake with energy loss and it takes
Speaker 1: her sixteen square miles to do that. To me, that's
Speaker 1: a habitat problem. That's something that I think most people
Speaker 1: would look at that map that Steve looking at and think,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, if he's telling us that is I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think sixteen square miles, that's a huge area.
Speaker 1: If a herkey's using that and I only own five
Speaker 1: hundred acres that birds disappearing from my land for weeks
Speaker 1: or months on end, and I whatever I'm doing is
Speaker 1: not benefiting this bird because they're not even on my
Speaker 1: property anymore. You know. It speaks to the need that
Speaker 1: we need to cooperate, We need to we need to
Speaker 1: think bigger about how we're managing how it's that for
Speaker 1: this bird. That was kind of the reason for that.
Speaker 1: Four hours ago you posted a chart that shows gobbling
Speaker 1: activity and barometric pressure correlated to barometric pressure. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: all the gobbling research done previous to this use people
Speaker 1: two to record gobbles. So their data sets had like
Speaker 1: five hundred gobbles. That has a hundred seventy thousand and
Speaker 1: and and we related to weather variables, and we see
Speaker 1: like that figure shows that if you on on any
Speaker 1: given day, if you have an average barometric pressure whatever
Speaker 1: they average is that day, if the barometric pressure starts
Speaker 1: rising point oh three inches right or point three inches,
Speaker 1: you see this market increase in gobbling activity. And conversely,
Speaker 1: if the pressure is declining, you might as well stay
Speaker 1: in bad right, because this is going to create like
Speaker 1: it's gonna be hard. Just a bunch of Mark Kenyan
Speaker 1: type turkey hunters man's you know this next year? Tuesday?
Speaker 1: The third? What's so? What's that? You know? You always
Speaker 1: hear people? I heard five gobbles this morning? Heard it
Speaker 1: was a thousand gobars morning. What in reality, since you
Speaker 1: know I'm in off of one censor, how far can
Speaker 1: you hear? How several hundred yards all the way around?
Speaker 1: What's the most gobbles one of those things ever logged
Speaker 1: in today? A couple of hundred? Yeah, that's it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because I mean, if you think gobble gobble, goals fly
Speaker 1: down and then they're moving away from the oh because okay,
Speaker 1: so you think you're not picking up a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff he does on the ground because he moves
Speaker 1: away some I didn't think that. Sometimes I've sat there
Speaker 1: under a bird in a tree and you think he
Speaker 1: gobbles a hundred times before he flies down. When you
Speaker 1: start actually counting that, you don't get anywhere close to
Speaker 1: a hundred. I've done the same thing. I've sat there
Speaker 1: and thought, man, he has gobbling his head off eighteen
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty, and he flies down, it's like thirty four.
Speaker 1: And I would have texted my Bundy and said, gobbled
Speaker 1: two four. I'm gonna do a better job accounting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're twenty five years of research. What's the most
Speaker 1: like surprising thing you've learned about turkeys? The most surprising
Speaker 1: thing cook them drumsticks long enough for good yea. UM,
Speaker 1: I would say without question the things that I published
Speaker 1: that were false, that's been the biggest surprise. Like I
Speaker 1: published a paper years ago saying that Hen's went out
Speaker 1: and searched for nest sites. Right, they went and looked
Speaker 1: for these really good nest sites. Because a lot of
Speaker 1: people have found the same thing. And in reality we
Speaker 1: see now they don't do any of that. They don't
Speaker 1: they literally fly down the day they're going to lay
Speaker 1: the first egg and they go find a spot to nest.
Speaker 1: They don't visit these sites days in advance or weeks
Speaker 1: in advance. They don't go pick this perfect spot like
Speaker 1: I thought they used to. So I've actually found that
Speaker 1: my own science was garbage, that that work was flawed,
Speaker 1: and it was flawed because of technology. We just didn't
Speaker 1: have the technology that we had, so we were inferring
Speaker 1: things that were inaccurate. It's good that you're comfortable, um
Speaker 1: admitting that moving on and not doubling down on I
Speaker 1: don't because that's what science is about. If you can't
Speaker 1: admit your own errors and flaws, then you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: in the academic. Well, that's why my father liked to
Speaker 1: discount all sciences, because because the story would change. So
Speaker 1: if like, if the story changed, he just was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I screw the whole thing. Yesterday it was this, and
Speaker 1: today it says so. Therefore, I just live in a
Speaker 1: factless world rather than just sort of embracing the prices.
Speaker 1: If somebody comes along twenty years from now and proves
Speaker 1: me wrong, then I would welcome that because that meant
Speaker 1: that somebody cared enough to go revisit those questions for
Speaker 1: the resource, the people. These people change their minds all
Speaker 1: the time. If Mike is wrong and his assertions, then
Speaker 1: he was wrong, But at least science is moving forward. Seth.
Speaker 1: That was Broidy's concluder. What do you what do you
Speaker 1: say to people that say turkeys are dumb animals? They
Speaker 1: can do some stupid things. Understand, they have a brain
Speaker 1: that's quite small in their environment. They're incredibly savvy until
Speaker 1: it's time to breed, uh, and then they can do
Speaker 1: some Tom's can do some stupid things, as we all know.
Speaker 1: But by and large, I mean, this is a bird
Speaker 1: that in its own environment is quite intelligent. In the
Speaker 1: breeding season, all bets are off. So that's kind of
Speaker 1: even though even like what you just said, that sounds
Speaker 1: like they smarten up to there the pressure during during
Speaker 1: the breeding season, during the hunting season. If they didn't,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't have many. I mean they obviously become yeah, inadaptable,
Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely all right, Doctor Michael Chamberlain. Michael Chamberlain, c
Speaker 1: H A M B E R L A I N
Speaker 1: found on Instagram a wild Turkey doc Twitter two on Facebook.
Speaker 1: Yeah on Twitter, it's the same handling. On Facebook, it's
Speaker 1: just my name. Yeah, I'm an instagram man, me too.
Speaker 1: But you know why, because people don't get all keyed
Speaker 1: up on politics Facebook. They get all riled up. They
Speaker 1: get on Facebook like and then they go over to
Speaker 1: like some hunting thing and they're pissed. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: different demographic Instagram. Lets that what's going on on Yeah,
Speaker 1: you catch them in a different movie. If somebody gets
Speaker 1: cranky and fussy at me and cheesay on Facebook, almost
Speaker 1: always it's never already riled up or Instagram. They were
Speaker 1: mad before they ever logged on. What's this guy turkey?
Speaker 1: He thinks he knows about turkeys. Yeah, I've been hunting
Speaker 1: turkeys my whole life. What you're saying is you know garbage.
Speaker 1: I get that. Yeah, I'm sure it's okay. Uh all right,
Speaker 1: I followed you. I had looked previously, but now I
Speaker 1: follow Awesome, Thank you, thanks you go following Instagram. Let's
Speaker 1: let's let's smoke his number up. Also, we gotta present
Speaker 1: with our T shirt. So here's our T shirt. It
Speaker 1: says it's a circle, and inside the circle is a turkey,
Speaker 1: and the circle says me eater sounds that make a
Speaker 1: turkey gobble. And then within the then the turkey is
Speaker 1: filled in with things that make a sampling. Ice cream trucks,
Speaker 1: sonic booms, cattle guards, antlers, ratlin, revving motorcycles, the calls
Speaker 1: of a loon, monastery bells. These are all user sourced.
Speaker 1: Shotgun blasts, rumble strips, loosening log nuts, artillery fire, ambulance sirens,
Speaker 1: dropping anchors, the braise of a jackass kicking rusty hunks
Speaker 1: of metal, the calls of a peacock, woodpeckers hammering on trees,
Speaker 1: squeaky door hinges, dry heaves, rocks, thrown it, stop signs,
Speaker 1: train whistles, dog whistles, elk bugles, kyle halls, helicopters, and
Speaker 1: thunder the dry we only just scratch the surface. We
Speaker 1: got a list of curl your hair. I'll wear it
Speaker 1: with I'll wear it with pride. Knowing that whoever came
Speaker 1: up with a dry heaves example, that had to be
Speaker 1: a hell of a story. Three people really wrote in
Speaker 1: about puking and getting rips from it. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to try three people I designed anyway. Yeah, we're too
Speaker 1: old for that. Well, I appreciate you can considerably man
Speaker 1: like a real part of life. Been there there, I
Speaker 1: appreciate the opportunity to be here, all right, thank you. Yep.