Boll Weevil":1t0mi736 said:
I'd definitely be interested in hearing how other land managers determine just how many gobblers to remove each season. As I think about it, never really read any research or guidance on the matter and just always try to leave "enough" even though I honestly don't know what they really means.
I've heard every single adult tom can be removed each spring and provided there's a healthy hatch, be replaced. This seems overly risky to me but what do I know. I've never felt comfortable killing more than about "a third of what I heard" during preseason listening. Maybe up to 1/2 but not much more because I don't manage quite enough land to know with some reasonable probability, that they won't wander across the property line and be shot. Turkeys are such nomads that even with many thousands of acres there's no guarantee they'll stick around.
I honestly have no clue other than listening, trail cam pics, and plain'ol intuition (which can be totally wrong of course) so how do you pick a quota?
I use personal experience to set my limits, and it's a tough call to say the least as there are a million variables as well as turkeys and their movements.
In GA for example, my place is about 3,500 acres. It's meticulously managed for all wildlife not just deer and turkeys, but the primary focus is deer and turkeys. On that property I want to harvest no more than 6 gobblers a year, no matter how many I hear. I came up with this somewhat arbitrary number by years of trial and error. It the early years we would take 10-15 birds off the place one year, the next only 3-4, then for several years the most we could kill was 8-9. It was happenstance that for a couple of years we got hammered by awful weather and had several years where we only took 3-5 birds, the first good weather year following those two bad years we were again infested with birds. I decided to cap harvest at 6 birds, period no matter what was heard and seen. For almost 10 years now the property has mainted a level of infestation that is what most hunters dream of when they walk into the spring woods. Birds gobble every where at first light, and it is usually no problem to find a receptive bird to work on any given day.
I took what I did in GA and applied the same general principle to my place in AL and have had nearly identical results. The property is larger, and overall the habitat is better so the quota is 7 birds.
Is it perfect nope, and IMO it's based on a lot of hunches and arbitrary ceilings. I do not base my harvest quotas on what is seen or heard in any given year, as I quickly realized that the populations are far more dynamic then I originally thought.
I also, am not of the opinion that if I kill too many then turkeys weren't meant to live there, as I have seen others post. In theory it shouldnt' matter how many gobblers are taken as long as recruitment is good etc., but there is only a certain % of mature gobblers in the populations that are willing to play the game each spring with us hunters. There's a bunch that stay silent, are loaners, and aren't dominant enough to gather hens. So I believe basing harvests off of birds seen and heard early leads to a flock with fewer receptive birds to hunt. Many birds that gobbler preseason get sent packing by the dominant birds, and by mid season may live miles away, and get killed a long way away from where you heard them in March.
I have zero desire to kill birds that don't gobbler, strut, or play the game with me. I don't want to bushwhack silent turkeys and don't want to have to sit and wait for one to slip in to a set up silently. I want gobbling birds that are receptive to calling, therefore I want as many birds out there as possible.
Just one mans opinion, and it works for me and those two tracts of land. Here I am at the mercy of the other hunters as all I hunt are public tracts, but still limit my kills in each place I hunt.
