Ep. 762: Diagnosing “The Turkey Problem” with Dr. Marcus Lashley

Conservation Initiative. And today we're taking a break from our series that we kicked off last week, which is about the culture of hunting, and instead we are going to be discussing a different topic, which is Turkey's We're talking turkey today because it is Turkey Week here at Mediator and across all the media to platforms. That means anywhere return it's gonna be turkey. Go to the media to podcast turkeys, Go to the media to YouTube channel turkeys.

Go to the media website. You're gonna see turkey hunt articles. You can see turkey hunting or not Turkey hunting recipes, but turkey recipes. You're gonna see a turkey calling contest actually, which, by the way, if I am somehow still in the turkey calling contest, it is a miracle and you should vote for me just because of the novelty of somebody like me being in a turkey calling contest and actually winning it.

very thing. What exactly is the state of turkeys today in the country, What kind of declines are we talking about? And then why are we seeing these declines?

I want to discuss with doctor Marcus Lashley today. And he's the guy to talk to because he is a wildlife biologist himself and he is involved in a number of turkey related studies. He's also a tremendous communicator about these issues because he is the host of the Wild Turkey Science podcast, in which himself and a co host have been discussing this very topic with a number of different subject experts over the last year and really been you know, I think covering this better than anybody else.

And he is also the creator of the University of Florida Deer Lab YouTube channel that is an acronym deer deer that stands for disturbance, Psychology and ecological restoration. And he's also found on Instagram at doctor Disturbance and all of this is you know, these are all different places to find his content related to wildlife biology, the wildlife

habitat improvement, turkey science, deer science. He was on the podcast years ago where we talked about wildlife habitats, specifically more deer habitat, but today turkeys is the main topic.

Marcus has got a lot to share. He helps give us some solid answers, points us in the right direction on some different questions and concerns, and gives us some real substantial ideas about how we can make a difference moving forward, to make sure that there are thunder chickens around to chase for many more string springs to come, because I know that's what I want and I'm pretty sure that's what you want to The turkeys are really cool, they taste really good, and I want to keep them

around out there. And it's not gonna be a guaranteed thing unless we are part of the solution, if we can be part of making sure the conditions on the ground are those the turkeys need moving forward. So that's the game plan for today's episode. I want to give you guys one more quick heads up before we get into the show with Mark, and that is related to

the Meat Eater Live Tour. We've got another round of Meet Eater Live events coming up here in April, late April, I believe it's starting, and this is gonna be a more Western coast, Rocky Mountain West tour, So the events will be kicking off on let me get these dates correct here for it. April twenty third is the first show and they're gonna run all the way through May fifth, and there are gonna be stops in places like Mesa, Arizona, San Diego, Anaheim, and Sacramento, California.

But you're also a Turkey guy, which makes you the perfect guest for us today here because here on Mediator it's Turkey Week across everything Mediator. This week we're celebrating turkeys, gobblers, all the good stuff they bring with them. And uh, you're down there in Florida these days, so I gotta ask. First off, I know some seasons are open there in Florida. Have you been out turkey yet?

get observations of them in the field. So essentially hunting turkeys and trying to keep up with them and not be known to them, and that, as you might imagine, it is quite fun.

talked it all through with them. He helped perfectly. Still, and those gobblers came in a range. He said, Dad, can I take him?

hens and gobblers on a few study areas. The primary goal actually the project is just to get baseline vital rate information, so like, you know, the typical things that people are seeing coming out, you know, across all these different projects in different states are the hen survival, nesting success Poult rearing success and the reason that we focus on those is because it allows us to project what populations are doing, because those are the important vital rates.

But there are some other interesting things going on in the Turkey world related to males. And you know, typically when we model populations, we don't even include the mail in it, especially when you know something like Turkey's or deer where one male can potentially breed many females. It's pretty common that we would project a population the male

survival isn't even incorporated. So you know, some of the work that we're doing now we're trying to to get that side of the coin as well, I guess with with male survival and behavior, and you know, I have a strong interest just inherently with Turkey behavior. So that's what we're trying to document things that the gobblers that we have tagged are doing just on a daily basis, and trying to you know, get almost like a personality

in print of what these individuals are acting like. And you know, we we have many things planned and I don't know where it will go. It really is funding

dependent and things. But that's sort of like a passion project for me as I'm trying to get more of an idea of what the identity of the individual is, and then we can start to relate his survival and you know how his habitat use on the landscape is a function of you know, his personality, which even when you capture him, you can tell like the individuals or individuals just like people. You know.

traits how females select males for to mate with. Uh So, there's been a fair amount of behavioral work, but not really looking at it from a from a an individualism standpoint. I don't know what the right word for it. That is but like the personality of them and how that's translating into their success in their day to day life has not been looked at very much, and I thought

it would be interesting. It's sort of a tack onto the ongoing project so that we can get some data and try to figure out is this worth some worth pursuing further.

many states, but it's definitely more than thirty. So you know, wherever your listener, you know, whoever you are, wherever you're from, you probably have an active project going going right now in your state. In your backyard.

definitely red flags being waived. Even the average deer hunter, I think is aware of that, but I'm not sure they understand the detail. So, so could you give me the quick update of how we got here? And then what is here?

in those days. Now, you know, it's hard to believe that, but that, you know, it's kind of how it was portrayed, and we kind of get on the brink of extinction for quite a few species, turkeys being one of them. We had you know, almost extirpated them from a large portion of their range, and that along with several other species, some of which we didn't save, like the passenger pigeon.

It led to a seer trees of legislative acts in the United States and led to the North American model for wildlife management that has been extremely successful not only in establishing sustainable use but also recovering a lot of species. It also built financial pillars that fund that research or research and conservation, and a lot of that is tads directly to hunting. So we have hunting licenses, we have bag limits, we have a duck stamp, we have you know,

financial pillars associated with hunting. The Pittman Robertson Act as an excise tax on hunting related products that then goes back into the conservation of hunted species. But what that usually entails is management of systems that then benefit many

of the non game. So the fact of the matter is the reason we have turkeys now is because we almost lost them along with some other species, and that wasn't acceptable to people, you know, that loved the resource, and it was kind of led us to this legislation, this really successful model, and for turkeys in particular, we started restocking them pretty aggressively. We saw the birth of the National Wild Turkey Federation that was focused on restocking

turkeys across the range. And we sort of went through this phase, especially in the seventies and eighties and nineties, where we had this almost exponential growth in populations across the range, especially in the easterns, but in much of the range of wild turkeys, and that kind of got us to where we are now, where we had historic levels of turkeys in like the two thousand in most places at vary some based on where you're at, but we had these really high populations and then we started

to see some symptoms of decline. And that's really led us to now where people know what the heyday with turkeys when they were, you know, super abundant across the landscape. And frankly, I understand why it is not acceptable for them to be rare. I mean, it's not acceptable for me, as a turkey hunter to go back. You know, I don't want to give up any ground. I want them to be abundant in it, you know, to to hear many gobels every time I go hunting. You know, I understand.

But we have a really passionate group of people that you know, are concerned because there were some there's some indicators of decline, especially in the range of easterns.

trend of decline over time. Mississippi is a good example where I think they kind of from their peak declined to maybe twenty percent lower of that peak, and then it's been relatively stable for about a decade now. So it varies a lot. One thing that seems to be evident is the trend in populations in many places seem to be on a timeline that's very similar to when

they were restocked. So that important implication. So for example, some states like Mississippi were among the first to be restocked, and we see about a pattern where's twenty twenty five thirty years later where we hit this peak and then we start to see this decline and now Mississippi is

relatively stable. Other states like North Carolina or a couple of the other ones that were really late in that restocking where that was happening, like in North Carolina, I think it was all the way into the early two thousands. They're still inclining based on the state level metrics.

what you just said. You kind of overshoot how many turkeys can be carried sustainably, and then you see a correction where density starts to negatively affect the individuals, you know, maybe through competition for resources or something and you start to see as you increase the number of adults, you decrease the productivity of nest or pulse or survival of the adults. So there's this negative relationship between density and production.

So that usually happens or we you know, we see we I guess another way in ecology, we expect that pattern when you have some sort of caring capacity relationship that's that is affecting it. But the fact of the matter is we have some competing hypotheses right now that could all explain that pattern in different ways. So it

could be that we've overshot carrying capacity of habitat. But what you would expect to happen in that case is that it to relatively stabilize like you see in Mississippi, where you know, sort of fluctuate around some number of turkeys that can be carried. But a lot of the states we're sort of seeing this slow decline. So instead of it staying stable at that level, there's this decline. So it could start to imagine some factors that could

play into that. Right, Well, we're developing habitat into you know, infrastructure for people, right We're building houses, we're building developments we're building roads, all those sorts of things. So the amount of habitat available is declining, and it's doing that more rapidly in some areas than other areas. But if you imagine that relationship that was just talking about, as you decrease amount of turkey habitat available, you should decrease

what that stable level should be over time. So that's one, uh, one factor that has been brought up. Another factor that has been brought up is, you know, we when we had that incline in all all those turkeys, we also

had an incline and interest in hunting turkeys. And you know that that's been proposed that maybe hunting has gotten to some inflection point that starts to drive that same sort of pattern where we'd see this steady decline because the hunting, you know, the productivity of the populations is not keeping up with the hunting pressure. The issue with that that hypothesis is that if you look at the harvest rates now and compare them to what they were historically,

they're the same. So that immediately tells me, Okay, there's the only way that works is if hunting. You know, about thirty percent of gobblers on average across studies. Usually about thirty percent of gobblers get harvested each year. So if that's a problem now and it wasn't, then why And the reason that would be is because of productivity. So it wouldn't be that hunting is causing a decline in productivity. It would be that productivity is no longer

high enough to sustain that that level of harvest. So that's one hypothesis. There's various people working on aspects of that idea as well. And another one that's very popular is that we have we don't have as many trappers anymore. For trappers, and you know, as we declined our pressure on thing, you know, things that eat nests in particular, or eat turkeys just at any life stage. As we've declined the pressure on those species, they've vinclined and become

more abundant. So people think that it's you know, blaming on predators changes that that has some issues too. I think it's really interesting to kind of unpack these things because they're also not independent on one another. So, for example, with the predator aspect, a real problem with that is, first of all, we have some studies showing that you can aggressively trap something like raccoons, and they can recover from like a ninety percent decline in one season, so

that wouldn't be a slow process like that. You know, we'd see an abrupt change in predation and that that isn't what the data suggests. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't be related to predators, because there's another thing happening. As you degrade the quality of habitat for turkeys, you increase the habitat quality simultaneously for several all of their predators,

particularly nest predators. So as habitat for nesting gets poorer, habitat quality for nest predators gets better at the same time. So you could you see how that could really affect the role of the predator. And it's actually a habitat problem in that case, because the habitat quality is declining for your target species and inclining for the non target and it's causing the predation problem. It's not the predator, it's the habitat. But you have the same symptom, you know,

which is higher nest predation. So you know that's the problem with this is we want to immediately fix it by trapping predators when actually it's a symptom of bad habitat, which most people don't want to hear that, but it's true. Yeah, and then there's a disease factor that comes in that's being postured. We have some new diseases that we didn't know were things, some that LPDV we think got introduced

relatively recently from the poultry industry. You know, it's been common in poultry, and we think maybe that's where it came from. So there are hypotheses related to disease, but the same thing is true. You know, if you change habitat quality, it may make individuals more vulnerable to disease. And we might see fluxes, you know, associated with populations that are symptoms of some other problem. And that's what

really makes it difficult to figure out. You know, they're all interrelated and it's hard to figure out which one is actually the cause of what you see.

in the South, but it applies elsewhere. If you look at the landscape changes that have occurred, even in just the last two or three decades. For example, we didn't have round up ready crops until the mid nineties. That was a substantial change in the landscape because agriculture got way more efficient, right, so we could kill a lot of the weeds in agricultural crops. Those weeds are the same forbes that I'm trying to get people to promote.

When they promote early succession for turkeys or other species that use it. We got really good at getting rid of those. We've also had intensification of pine plantations and a lot of those came to mature, I should say that a different way. Many of those were the pine plantations were started in the early nineties, and in the South in particular, those would start reaching close canopy conditions

in the early two thousands. For a large swath of time, we would have them be the least usable for turkeys. We have also decreased the use of prescribed fire precipitously over several many decades. Through the nineteen hundreds, we have converted most of our early succession, this not in agriculture to a non native pasture grass. In my part of the world, that's primarily by haya. If you get up into the mid South, that's fescue, it could be braham.

We've got, you know, all kinds of options depending on where you're at. But we've had this really strong conversion of areas that pulps would be using. And one thing that's been really consistent in studies is that we usually see a bottleneck on productivity of turkeys, particularly in that first two weeks of the poltse life. They're really vulnerable. They can't you know, when they're born, they don't have their feathers yet, they're growing really fast. They're eating exclusively insects.

They're growing not just their skeleton but also their feathers, and before they are they reach flight, they can't thermoregulate well, so they can die from exposure. The community, the plant community structure is critical to provide that you know, that that buffer from the elements and predators and provide high production of insects. You know, if you start looking at all of those things and then what those changes would mean.

For example, for nest predator abundance, we should expect things like raccoons and possums and foxes and various other coyotes, we should expect them to increase and abundance as a result of that change in plank commune because they have habitat too right and it's improving for those species. So to me, the factor that makes most sense that would also promote other aspects of this makes you know, it

comes down to that habitat issue. And it's not just that we are losing the amount of habitat, but the connectivity of habitat is being influenced and also the quality of habitat. And even when you think about hunting, you know, we're still harvesting thirty percent of the males. But if habitat quality is poor and we have fewer nests that hatch, and then fewer of those poults that from the hatch nest survive, then we can support less hunting mortality. And

that's not because hunting is the problem. It's because productivity in the population is the problem. I think to me, at the point we're at now, with the amount of information that we have, we know that the relative role of these factors is fluctuating substantially potentially across the landscape. But the common denominator that is consistent is that we are very limited on high quality nesting and brooding cover

across the landscape. Every study that tries to quantify the proportion of the landscape that we would classify as high quality nesting and brooding cover doesn't matter what state you pick, it always comes out in the single digit proportion when you add them together. So I don't know how much of the landscape needs to be high quality brooding and high quality nesting cover, but it's probably more than a single digit percentage of the available habitat in an area.

predator problem. And then it makes sense when you look at the studies and pretty much in every single study, the leading calls of nest loss, the leading cause of polt loss, the leading cause of him mortality is always predation. And then it makes people look at that and say, oh, well, clearly predators of the problem. And the problem with that that viewpoint is what that data point actually tells you is that predators eat turkeys. We already know that, right Yeah.

What you're not really understanding, necessarily, if you're not thinking deeply about it, is what would what would be the outcome? If you know, if I did a study in an area and I removed or allowed the the nesting cover to decline in quality substantially, we would lose more nests. Do you know why because more would get eaten. So if I took the same area and had high quality nesting cover available and I just continue to add more and more and more predators, we would lose more nests

and it would be because more would get eaten. So if you see more nests get eaten, it doesn't actually tell you what the problem is. That the predation could be the cause or the symptom, if that makes sense. And you know, I think we we latch onto some things that they just make intuitive sense at face value. And you know, we've we have been talking about habitat and nauseum for a really long time with a lot of wildlife management, and it's just people don't like to

hear that for some reason. So I don't know if it's because we it's easy for us to villainize other potential causes, or you know, it's it's something that's not within the control of some people. It's something that's harder to understand sometimes. Uh, you know, we have plant blindness that's actually been quantified. There are all kinds of reasons. I really don't know, but I do think it's interesting,

you know, if you take a step back. Even when I work with private landowners really commonly trying to help them, you know, develop high quality habitat for deer in turkeys. And it's really interesting to hear someone that's been a wrong, you know, for seventy or eighty years, and they say, well, nothing's really changed here, and then we go around on their property and it's like, yeah, I remember when this field we used to plant by hand and I had to go out there and pick weeds out of it.

And this field over here, it wasn't even a field. It used to be this, you know, this old savannah and yeah, we didn't even have herbicides, so we used to just burn off all the brush everywhere. You know that they start naming all these different things that have changed right after they tell you nothing has changed, right,

And it's a really interesting thing. But I don't have the answer to that, but I do see that that that response often where there's some people that they don't want to hear that this is a habitat problem.

key thing. If we look at space, so let's think about turkeys I just told you nesting in brooding cover that's essentially shrubland or shrubby structure, and an understory that has an open canopy and a forest or brooding cover which is essentially a herbaceous dominated unity that is particularly

dominated by forbes, not grass. Okay, the if we look at the species of conservation concern outside of turkeys in the eastern United States and we restrict that to the species that reside in uplands like turkeys mainly do, almost every single species on the list that's in decline and of concern is associated with early succession, prairie or some sort of broken canopy, frequent fire system, all of them, almost everyone.

it's the easiest to convert to pasture grass. You know, it makes sense why we would see, you know, those species imperiled by that. But you know, then we turn and look at turkeys and people don't want to hear that this is a habitat issue when the bottleneck demographically for them are associated with that same you know, habitat structure.

are very successful. You know, where you have many landowners getting together and they get a plan together where they're all going to collectively manage their deer under this plan, and that can be extremely successful. I think the same thing could work for turkeys, and we do not see that very often, but that's one way, you know, you could collectively decide you know, hey, this is how many gobboyers we think, here's what we should do in terms

of our you know, our harvest. Hey, uh, you know, we need to all try to increase the amount of brooding cover to some critical level. Hey, we need connectivity. So if I get a crew in to harvest this stand, do you think you could do this in the one and adjacent on your property? You know, those kinds of things can start to move the needle more at a local scale, and then they build out from there. I've also been extremely active in the fire community, and particularly

in the South. I mean, almost all of those landscapes that I've been talking about that turkeys thrive in, I mean mark when you look at the historical records from various aspects, basically all of the eastern United States, nearly all of it was classified in some sort of woodland or savannah or grassland state. You know, almost none of that landscape is in that state now. But the reason it was in that state is because of widespread use of fire. So I think that's one tool that we

are starting to implement at scale. There's barriers. People are afraid of it. On private lands, for example, there's liability of fears. A lot of people don't realize, especially in some of the southern states, that we have right to burn laws that help protect you from liability. We have prescribed burn associations that are popping up all over the place that are basically landown or cooperatives where they're all sharing resources and they're going and burning with each other.

That's one aspect that I think is going to really help with this situation is just getting more fire use on the landscape that the artifact of that practice is better nesting and brooding cover for turkeys. So I think those are the kinds of grassroots initiatives that we can

really start to move the needle. And if we have high enough awareness and we start to make policy changes like those right to burn laws that make it easier for people to do things, you know, that would benefit the species, uh, you know, we start to make real change.

And there there are examples where groups of landowners or wm A complexes have gotten really aggressive with habitat management and they see really great success with that where the populations seem to flourish even even though they may not be elsewhere in the state.

We just we've recorded various episodes on various podcasts about this where we've covered several studies related to prescribe fire and like, for example, with a raccoon, if you put a tag on a raccoon and follow him around and get his home range, and then you burn a unit within his home range, you may as well made that

thing of donut. He basically, I mean, in one of the studies that they did that they decrease the use of that area up to eighty percent within that burn unit, even though it's running the middle of his home range. So you know, another study from northern Florida that had a whole bunch of different areas all across the Panhandle

all the way over to the Atlantic. They looked at how likely they were to detect a many of the predators of turkeys, both nest and adult predators, the mammals, and basically across the board and including of wild pigs that cause all kinds of problems if you increase the well, let me start, if the area that the cameras were in was not burned, and this was replicated remember across many sites. If the area was not being burned that the cameras were in, you were above seventy percent likelihood

to detect all of them. And if you increase the frequency such that you were on a two year return intervoy fire, so frequent fire, which most of Florida historically did burn every two years, or even more frequently in some places, if you increased it to that two year frequency, you decrease the likelihood of detecting a whole suite of predators from above seventy percent across the board to below

ten percent across the board. We're talking about substantial changes and predator use, and it's not that they're that much less abundant. What happens is they get relegated to the wetland basically the stream. You know that the wet areas that are not being influenced by fire, and a lot of those species are what we'd call music species. They're supposed to be associated with that drainage. Wow, they're just not when when fire isn't part of the landscape.

for both species. So that can include a commercial timber harvest, or if you're in a situation where you can't or don't want to do that, it could include forest and improvement where you go in and kill individual trees and try to, you know, get rid of things that are unwanted tree species you don't like, and do that in

a way that promotes higher sunlight penetration. Other things that I think the deer community in particular can have a major impact if you're also interested in turkeys, is starting to manage your fall food pot program such that it turns into a high quality poult rearing program during the spring.

So if you plant let's say twenty pounds of crimson clover per acre and maybe a thirty pound rate or forty pound rate something like that of wheat, basically those two plants super attractive to deer during the fall. And I realize that this may not be applicable to some other parts of the country, but in the South, I mean, those things are those are really great plants, are well adapted, and they do really well, and the important thing is

they're really attractive to deer. They're also really attractive to turkeys. Early in the breeding season, when you're getting a lot of the strutting, you know, you'll see a lot of turkey use of those areas. And then they start to the clover and the wheat starts to seness. So it basically dies right because those their annual plants. And when they die, because of the disturbance of the field, you

start to get a lot of weeds come in. And if those weeds, if you take some care to make sure that you get rid of unwanted weeds, a lot of the weeds will be really high quality forbes, the things that you're trying to encourage in a brooding field.

So what you end up with in that transition is it goes from that really high quality deer plot that becomes a really attractive turkey plot during a lot of folks turkey season, and then it transitions early in brooding into a really good structure for brooding because of the weeds. What most people, well, there's multiple problems that come that

most people are not taking care of. One, if you're planting something like that and you don't deal with whatever grass problems or said problems that you have, which is almost certain that you do. If you don't take care of those, that will limit it from transitioning into that kind of structure. And down here that's rye grass. Every field that I go to almost has a rye grass problem unless they have they have tried to take care

of it through some sort of herbicide regimen. So you know, if you take care of some of your weed issues, which often is going to be some sort of grass, then you know it can transition. There can be some problematic forbes. Don't get me wrong, We have plenty of them. Down here, you know, like sickle pod or you know some of the other invasive forbes like that can certainly

be a problem. But if you take some precaution precautionary measures to make sure you deal with those issues and then let it transition into that forb dominated community in the dead you know, crimson and wheat, it can produce a really powerful system for you to balance deer hunting opportunity with turkey hunting opportunity with poult rearing cover. So, like that's a practice that could really help people that have a property that they're interested in both species.

be in that critical two week window. That window where whatever it is for where you're listening from, is the critical window. The beauty of turkeys is. It doesn't matter if you're in Oregon or Florida, or Pennsylvania or Texas. It doesn't matter. The same general structure is needed. You might get there a little differently, but we need a

FORB dominated community with a lot of bare ground underneath that. So, like you said, I had a video that I put on YouTube recently trying to show people that system, the Crimson cover with wheat system, and what that needed to look like to make sure that it was producing that poul room cover. So if you can get that two week minimum, you know period at a minimum, really you know, a four to six week window of time, you can

really produce a lot of poles. The other thing that I will add a lot of those forbes that we're trying to produce in that system or thirty percent crew protein twenty five percent crew protein. They're just as good as what you would be planting for your deer, you know, summer plots right in many cases. So yeah, it really is.

It's a great way to balance those two species. You know, a lot of the lot of the plants that that deer are going to eat, the wild plants that they're eating when they're trying to support peak lactation or antler growth, are the same plants that are producing lots of insects for polts to run around under and catch.

or different things like that. But from your perspective, based on what you've seen, based on the research, based on the folks who've talked to. If I am an individual who's worried about turkeys in my area, are there any changes that I should make as a turkey hunter as far as how I hunt, as far as when I hunt,

as far as anything like that. If I'm a concerned turkey hunter, are there any changes that I should be making to my hunting practices in or to the regulations that I advocate for that would help.

That hen is the most important fact. She is playing the most important role in what the population trajectory is. You think about that hen she is potentially producing nests and poults for nine or ten years. Right, If you take out a hen, you've taken out years worth of nests and poults potentially, So you know that. That's another way that if you're concerned, you know to on your property not take a hen. That makes sense. Some people have have been been concerned about the timing of hunting

and when we're hunting. There is a study and it's in the publication process now. It was in Tennessee where they manipulated the timing of the season in a well, frankly, one of the strongest experiments has ever been done in turkeys. It was a before after control impact design. It's like the dream design best case scenario. They had a really

large sample size. They went into five counties and monitored the reproductive success and survival and all that stuff of populations of turkeys in these counties and then took part of the counties. After they did that for a while three or four years, then they changed the season date to be later in those counties and then compared it to the other counties that they did not move it in.

After they followed the populations for two more years, they looked to see or is there any difference in reproduction between the populations, and there was not. They didn't observe anything in Tennessee. But in that Tennessee study they did show a substantial change in productivity of turkeys as a function of habitat. So hens that were nesting in in Shreubland had a substantially higher nesting success than hens that

nested elsewhere. And seven percent of the landscape was between brooding and nesting cover considered high quality in that study, and almost fifty percent of the nesting attempts were in that seven percent. Right, that's substantial selection, and it had conferred a really big effect on the success. And that's an example of where the selection is extremely strong for something that we could probably stand to produce a lot

more on the landscape, certainly more than seven percent. And if we did that at the scale, we'd have a really big effect on population. And here I think is the important thing. If you change your poulp per hen ratio, so how many polts you're recruiting per hen from let's say one to four, you're so productive. All these other factors really don't matter that much.

that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. If you're doing that within your legal right, then you go have fun. But you know, the predator issue is probably linked to habitat first, and I think you know that's the way to think about that.

important thing for you to consider. But trying to find ways to get that to scale up so that it is the the norm on the landscape instead of an oddity is what we you know, what we really need to get to. And I don't know, uh, you know, if I'm in that situation, yours our situation, if that needs to be some sort of incentive or penalty, I

don't think that's the way to do it. We don't respond well to that that type of but you know, we we have responded well to incentive based programs to get land owners to take actions that might otherwise not be in their their self interest, right like retiring some of the agricultural land so that it can better filter nutrients from getting into waterways. You know, we we we

incentivize things like that. So maybe some type of program that incentivize people to create, you know, better nesting and brooding cover could be a way to circumvent that. I know that the research is necessary. Having some sort of of modifier of behavior is probably a necessary point. And then the other part is awareness, you know, trying to focus programming to reach people so that they're aware of the issue and they're aware of how to they can

help with the issue. I think that's an important part of the the the puzzle there. So you know, I don't know exactly, I'd have to probably plan a little better than that's fair up here, but you know, I think those three elements would be pretty critical to trying to write the ship, so something, Yeah, go ahead.

are those numbers? When you hear those numbers to you, is that like a five alarm, fire drill, like this is crisis mode or when you when we hear those numbers, is that like, well, yeah, this is concerning, but you know, populations fluctuate, these things happen. You know, this is something we need to be doing more research on. But let's not freak out, Like how how concerned should we be?

aggressively start managing habitat. We're seeing that in some places, you know, people care about the resource and that that you know, That's why I'm not more concerned. I know that we have a group of people that we're ready to get this done. We just need to know what to do.

various topics. In fact, if you're interested in in learning more like I can't cover everything in an hour, right, but if you want some intense information on what you can do on your property to improve habitat or various other things, we have episodes episode twenty nine and thirty on Wild Turkey Science. We talk about how to manage fields for brooding cover. It's probably the best resource out there and we had the best person in the business

on the show to talk about it. And it's about the you know, it will teach you how to make brooding cover fields. So we also have a YouTube channel. We put a lot of videos like the one you mentioned where we you know, if you don't know what nesting cover looks like, we have a video that will show you what every hen was nesting in and what it looked like and whether or not she was successful.

So you know, there are resources through a YouTube channel at ufder Lab the I also have an Instagram account that I'm very active on it, and I share all kinds of of how to type information and science that's going on, especially on turkeys. Occasionally I share something about deer, but I focus a lot on turkeys. That's doctor disturbance.

So i'd encourage you if you're if you're really interested in turkeys and you want to know how to manage them, or you want to understand the problem or what's going on in your state, you know, to tap into those resources because that's what we're looking for, is just to make it available to you. All.