Welcome to Wild Turkey Science, a podcast made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow. I'm Dr. Marcus Lashley, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Florida. And I'm Dr. Will Goolsby, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management at Auburn University. We're both lifelong hunters and devoted scientists who are passionate about hunting, managing, and researching wild turkeys.
In this podcast, we'll explore turkey research, speak to the experts in the field, and address the difficult questions related to wild turkey ecology and management. Our goal is to serve as your connection to Wild Turkey Science. Do we still need to be quiet, or have we been quiet enough? I think we've now been quiet enough. Get some ASMR of me sipping my coffee. Isn't that what it's called when people listen to it? I think so. Zach, you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah, yeah.
Peter does that with his kid Wanda all the time. They put that stuff on. It's supposed to be really good for kids. People are playing with marbles or something, or just pouring water. Yes. You know what I'm talking about. I'm going to have to draw that. Marcus just gaslights me into thinking, making me think I'm crazy. He does that all the time. That was not an intentional gaslight. Yeah. Well, Zach, we're glad to have you again. Again. Is this again?
I was going to say, I don't know if this is again. Is it? Have I been on before? I don't think I've been on before. You have talked to him before. Did he not? We did an episode with him, didn't we? No. I think I was there in spirit. I'm always on the other side of the wall, if that means anything. For everybody out there, we have mentioned Zach numerous times because he's the one that keeps emailing everybody. Now I feel like you're gaslighting me that he hasn't been on the show before.
He hasn't been on the show before. I promise. I have not been on the show. He's literally getting on my podcast right now on my phone because I swear he's been on here before. I did get a concussion lately, but I have not forgotten if I've been on. Yeah. We have talked about his work quite a bit and I think it's for good reason and we want to revisit it because he's got some really cool stuff coming down the chute right now. Some of it will be published soon, hopefully. Fingers crossed.
Yeah. He's got a pretty positive review on it, so we're going to talk about that paper today. It is publicly available in a pre-print and it will be published soon, hopefully, from the Wildlife Society Bulletin in the National Wild Turkey Symposium that's getting published right now in the process.
But I figured we could visit some of those things because there's going to be several gems in there that are going to be pretty controversial, and then some of his new work is going to be even more controversial, and I figured why not bring Zach in and put him in there. Go ahead and introduce him to the controversy. God, put me in the hot seat, dang. Yeah, since he's been emailing everybody and they haven't been able to see his face, now...
It's not like he's looking for a permanent job or anything. God. Well, Zach is the human dimensions guy. I keep telling him that, I don't know if he wants to be that guy, but in terms of doing human dimensions work on turkeys, there's not that many folks doing that. Zach is one of those people. Zach, how do you define human dimensions for our listeners?
Because I think that's a term we always throw around as wildlifers, and we all kind of have a common understanding of it, but I think our audience would benefit from hearing your opinion on it. Yeah, so human dimensions of wildlife is basically capturing people's opinions, their attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and then using that information to inform wildlife management.
So a lot of times, a regulation change is going to occur, or they're thinking about making a regulation change, and that's when they bring in the human dimensions experts, which I don't know if I call myself an expert or anything, but then they're going to conduct either surveys, or sometimes they'll do qualitative interviews, and start to get an understanding of how our stakeholder is going to feel about this potential regulation change.
So that's typically how I think of human dimensions of wildlife. And why do you think that so many, particularly wildlife agencies, put a lot of emphasis on human dimensions programs? Why is that important to their program?
I think especially in the last 15 or 20 years, it's really picked up speed and become a big emphasis just because you look at previous situations, and you learn from your mistakes, for lack of better phrasing, and get a better understanding of, okay, if we collect this data in advance before we make some of these decisions, that can really help with getting a better understanding of how this is going to be perceived when we do make that change.
So a lot of my background, before I got involved with the UF Game Lab, was on the non-native and invasive species side of things. And if you look in that literature, there's a lot of historical evidence of agency going out there to try and remove a non-native species or an invasive species, especially those that live in close proximity to people in high-density areas.
And without doing that human dimensions work, they kind of assumed, we're going to go out there and we're going to remove this species, and everyone's going to love it. And a lot of times, they learned either during the fact or after the fact that some people were actually really attached to that non-native or invasive species, and there was a lot of backlash and a lot of pushback.
And those kinds of examples, I think, have really led to a much stronger emphasis on having that HD component in a state agency. Yeah. That makes sense. And I think, too, tell me if you agree or not, you're the expert here, that a lot of times there are, an agency has flexibility within the biological parameters of the regulations they set, if that makes sense. And so they're trying, you know, there's different ways to cut the pie, in other words.
And so they can use human dimensions type information to decide what decision is most optimal, both for the biology of the species and what they're trying to accomplish from a population growth perspective, and then what will make hunters happy at the same time. Is that accurate?
Yeah. So there's a lot of times it's just a feeling out process of like, there's these five different options that we could go about, but which one is going to be, you know, the most well-received or the one that's going to cause the least tension with other folk. So a lot of times, yeah, it's kind of sorting out, you know, which of these approaches would be the best avenue to go down.
And I guess, too, that sometimes human dimensions work is used to determine how, if we change this particular policy or regulation, how will people react to it? And then how will that in turn affect the species or the population? Is that accurate? Yeah. So decisions kind of already been made, like we're going down this route, but we want to understand like, OK, once we make the change, what is kind of public opinion going to look like?
So a lot of times that's where you're developing, you know, a survey or sometimes you're doing interviews to get an understanding of, all right, now that we know we're going down this road, this is kind of how we perceive things are going to be received. And then you can kind of plan for that reaction. And that puts you kind of ahead of the curve instead of, you know, finding out afterwards, like, oh, wow, people did not perceive this the way we thought they would.
Yeah, it's such an interesting aspect, right? For sure. Including humans in wildlife management. I think a lot of folks get into the discipline because they're trying to avoid it. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I can I can remember in grad school there, you know, there were several of us that made fun of human dimensions work on a regular basis. And let me. One of the cool kids. Let me. Oh, my God. Let me recover. Let me recover.
Will was one of those people who's going to put me in a locker or something, give me a wedgie. He's bullying me. But the further the further that I've gone in my career. I mean, the more that I realize that there's some instances where the human dimensions information is more important than the biological information. So I mean, just, you know, as you age and gain wisdom and become more pragmatic, you definitely realize that it plays a super important role.
And in fact, we probably don't pay as much attention to it as we should sometimes. Yeah. And for me, for me personally, like some of the moments that I look back on kind of fondly are where there was someone who had these kind of, I don't know, like harsh opinions about human dimensions of wildlife. And, you know, do we really need to do that? Like those are the dorky kind of guys. And then moments where those people do reach out to me or one of my colleagues or collaborators.
And they're like, actually, we're in this situation now where we do need the HD folk. And it's always kind of nice where you're like, see, it does matter. Like it just took a certain instance for you to to kind of recognize that. Yeah. I mean, it definitely matters. Yeah. Especially given the topic we're about to start talking about today with, you know, declining hunter numbers and things like that, because, you know, those license dollars are so important to the conservation work that we do.
So making sure we keep those hunters engaged, you know, and satisfied is very important to allowing state agencies to be effective in their mission. Well, I think we should use that as a segue to, to get into what I'm guessing is probably going to be a controversial topic. Man, you need to stop saying that. Now, people, now people are already like, you know, directing their thoughts and they're typing up their comments right now, Marcus. Good. Let us know what you think.
Zach's going to put it in a survey or something. Make sure you come in. Well, I think we could start with, you know, what you have done with the preprint that we're going to link this soon to be published.
I think, you know, early on when we were discussing the work, it became evident that there really hasn't been that much human dimensions work in the turkey realm, but there's a lot of topics like, you know, people probably, or most turkey hunters are being affected by season date changes, changes in what kind of shot shells you can use, you know, regulations related to decoy use, like there's all kinds of things that people have various opinions
on and they're being affected by it because there's changes being made or have been, you know, over the last couple of decades. So, you know, we know there are these types of issues that lend themselves to this kind of work that you specialize in, but can you just lay out sort of what you did in this and why that was important?
Yeah, so I joined the UF Game Lab team in August of 2024, and I remember talking with Marcus and being like, well, what kind of human dimensions research has been done related to turkey hunting? And Marcus was like, I don't think very much. I was like, all right, well, I'm going to look into it and see what has been done. And surprisingly, like it's not a, you know, extravagant, tremendous amount or whatever, but there are 30 studies that have been done going back to, I think, 1985.
And we looked at things through a lens of studies that the main objective is a human dimensions perspective. So a lot of times, you know, state agencies will also survey folks more to just get specific hunting numbers that they're going to put into like a harvest report or an agency report. But the goal of that research isn't, you know, looking at people's attitudes, their behaviors, their perceptions, that kind of stuff.
It's mainly just getting an understanding of these specific numbers that they're interested in. So we didn't include that in what we're looking at, just to be super clear. But yeah, we ended up finding, like I said, about 30 papers going back 40 years. And what I ended up doing was kind of looking at these 30 papers and seeing what information was consistently collected amongst these papers.
So in terms of demographics, hunter characteristics, approaches to hunting, so like Marcus kind of alluded to like decoy use. And yeah, we ended up putting this together into a literature review, like Marcus said, that's currently in review, and hopefully, fingers crossed, will be published soon.
So when you look at figure one, that is just showing the distribution of the studies, I guess, where they were concentrated, and it kind of sticks out pretty obviously right away that the majority of work has been in the eastern US and particularly in the northeast, which is kind of surprising to me. Yeah, there's there's a good density, though, in the southeast, obviously, as well. But yeah, there is, for human dimensions, a lot of stuff coming from the northeast.
And I think that has a lot to do with the area of focus in some of those states. Like for example, like New York and Pennsylvania, both of those states do a really good job on the human dimension side of things. The other thing that kind of jumps out to me in that figure, is if you look out west, there's just just not much coming from out there, which makes sense. But recently, you know, some of those states out west are really starting to develop a pretty strong turkey hunting community.
So it'll be interesting to see, you know, in the next five to 10 years, if we start to see a lot more coming out of those states like California. It's also kind of interesting, you know, when looking at the pattern, it just dawned on me, there's also quite a few states in the range of turkeys. Some of them were there, I would call them destination places that have a really strong hunting culture for turkeys that there is no entries from.
Yeah, they've never had a published study on human dimensions. So that's kind of interesting as well, and it's kind of scattered all over the US. On the opposite of the spectrum, like Zach said, like Pennsylvania has apparently done a pretty good job. I mean, was that they have four studies on the human dimensions of turkey, some aspect of turkeys, and then Ohio has a similar number, and then Missouri leading the way with five studies. Yeah, Mississippi has a relatively large number too.
Yeah, so that's interesting just on surface level looking at where people are studying this kind of stuff. But I wanted to get to the second figure because I think, well, I know there are a lot of people out there that do not think this is what's happening.
So we're following the data, I'll just have that as a precursor to this conversation, but based on what you found from all those studies, when you plot the average age of people over time that are at least responding to the surveys, the community of turkey hunters to me looks like it's been aging pretty quickly. Can you tell us more about that, Zach?
Yeah, so kind of when you break it down, if you look kind of in the bottom left of that figure, you're starting in basically the early 1990s at an average age of turkey hunters around 40 years old. And then if you fast forward to present day, the average age is around 50 years old. So basically when you kind of break that down, every three years it's happening in real time, there's about a one year increase in the average age of a turkey hunter.
So you could say it's a little gradual, like it's only gone up 10 years in, what is that, 30, 35 years. But that is something that we've documented and you can see that trend pretty clearly when you look at this figure, and that's something that's been alluded to in some of the larger national studies that like US Fish and Wildlife has conducted. But it's interesting to see it when you combine all this data from these human dimension studies and look at it on this figure.
Yeah, so can you interpret what, or how do you interpret that? So yeah, the age is 10 years older now, but what does that functionally mean for the turkey hunting community other than there's a bunch of older hunters out there? Yeah, I mean it suggests that currently we're not recruiting hunters at the rate that the current hunters are aging. So that kind of suggests that currently recruitment isn't where it needs to be.
Okay. So we're not recruiting people into hunting as fast as they're aging out of it? Is that an accurate statement? Yeah. That's not what I hear all the time. No. No, what I hear is there's more turkey hunters than ever, and I hear a lot of blame cast at the younger turkey hunters, which I think part of the perspective that there's all these new young turkey hunters is because they're very visible on social media.
And then I wonder some too about the overall numbers or the perception that overall numbers are increasing, if that is driven by the increase in the trend of public land turkey hunting. I mean, there's a lot of people now that take great pride in being a public land turkey hunter, being a public land hunter in general. And also the willingness of people to travel to turkey hunt and basically chase turkey season from beginning to end across the country.
That definitely seems to be one thing to me that is evident is there's a lot of visibility and from a practical standpoint, people are traveling a lot more, more people are traveling a lot more, and they're often concentrated on public land. Yeah. I mean, I feel like one of the first questions that I get asked now when I have a conversation with another avid turkey hunter, right before the season is what states do you have planned this year? Right off the bat, where are you going?
Where you got hunts planned? That's just assumed now that you're in the cold. So one thing that I noted before the show started was that it doesn't necessarily mean that there are less hunters because he's aging. However, Zach, there was another study that was nationwide that addressed that, that you reminded me about. So do you want to talk about it for a second?
Yeah. Let me pull up the exact number, but yeah, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, every five or six years, they do a larger study looking at just hunting and angling in the US. And occasionally they break this down into more specific data, depending on the type of hunting that you're doing. And in 2003, or sorry, 2011, there was an estimated 3.1 million turkey hunters from this US Fish and Wildlife Service survey.
And again, this is just an estimate, but by 2016 that had dropped off to 2 million. So there's obviously a lot of error involved in that estimate, but that's a pretty shocking number in terms of what they're suggesting the trend is within the turkey hunting community. So almost a third lost over the five years. Over five years. Wow. And we've seen, I mean, we've talked to some state coordinators that have mentioned some pretty sharp declines within a state.
So I guess, you start pairing those together and it makes sense that across states that we would be seeing a pretty sharp decline too. Yeah. But there's a bunch of folks out there that do not think that's the case. Right. Oh, I know. So I guess based on that, which we don't have more current data, the last data point from that study was 2016 and they did not capture it in the more recent versions. Maybe the one that's going to be coming out any time we'll capture it again, that'd be great.
But when I saw that, I was, it was a little bit shocking again, you know, over that five year period, you know, that is such a tremendous change that we're pretty confident that it decreased. Yeah. It's hard to say obviously like what exact number that is, but when they're making an estimate like that, that at least suggests that there is some type of decrease occurring there. Like what that exact number is, it's hard to say with that much wiggle room with the error and everything.
Yeah. So your data, I think it's pretty solid unless young, younger folks stops taking surveys or something. We're pretty confident that the turkey hunting community is aging faster than we're recruiting. Yeah. Well, and that's, that's the thing to point out too, is like, this was an online survey that we, the preliminary data that we were talking about before where we're capturing some of this stuff.
So a lot of times that that skews towards a younger audience and a lot of the more recent data points that are on that plot that we're showing are also coming from online data. So a lot of the stuff in the earlier portion of that, you know, was collected via mail-based surveys which, you know, you still see occasionally, but a lot of the state agencies have kind of moved away from that towards an online platform.
So that kind of gives you even greater confidence in some of these numbers that we're talking about because that just tends to skew towards a younger audience. Yeah. Sure. Makes sense. But I would say the other aspect is, you know, the, the visibility is probably quite skewed as well because younger hunters are way more likely I would, I wouldn't expect to post what they're doing online right where everybody can see it.
Whereas, you know, I'm thinking about, uh, like my dad, for example, he's not going to go post that he killed a turkey on mine. Well, the average 50 year old turkey hunter won't even tell you that they turkey hunt. You know, that's how secretive they are. Yeah. Like I'm not, I don't see that, that nearly as much online. I wouldn't expect that kind of behavior, especially from the, you know, folks in that age class that I know well and know what they're doing.
They're not, they're not advertising it online to everybody. Yeah. They don't even want to talk about what states they hunt. Yeah. So I thought that was pretty interesting as well, that there were several states. This is the next figure for Charlotte to cut in so folks can see it, but you know, we, we mentioned several of these states. I don't think we said anything about Virginia, but there are a bunch of states that have multiple surveys over a long term, right?
So Pennsylvania, Virginia, Missouri, and Mississippi all had multiple data points, at least three over time. Did we, we may have even had it stipulated that they needed to be at least a decade apart. I don't remember if that was true, Zach. No. Yeah. So, you know, they are in increments that are about 10 years at least for most of them.
But I guess the, the general thing is in the states that have tracked at the age of respondents over time with multiple surveys, all of them increased in age, which I think again, gives more confidence that this is a real trend that's happening. Right.
Yeah. The one thing that sticks out to me about this figure though, is it seems like there are certain states like Missouri that the change has not been as drastic and maybe that's because they have more data points that might be part of what's influencing it, but it seems like... Same number as Mississippi. That's true. Yeah. But Mississippi hunters over this time period have aged much more significantly than Missouri hunters.
Do you have any thoughts about, about why that might be, Zach, or were you not able to tease that out from the data? Yeah. I don't know if I have a, a good hypothesis of why that's, why that's occurring, but yeah, that is something that definitely jumped out at me when I was looking at it. Is that, I wonder if that's a general trend in those populations, just like, are people that live in Pennsylvania aging faster than people that live in Mississippi or, or whatever? I'm just thrown out there.
Are people aging faster? I mean, as a population. Is the population aging faster? Yeah. I got what you meant, Morgan. I was there. I knew what he meant too, but I couldn't, I had to take a shot at him over it. Yeah. Well, I'd spec nothing less. Well, I'm just saying like, is the average age of people that live in Pennsylvania increasing faster than in other states? Yeah. I don't know. I have no idea. So like maybe, maybe the whole state is experiencing a demographic shift.
Yeah. Where, you know, there may be the young people are leaving the state or old people are moving to the state or whatever, but I'm sure there's a variation across states in that. So that, that might be one thing that is just a, you know, demographic thing of that state, but they all are aging. Yeah. But the, yeah, that's consistent. Some at a faster rate than others, but they're all aging. It was interesting.
They all started in the, the data points were around, let's see, I guess it was a little bit earlier in Missouri, but basically around 1990 was the first data point and all of them were around 40 years old at that point. That's interesting. And now all of them are around 50, except for Missouri, that one's still around 45.
Yeah. That, that lines up super well with the figure we were just talking about where, yeah, in that bottom left corner, they all just group around somewhere either late, late thirties or early forties. And then by the time it's present day, it just all hovers around 50. So it really makes it seem like this is, you know, a consistent trend that we're seeing, you know, throughout the U S okay. Well, do we want to move on sure to the next figure? Yeah, that's a fun one. Oh yeah.
Well, this one that was surprising to me as well, because I didn't think there would be data that far back on it. Yeah. I wouldn't either. So for, for background, this, this next figure, figure four for everybody listen, you know, on the audio only format shows the percentage of respondents in the sample using decoys over time. So Zach, you want to give us a little bit of background on this? Yeah. Zach, can you also talk about what, what does that mean?
Like, what was the, how was the question structured? Yeah, so basically like Marcus was kind of alluding to you know, I didn't think there would be this much data, especially going back this far, but I think that has a lot to do with at that time, some of the regulations were changing in these different States. So I think they were really interested to see, you know, okay, like now that we've made some changes, who's using decoys.
And the wording in these surveys is always going to be slightly different, but this is basically just asking generally, do you use decoys? So that could mean, you know, I hunt 20 times throughout the year and maybe one or two times I bring out decoys, but that could also mean like I bring decoys out almost every single time that I go hunting. So that's kind of how we compiled this together.
And yeah, as you can see, like in the 1990s especially the early nineties even some points here from the late eighties, like percentage of people using decoys is around 25%, a lot of times lower than that. But as you fast forward to present day, many of these States you're seeing, you know, 75% or more people or at least using decoys some of the time. So it's really interesting to see how quickly that's grown over time.
Yeah, I wonder, I mean, I would think that part of this is probably explained by, you know, kind of the advent and improvement on the appearance of decoys, right? I mean, like you go back to the nineties and the quality of decoys was vastly inferior to what we have today. So that's part of it. And then I was going to say that another part of it may just be that, you know, States have legalized decoy use over time.
But then again, I was thinking about it and I was, I was assuming that, you know, even in that early period, they wouldn't have asked that question if it weren't legal in the state where they were asking it. So I would guess that probably even in States that legalized it long ago, that that use has still increased over time. Right.
Yeah. I guess like to go back to what I was saying before, I think, yeah, they probably put a regulation in place, allowing it, and then they did a survey probably a couple of years after to see like, okay, well, what percentage of people is, um, is using it now. So right after a regulation change, it may have been slow to adopt. I brought up the same thing when I originally saw this wheel, because I remember it being legalized in Alabama. Yeah. That was like 05, 06, somewhere around there.
Yeah. It was, I was a teenager. I remember that about 20 years ago. So, you know, it also, I think I said this on the air to you when we were talking about it at one point, uh, my early interaction with a turkey, with a decoy kind of turned me off to using them. And I, I, now I don't use them at all, really like it. It's a rare thing. I don't care if other people do, or people can do what they want to within their legal right. But to me, I just, I don't get as much out of it.
So I don't use them usually. I don't like carrying them around, but I wonder, you know, especially for younger hunters where it's always been legal, I would like to see that kind of like as an interaction with the other data set that we've just talked about. Yeah. And like some of the data that we're collecting right now, we'll have a better picture of this, um, in the coming months where like you can break it down on public and private land use as well, um, and see how that varies.
Um, cause obviously that's a factor as well. Um, so yeah, we'll get a better understanding of kind of what's factoring into a decoy use by people. But it's pretty obvious from this figure that decoy use is certainly increasing and by a lot. Yeah. And from what we've seen from some preliminary data that we've gathered from Florida, um, I want to say the number is around 55%. Let me double check that. Yeah. 55% of people not just use decoys, primarily use decoys.
So that's the main approach that they're using when they're Turkey hunting is bringing decoys with them. Um, that gives a little more clarity to the amount of times that they're using decoys.
So like what we're looking at right now is just showing the trend and people saying that they use decoy some, but we probably also seeing another, we would probably also see another trend if the data existed, but it doesn't in the publications you surveyed where they didn't, you know, maybe they, they would have answered, yes, I'm using decoys, but they just don't use them that often.
But now at least based on some of the, the early evidence from our current work, uh, a large portion of the people now are using it as a primary means of finding, right. And I think there is one point on there, um, which we might need to exclude from this figure. I was going to ask you to talk about that one. So yeah, the Mississippi one I think is, is worded in a way that's a little more similar to what I was describing where they're saying, like, do you typically use decoys?
And that's why that one is closer to like 30%, um, whereas the average is around 75% of the data. Yeah. To me, it's pretty remarkable. And will you even noted this when you first saw these figures, how much of the variation is being explained by time, like a 60% R squared is pretty crazy. And I bet if we took the, the Mississippi data point out, it'd probably be substantially higher.
I mean, over time we have seen a really clear increase in vehicle use, which, you know, some of that is because regulations are changing or, or, uh, technology, technology and all that. But I still, I mean, when do you ever explain that much of a trend with a variable? That's crazy. Almost never. Zach's going wild on us over there. I realized my leg plug got disconnected. I was like, Oh shoot. I better plug that back in. So apologies. If you saw my Gecko while I walked around.
That is not my room. Yeah. So as a confidence builder for that trend, which I don't think any, I don't think that one would be controversial. I think people probably like to the vehicle use has increased over time. So it's not surprising on that one, but there were two States, Ohio and Missouri that had multiple data points on that as well. And both of them were increasing at a pretty similar rate, at least over the timeframe that they both had data, you know, but both of them are increasing.
So pretty confident in that trend as well. And they both have ended up around that average number of around 75% of hunters based on the most recently available data, which is super interesting. Yeah. Ohio was already at 75% by two, by whenever that data point is in the early two thousands. Yeah. Whereas Missouri didn't get there until the two thousand tens. So interesting.
Yeah, and that's one of the things that we were able to pull out where we had enough data from multiple States and just data points in general where we could combine something together. But there were some other things, you know, I don't know if you want to get into this or not, Marcus, we definitely do on like the, the reaping side of things and then TSS tungsten super shot where there wasn't enough data where we could put some type of figure together like that.
But we did get some preliminary data that kind of inspired some of the work that we're currently doing. Yeah. Let's talk about it. So from this, this literature review, we found a couple of States that did have data points for reaping in their States. Let me go up cause I believe South Carolina is one of them. Here I have this right. Yeah. We've talked about their, their data a little bit before. Yeah. So in a 2018 South Carolina sample, 22% of hunters stated that they have used reaping before.
And then in Maryland, I think it was 6% of a 2017 sample stated the same thing. And those were the two data points that we were able to pull out of this that looked at reaping. And that got us curious, you know, let's start including this in some of the surveys. That we're building. So from that preliminary data in Florida, we worded this differently. And we asked, you know, do you typically use reaping when you go out and hunting?
And 8% of hunters stated that they're typically using reaping as an approach when they're hunting turkeys. 8% you said? 8%. Yeah. And those previous data points were those South Carolina and Maryland. And South Carolina was 22%. And what was Maryland? 6%. 6%. And the South Carolina one got a little more into it, which was interesting. And they asked kind of some opinions about how, how reaping is perceived by hunters in that state.
Yeah. Before you do that, so that question was, do you ever use it? Have you used reaping? I believe is how it's phrased. Oh, have you ever used reaping? I'd have, I'd have to double check that, but I believe it was just. Yeah. So that, I mean, this one's definitely controversial. So I'm really curious to hear where you were going right then. Like what, what was the perception? Oh my God. I don't like how excited you get when I'm about to say something controversial, God. Making me nervous.
Maybe I'm not going to say it now. So from their data in 2018, they had 31% stated that reaping was not a safe practice. Whereas 50% believed it was a fair and ethical approach, which is a really interesting question. That is an interesting question. Half. So half of the respondents think that it is a safe and ethical practice. A fair and ethical approach. Fair and ethical. Oh, they didn't say safe. Yeah. Fair. You said safe. Okay. What did they ask about safety?
Yeah. So that was the previous part where it's 31% stated that reaping was not a safe practice. So almost 70% think it is, yes, or don't, is there other options or do not feel that it's not safe? They might be in the middle somewhere. Okay. So they could have just been indifferent. Right. Okay. That's really interesting.
Yeah. So that's cool to see that other states have been looking at this because yeah, till recently, I don't think as many people were considering including that in some of the data that they were collecting. Yeah. Well, would you not have expected that to be like the reverse? I would have expected 70 something percent to say it wasn't safe. Yeah. That is really surprising to me.
And it makes me wonder how many turkey hunters out there, because we have a biased perspective when we've already talked about this a little bit today that we talk to a lot of avid turkey hunters all the time. So that's a biased sample. Sure. I wonder how many of the more casual turkey hunters, the guys that, you know, maybe they're mainly deer hunters and then they go out open and weekend or maybe two or three weekends or whatever.
But they're not diehards or even familiar with what this practice entails and how that would influence their answer to this question, because I mean, I just feel like if you're paying attention and you're a diehard turkey hunter, you've probably heard a story of a hunter being shot somewhere while reaping. So, hang on, I just I just pulled it up just to make, you know, 100 percent sure. So the question that the way it was phrased was, do you feel that fanning slash reaping is a safe practice?
And 31 percent said no outright, 19 percent said no opinion, 6 percent said yes. And then 44 percent said yes, but only on private land. OK. All right. Well, that makes more sense. Yeah. Yeah. That aligns more with. Yeah. So a lot of people think, I guess, the 30 something percent number that you said, those people don't think is it is safe even on private land. Correct. Yeah. Gotcha. I'll say. Well, that makes a lot more sense. Yeah. Very interesting.
I mean, I think it's also pretty interesting that half of people believe that it was fair and ethical. It seems like we hear a lot of people arguing the ethics of it. And I mean, I guess maybe it's the other half, you know, the more vocal half. Yeah. Well, it's also one of those. Where the perception might be quite skewed because that is a practice that gets a lot of clicks online.
And I think there are probably some people that are practicing it to get the video footage to get right on line, which that drives some of the negativity around it for sure. So yeah, I think these kinds of studies are really important for that reason now with, you know, where everybody has a microphone, so to speak, including us, but I got one right here.
You know, like the especially people that have a big following online or that that is getting amplified and it may not actually reflect the average of what's going on. Yeah. So I think one thing that's really interesting, too, to note here, as you did in the papers, Zach, that as of twenty four, twenty twenty four, seven states have to at least to some extent banned reaping. And that includes Alabama, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Mainly and you add mainly on public land where safety concerns are highest. And I think didn't did you go and look at those didn't I know some of them state safety concerns as the reason for the change. Yeah. So that's that's really interesting. I'm really curious what you know, with some of this new work we've gotten the Florida results already, but there's some other states that are sending it out. I guess we do have a lot of state agency personnel listening.
So if if there are other states that want to participate, that's still not out of the question that we could we could gladly send the survey out in their state if they're interested. So reach out and let us know if you would like to do this in your state. But I'm really, really curious to see some of these things, because you I mean, you just hear about them constantly and, you know, we're collecting the data to see, you know, what what this actually looks like on the landscape.
Yeah. I think one other thing that was really cool that I wanted to point out, and I mean, we can get into the numbers if y'all want to, but at least I wanted to to highlight that it does it does seem like that hunting turkey hunting incidents have been decreasing in recent years, which is good news. Yeah. But it seems like it's it's increased in levels of safety over time.
Yeah, that was something, you know, when I first was doing this work, I was surprised to see where the incident rates were, especially in the late 80s, early 90s, where, you know, they compared it with, you know, hunting deer, hunting small game, hunting pigs. And the numbers for the incident rates for turkey hunting was just, you know, way higher than these these other types of hunting.
So it's cool to see the work that NWTF and the state agencies did in like the mid 1990s, late 1990s and early 2000s to really combat this. And you've seen this kind of across the board in all these states, the incident rates have dramatically declined.
But what's interesting is when you look in some of the studies that have been conducted, especially in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, there's a couple in the 2010s, looking at safety perceptions, there's still a good amount of concern from hunters, where they're reporting those those safety concerns, those feelings like, oh, I'm worried that someone might shoot me when I'm out turkey hunting.
I think that's something that we picked up on and something that, you know, we've been interested in looking at in the future with some of our studies, just because it hasn't been looked at in over a decade is looking at these safety concerns and comparing it with hunting other types of species. That makes a lot of sense. One of the that reminded me of another controversial topic. Oh, my God, you just pulled them all out today.
It is a major concern, at least from the people that we talk to, because we get asked about it and people comment on it and I see it commented on a lot is what the the new technology with shotgun shells, TSS. So did you have any data related to that? Yeah. So again, this is coming from that preliminary data from Florida. So just one state. But again, the phrasing for this question is, do you typically use TSS tungsten supershot? And it's about 40% of respondents are typically using that.
I thought it would be higher than that, if I had to guess. I would have probably said half. But that's that's one of those where, you know, that data hasn't really been collected at all in the literature. So it's kind of hard to see, you know, how is this increased over time? So hopefully that's starts to become something that's collected more regularly in this type of work, so we can really track that over time and see see how that changes.
Did you have any questions about how people perceive it? Like, what are what do people think about the use of TSS? So we there's I don't want to say too much without, like, giving away some of the stuff because it's still preliminary. But we're able to kind of model this and see, you know, how TSS factors into things like risk perceptions and stuff. So that'll be some of the coming work just that'll come out.
I mean, you know, I hope you agree, Will, but I think this is really interesting and valuable work. And we definitely need to revisit it once we get, you know, some of these products. Yeah. The especially across several states to compare. Yeah. States, I think. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, there's biological implications and there's, you know, hunting participation and hunter recruitment implications. So I think it's super important.
You know, one thing that I was going to note real quickly for our listeners about the TSS is the people that have concerns about the use of that technology typically cite that, you know, people are taking further shots to kill turkeys, resulting in them having a higher harvest rate. However, you know, the reason we do science is because a lot of times things that seem to stand to reason aren't always true, right?
And I bring this up because a good friend of mine, CJ Winan, has done a lot of work. He writes a lot of articles about bow hunting and he's done a lot of work comparing crossbow use to vertical bow use and archery hunting for big game.
And he shared some of those results with me and what's really interesting is that the data from at least a few states shows that crossbow hunters, even though the technology is capable, oftentimes of shooting, especially these days, of shooting further, more accurately, that on average crossbow hunters aren't really taking longer shots. So just because TSS gives you that capability, it does not necessarily translate directly into, you know, people that use TSS shoot further.
Yeah. Well, I, you know, just thinking about that from a personal perspective, I kind of have my own self limit, you know, where I'm willing to shoot one out to about 50 yards. And even though the 12 gauge with TSS would be more than capable of going out another 20 plus yards, I'm not going to do that. Right. Personally, I'm not going to, even though the capability. So I wonder how much of it is that self limitation versus the other thing I was going to say.
And I've heard people talk about this and have said something similar to me. But it did, the TSS, what it did do was open up the door to use a smaller shotgun field. Yep. And now for me, that became important because I have the, you know, this eye issue that I don't know if the audience is aware of, but I know you guys are where I needed to be able to make that, that shift. And now I can, I'm still effective out to about the same distance as well at 410.
So, you know, and I've also, yeah, leveraged it to go to a sub gauge too, because I just don't like carrying a 12 gauge, it's too heavy. I'm kind of kicking myself right now, cause, um, we had that question in there. And when you develop a survey, you always go through this process of pre-testing where you meet with, you know, different people and they go through the questions with you and they give you feedback to make sure that they're interpreting it, you know, as you've written it.
And we had a question in there about what is like a shot that you feel comfortable with, um, typically. And they felt like it was too difficult to answer cause there's so many, you know, stipulations involved in that. And it changes so much depending on what's going on.
But we had tried to get that in there cause we were, we were curious and seeing, you know, if that really does make the difference in the way you were saying, well, maybe you use TSS, but maybe that really doesn't change that much in terms of where you feel comfortable or how far comfortable you feel shooting. Yeah. My logic behind using it is that not only does it allow me to carry a sub gauge, but it's probably going to result in the most humane quick kill.
Um, and I figure, you know, especially me, like I shoot so few turkeys that it's not that, I mean like when you factor it in, it's like I'm only shooting a handful of them every so often. So it all, it all kind of adds up to make sense. Little self deprecation there. Well, also I'm like a turkey stand, I've had quite a few turkeys standing at 75 yards and it doesn't feel like I should be able to shoot one that far, you know, like it's so, I can't really see it well to be honest with you.
Well, I mean, and the other thing too is, I mean, you know, Marcus, like if I'm my personal goal is to get a turkey at 40 yards or inside and you know how it is sometimes, you know, what you guessed was 40 is actually 50 and I like having that reassurance. I agree with that. So probably going to make some people mad that are happy to take longer shots and that's fine. You can do whatever you want to do. I was also interested in that question from the safety standpoint.
You know, is this an interaction, like are people concerned about, like, are they concerned about reaping because we have that longer shot range, you know, that, that denser, you know, that that's more dangerous now because of that or vice versa, are people worried about TSS because reaping is taking off. So yeah, really interesting stuff.
Well, Zach, is there anything that we have not asked you about that you wanted to talk about or you thought we were going to ask you or we should have asked you? I don't think so. But I feel like this is the time of the podcast where like I give like a shout out basically just to the hunting community in general, just because in terms of surveying people, the hunting community is always, I would say, one of the most gracious in terms of responding to surveys, filling them out.
You see more, there's always a comment box at the end of a survey where people can write something and hunters, they always fill out that comment box, which I mean, you might think is silly. You might think, oh, they never look at this, but I promise you, we do look at that. So I just want to, like I said, give a shout out because that helps so much in terms of the research.
And a lot of times it's really hard to reach that audience that you're looking for and get a good enough sample size where you can really do something. But with hunters, that's never been a problem. And a lot of the work I was doing earlier this year was going out to WMAs and surveying folks. And I was also working with one of our colleagues, TJ, and he was collecting samples for some of the pathogen work that he's doing.
And I was collecting samples for another project I'm working on where I needed blood samples for stable isotope work. And just the amount of contributions that we got from folks for that was awesome. So always really grateful for the amount of people who are willing to participate in research. And you just see that so much with hunters and anglers. So there's my cheesy thank you for all that. I think that's awesome.
Well, we can link these resources in the show notes and also I'll put out again that we're still in the middle of some of these surveys and haven't even sent out some of the stuff you're working on. So if there are other states that are interested, we're kind of viewing it the more the merrier. We want to get as much data as we can. Yeah, so if you get an annoying email from me in the next couple weeks or months, I promise like I'm just trying to use this data to help the hunting community.
So I promise you like it's only going to take 10 or 15 minutes if you have the time. Definitely recommend completing those surveys because like I said, it really does matter and that data is so needed and so important, especially on the turkey side of things. Well, hopefully if people were interested in what we just talked about, they see that value like the only way to get it is for people to participate and then us to be able to aggregate it, to look at trends and stuff.
So you know, I understand the survey fatigue and people getting irritated that they keep getting surveys and all that, but if you care about turkeys, you know, and you get one related to turkeys, make sure to do that because it definitely turns into important data. For sure. Cool. Well, thanks Zach, that was really interesting stuff. Oh, thanks for having me on again, Will. At least in my mind. Yeah. And thanks everybody for listening.
Let us know, you know, if you found any of that interesting or you want us to talk about different aspects that we didn't cover or whatever, just drop us a note. We're happy to hear from you. Wild Turkey Science is part of the Natural Resources University Podcast Network and is made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow, a grassroots organization dedicated to the wild turkey. To learn more about TFT, check out turkeysfortomorrow.org. Thanks. www.microsoft.com.ca