You hunting in Region 2? 

This is a fair enough point.  If kill numbers were poor, I'd be mad. Now they're through the roof and I'm mad. But It's getting harder to deny that our season is too early from a reproduction standpoint. Peak nest initiation is around the first week of May. So most hens have not started breeding yet. But we've already killed nearly a quarter of the turkeys capable of breeding them. No one can argue that to be good for future turkey numbers. If we started April 15 or later and pounded gobblers the first week, I wouldn't be nearly as concerned.

Also, the last two years were not "better hatches" overall, according to the summer brood survey - Which is the only empirical measure we have. We don't have more turkeys. We're just killing a bigger percentage of what we have. I would bet a lot that this year's numbers of poults with hens and poults per hen will be much worse. If we keep hatching fewer and getting fewer to adulthood, but keep killing more the next spring, the math ends badly.