Crop land vs bird numbers

[Planking]

I converted a cattle farm that never had turkeys, deer or quail in my decade of use to row crop land that now has deer, alot of turkey and a few quail. I let some areas stay fallow and trap as much as i can. It may be worth studying but i just don't see how that could happen if the crops caused them to disappear.

After trapping for a couple of years, im convinced there are enough nest predators running around Tennessee to feed a large country.

 

[Kyboy]

That is very true, I grew up trapping and coon hunting with a lot of older gentlemen that lived around here. Now very few people do trap, some still coon hunt but don't shoot them like they need to. I know nest raiders are a huge problem to all nesting animals not just turkeys. ( I've personally seen coons eating a fawn). But it's very interesting to me how crops have seemed to negatively impacted the farms I own and hunt, vs somewhere like yours where it has brought life back to it.

I converted a cattle farm that never had turkeys, deer or quail in my decade of use to row crop land that now has deer, alot of turkey and a few quail. I let some areas stay fallow and trap as much as i can. It may be worth studying but i just don't see how that could happen if the crops caused them to disappear.

After trapping for a couple of years, im convinced there are enough nest predators running around Tennessee to feed a large country

 

[Planking]

That is very true, I grew up trapping and coon hunting with a lot of older gentlemen that lived around here. Now very few people do trap, some still coon hunt but don't shoot them like they need to. I know nest raiders are a huge problem to all nesting animals not just turkeys. ( I've personally seen coons eating a fawn). But it's very interesting to me how crops have seemed to negatively impacted the farms I own and hunt, vs somewhere like yours where it has brought life back to it.

The only other factor i can think of is there is good cover all around the borders and drainages of the crops. Quail are always there. If i hadn't done that then maybe i could have had a similar experience.

 

[Bone Collector]

Converting the fields to CRP doesn't hurt the turkey at all, they will just go to do their strutting and bugging on neighboring pastures. Grown up fields are much better for nesting hens, just not good for hunting.

correct it will not hurt the turkey, just makes the hunting tougher, and when those neighboring fields are on private, then you have to call them back over to public. I am speaking mainly about how when the WMAs I hunt had crop fields birds were everywhere on Pubic, but now that the fields were allowed to grow up, they have moved off to Private. In a lot of cases there is no calling them back as they are too far away. Just the way it lays out. So you have to look a lot harder to find birds, and then you have to deal with the mob once they figure out there are birds in a specific area. I liked it better with crop fields, and thicker stuff around it (nesting), because you had more birds and could spread out.