WRbowhunter":3sgnkjwq said:
"Honestly, I wouldn't give 2c for your opinion, because I could care less about it (or what any one individual wants). My only concern is for the birds themselves and the overall flock."
Seriously, Are you giving ITS ALL FOR THE CHILDREN speech.
yes, sometimes I feel like I am lecturing children, trying to educate them, but it's like banging my head against a wall with many.
You see, I'm a little different than the average turkey hunter. I LOVE these birds. I love everything about them. I never get tired of watching them, talking to them, chasing them, calling them... everything about them. Even though I've lost the desire to kill them, I still love to hunt them. And I don't think that will ever change. It absolutely breaks my heart to see the population down to about 1/5 of what the long term average used to be on my farms. Sure, I could do just what TWRA suggests... 'the flock in TN is just fine as a whole, and those who have experienced local declines in populations can just go to other locations where the population is OK and hunt there'. But I WANT to be able to chase birds on the farm I grew up on, the farm I learned how to turkey hunt on, the farm where I've personally worked 29 different longbeards in a SINGLE day. I've got enough contacts in Dickson and Maury counties that would allow me to tag out in the first week if I wanted... but that's not what I want.... In many areas of TN, the population is STRUGGLING. And it's not about the 4 bird spring limit. I have not advocated for a reduction in the limit. All I want to see is the opportunity for hens to produce fertilized eggs and at least have a chance at hatching out the next generation. It's a combination of multiple factors that has affected many local populations. Predation is big on poults until August, be we lose relatively few adults to predators. I'm sure there are localized areas with Histoplasmosis, and perhaps even several localized flocks have been decimated by aflatoxin tainted corn. We can't change Histo or aflatoxin (or at least I don't believe deer and turkey hunters will stop baiting suddenly). A marked increase in predation has not happened suddenly since turkeys were reintroduced either. Sure, trapping predators will help struggling flocks, but it isn't what caused the decline. The decline was caused by a 'perfect storm' situation... several consecutive years of bad hatches due to weather started the problem... as the flock declined, there were fewer gobblers left to pursue, and a larger percentage of the male segment was removed prior to breeding and nest initiation. That resulted in decreased fertility and even poorer hatches.
Again, we can't change the weather at hatch time, but we CAN change the season dates to ensure that every hen capable of nesting has the opportunity to produce fertilized eggs. As I've said in a previous post, I could even live with eliminating the spring limit completely and let folks like you shoot every single adult gobbler in the state, as long as the season opened AFTER all hens were bred at least once (and preferably twice), and as long as the jakes were protected to do the breeding the following spring. Even keep the length of the season- just open it 2 weeks later like North Carolina and close it the 3rd week of May.
Another beef of mine... TWRA (and many of you) don't seem to have a grasp on how extensive the decline is... it's not just the 3 southern counties mentioned... but many other counties in middle TN have experienced a 50% reduction in spring male kills since the peak in the late 90's. When I was up there a couple weeks ago, I met a local beef farmer grabbing lunch. Nice fellow, in his mid 80's. We got to talking, turns out he was friends with my late grandfather. He invited me to come hunt his beef farms, but did mention that he hadn't seen many turkeys the past 5 years, when he had been seeing 20-30 gobblers on his farms each spring prior to that. He has never hunted and doesn't really care about turkeys, but even he noticed the dramatic decrease and wondered what had happened to all the birds. This was on the county line between Rutherford and Bedford counties. Yet TWRA wants to use Bedford county as a model of a flock that has not been affected and collect tissue samples from birds collected there to compare to Lawrence county??? Seriously, a county who's kill has decreased by 50% since the 90's is the standard model to compare to???
)... but seriously, poultry have an innate knowledge somehow of recognizing infertile eggs and will abandon them and renest with fertile eggs elsewhere.
