Bear Grease - Ep. 432: Backwoods University - Wild Turkey DNA

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

The Wild Turkey is one of the most beloved, and also most studied game birds. In this episode, Dr. Mike Chamberlain, also known as the Wild Turkey doc, gives us a look into one of the greatest new discoveries in the world of turkey science. A discovery that might have huge implications for the future of turkeys and turkey hunting. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. And on today's episode, man, the stars line up just right. As y'all have heard me say before, I love. Man, I love spring turkey hunting. Everything about it, the bird, the habitat. It's magical, top to bottom.

And on this episode, we're going to dive into one of the newest, one of the most fascinating, and honestly one of the most uncharted areas of turkey research and biology, and without my planning to do so. It just so happens to line up so very perfectly with what we just learned about wild turkey conservation just a few episodes back with Mr. Benny Herring. Y'all will see what I mean. Let's dive in. This past Saturday was youth turkey opener here in Mississippi, and I had an eager young turkey hunter lined up to take to the spring woods, which meant, in the days leading up,

I needed to find a turkey to hunt. Now, this part of the process is honestly one of my favorite parts of the whole game, the scouting, the very first pieces of the puzzle, the added bonus of being able to break day in the woods early, and if you're lucky, you get to hear a tall timber Gabriel sound off from his heavenly perch. I'd slipped out to this place Monday morning, and I'd heard what I believed to be three to four gobbling turkeys together in one wad, along with a gaggle of hens. Now, it is important to note that wads of turkeys like this are very normal this early

in the spring. With the opener coming up on Saturday, I wanted to slip out there one more time early Friday morning and see if I could put ears on these turkeys one more time, to see if they were still hanging out in the general area, and to get any more information I could on where they wanted to be. So, there I was, watching the dim morning light starting to pour over this fresh cutover and onto the timber on the other side where I expected the turkeys to be. As the daylight began to grow, songbirds began to sing. Bard owls began to state their claim across the land. The woods were coming alive. And then an eruption took place. Turkey's gobbling, hens cackling, and a symphony that seemed unplanned and in perfect harmony all at the same time.

I sat there, leaned up against a tree from my side of the cutover and just smiled. Right where I left them, I thought to myself, when out of seemingly nowhere, a gobbler sounded off out of the same chunk of woods that I was sitting in. Now, he was still around 200, 250 yards away, but I still wasn't expecting any turkeys to be roosted in the block of woods that I was in. Not that they couldn't be. It was just that the other side had a big creek running through it, which is a textbook ingredient of places where turkeys love to roost. And also, like I stated earlier, this time of year, they tend to be all in a watt. He gobbled again, which confirmed I had not miscourced him, and he was indeed roosted away from the rest of the wad and in the same woods with me.

There was nothing I could do but lean into my tree and see how this unfolded, which is where this video clip I'm about to share with you comes in. I wanted to capture some of the audio of all these turkeys gobbling. I was also unsure of what this turkey roosted close to me was going to do, so I started recording video on my phone and put it in my bino pouch. If you couldn't tell from the volume of that gobble, this turkey was now much closer than 250 yards. He was more like 90 to 100 yards. This turkey had somehow gotten separated from the rest of the wad, and now he had flown out into the cutover and began walking, gobbling, and strutting across back towards all the other gobbling turkeys in the woods on the other side,

and the path he chose to take was angling right by me. And I'm just out there, sitting against a tree and green pants in a t-shirt. I did my best to blend into the tree I was leaned against, and I watched him make his way all across there and into the woods back with all his friends. It's the day before youth season in Mississippi, and I'm taking a young and out tomorrow, so I came out here to scout because I'd heard some turkeys roosted in this area. So I was expecting slash hoping to get ears on them. I was not expecting the experience I ended up having. made me wish today was the opening day of youth man that was about as killable of a turkey as you could ever ask for you don't typically find long beards by themselves on march the sixth but he was what happened ended up happen was

the wad of turkeys that i had been hearing was roosted across here you could hear him goblin and yelping and carry it on the other side somehow this guy got separated and was goblin on his own and when he finally came out into the opening and he gobbling and strutted, but he was on a mission to get to those other turkeys. That was way cool. And I love spring. It was worth waking up for right there. That next morning, my youth hunter and I were right back in there. We started setting up right near to where I had that crazy scouting incident the morning before.

The morning started with the same chaotic chorus of yelping, cutting, and gobbling. However, this morning, all of the turkeys were roosted on the other side. No lone goblers. I had a sneaking suspicion that this might be the chaos. However, I elected to play it safe and not risk crossing that log and debris covered cutover in the dark and risk making two truckloads of noise. After hearing the turkeys fly down, they remained vocal enough that I could tell they drifted away from the edge of the cutover and deeper into the woods. It was at this time that I felt confident that we could cross the cutover and get into the same woods that they were in. We identified a spot that would give us the most covered across and also had a small ribbon of trees left on it.

It wasn't much for hiding us walking across there, but it was enough. It was going to have to be. I owled one time before we made our trek and two turkeys answered me. Deep in the woods on the other side, it was time to move. We started walking as quickly and quietly as we could until we finally made it to the other side. These woods were of different composition than the woods we had walked from. Although separated by nothing but a few hundred yards, these were lowlands that led into a big creek bottom. And the ground was covered in Chinese privet.

If you've ever had any dealings with Chinese Privet, then you probably had the same reaction when you heard me say it as I did when I saw it. Ugh. It's a highly problematic invasive plant, and it's a real problem in the southeastern United States. It's a small slender shrub that is dense with branches and small green leaves. Now, on one hand, it was going to give us some cover to move, but on the other hand, finding a spot to set up for success was going to be extremely difficult.

But the turkeys were in there, so we didn't really have a choice. We slipped through the maze of privet vines and thin trunk trees until we hit a noticeable change in the woods. The Big Creek was now in view, and on both sides for about 30 yards was a buffer strip of more open ground and larger oak trees. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best opportunity for a setup that I had seen so far. We sat down next to a large fallen oak tree,

which provided us great color. I told my young hunter that we would sit here and call for a bit. Even if we didn't get an answer, this area was worth spending some time in. We got settled in, and I pulled out my slate call. I let out two soft clucks and a seven-note yelp. I heard the sound of my calling ringed down the creek. Seconds went by, and I do mean seconds, probably less than 30 of them, when the unmistakable noise of a turkey drum fell across my ears.

I could feel the hair on my neck stand up and my heartbeat in my heart. increase. I remember thinking to myself, surely not. We just sat down. I decided it was not worth risking, exciting my young hunter over a false alarm, and I wanted to double check and see if I heard it again. In the few seconds that had passed by since I heard it, I had already began to doubt whether or not it was real. A few more seconds went by, and I heard it again. This time, it was undeniable. I was just about to whisper to let my hunter know when all of the sudden a hen started yelping loudly, and it was quickly answered by two thundering gobbles. They were no more than 50 yards away. We just couldn't see them due to the sea of Privet. The hen started yelping louder. I answered her back.

She yelped again. The longbeards gobbled again, and they were steadily getting closer. I whispered across to get ready, and that we would see them at any second. The drumming became so loud that I felt like I could hear it in syllables. I was burning my eyes through the woods trying to catch a glimpse when finally I caught movement. It was a hen. She was 25 yards away, yelping and looking. Shortly after, I saw a second hen, and all the while I'm still hearing drumming. I thought for sure at any second one of them would pop up. We waited for what seemed like in eternity, watching the hens, constantly hearing drumming,

when all of the sudden one of the hens picked up and flew right over our heads and landed on the other side of the creek just 30 yards away and went back to yelping. The second hen followed suit. Now we had hens directly to our right yelping on the other side of the creek and the goblers drumming to our left. I thought that this was going to work out perfectly. Surely they will follow where the hens went. To my dismay, shortly after, I finally got a glimpse of the longbeards. They were crossing and headed to the creek, except they didn't take the same path as the hens.

They were about 45 yards and behind Privet. They crossed a small opening but only gave us about one to two seconds. seconds before disappearing again. All fell quiet. I yelped softly and I heard a drum. These turkeys had been in gun range for over 10 minutes now without a solid shot opportunity. And we were trying to still pull it off before they inevitably crossed the creek to go to their hens and walked out of our lives. I waited a few moments and I yelped again. And again, they drummed, but I still couldn't see them. More minutes went by and I finally caught sight of one of them. They were now 65 yards away and standing right on the

a creek edge. One strutted one more time while the other looked around. They both hopped and glided across the creek, gobbled, and went to their hands. An incredible hunt, a fun hunt, but man, I sure wanted to see that youth hunter that I was with shoot one of those goblers. Thankfully, he was in good spirits, and we have full plans to pursue those birds again, because thankfully, they didn't spook. So all as well. You may be asking yourself at this point, why is this guy sharing this story? Well, the reason's really simple. I love turkey hunting, a whole lot.

In fact, I think a lot of listeners to this podcast feed love turkey hunting a lot as well, and appreciate a good turkey story, even if it doesn't end with one getting carried out over someone's shoulder. But I do think a lot of the listeners to this podcast feed enjoy hearing about a topic that directly impacts the future of turkeys getting carried out over someone's shoulder. Did that even make sense?

I've been told sometimes I try to get a little bit of. too cute with my words and sentences and it just ends up being hard to follow. Basically, what I'm saying is, I think a lot of y'all care about the future of turkeys and turkey hunting. And so does the guest on today's show. Dr. Mike Chamberlain, the infamous wild turkey doc. The man is straight up famous in the world of wild turkey science and research. And in this episode, we're talking about one of his newest and honestly one of his most fascinating endeavors. And quick disclaimer, when we scheduled this interview, I fully expected us to get some really cool and fascinating information. What I did not expect was how perfectly all this would line up

with the Saving Wild Turkeys episode we recently did with Mr. Benny Herring. Y'all will see what I mean. Where did the idea come from to do the Turkey DNA project that you're doing now? Yeah, so basically I was collaborating with Phil Lovreskes at University of Texas at El Paso on some turkey genetics work, irrespective of Wild Turkey DNA. We're doing a lot of work. We're doing a lot of work with using eggshell membranes from hatched clutches to look at the sex of the pult, to look at relatedness within the clutches, identifying instances of where there's multi-paternity where you have more than one tom that's fertilizing clutches. And basically I had tapped into Phil's knowledge and I was familiar with duck DNA, you know, the sister or brother

project. And I knew kind of how they were doing that project, you know, citizen science driven, using duck hunters. And I saw a social media post with an odd looking turkey in it. And there were all these statements in the social media post about it's a domestic bird, it's this, it's that, like definitive statements. Sure. And I've always been interested in color phases of wild turkeys, and I have long wanted to do a range-wide genetic study.

Since 2002, when the last one was done, this is something I've wanted to do and I didn't have the vehicle to do it and it hit me on Super Bowl Sunday last year I texted Phil and I said let me ask you a question I was like if I got you a piece of tissue

like you do for ducks like a tongue or a piece of brass or whatever could you tell me if it's a wild bird or not and he 100% I was like do you have five minutes for a call and that took two hours we got on the phone

and no alcohol was involved. We got on the phone and it came around to what if we did wild turkey DNA like we've done duck DNA? Well this was, you know, this was February and turkey season's right around the corner. So I had two options. I could try to put together a huge project right out of the box evaluating range-wide genetics, but I feared if I did that, I'd fail. And so, we decided to start with the odd plumage turkeys. And we figured, okay, we can get enough funding together to maybe process 75 samples. Let's start a project called Wild Turkey DNA and let's ask hunters to send us samples if they kill a weird looking turkey.

No kidding. The next day was Monday. I had a cooperative framework outlined. I called a friend who runs a private foundation to see if they would provide some funding. I reached out to NWTF leadership, asked if they would provide some funding. Do you agree to provide some funding? I gave some funding through the Wild Turkey Lab at the University of Georgia. And within two weeks, we had a logo and we had a project launched.

Yeah. And it came to gather really quickly. And to be honest with you, man, I never expected it. We were overwhelmed with samples. Yeah. We had to turn away hundreds of samples that hunters reached out to us, and we just didn't have the resources to process all of the data. And it was very humbling to see the turkey hunting community be that interested in this.

And it allowed me, frankly, it allowed us, I say me. It allowed us to capture some attention, generate some buzz, some publicity, and get our legs under us to launch this broader effort this year. And we, you know, D.U already had this, the infrastructure in place. They, they knew how to do this. Right. We just had to model it similarly, and we had to do some things differently for Wild Turkey DNA. But being able to rely on D.U's expertise and history was super cool.

And to be able to link NWTF with DU in a partnership, that, I thought, was really charismatic and cool. and yeah, it's exploded since then. And this convention, I have been asked 10,000 questions about this project, and that is so cool to me that turkey hunters see value in it. I remember the first time hearing about a, quote, color phase turkey getting killed close to where I grew up. It was a smoke phase, and it happened when I was in high school, and the news of that swept across Rankin County, Mississippi like pollen covering a windshield in March. Many of you out there have probably had similar.

experiences. But have you ever thought to wonder what causes a turkey to exhibit these unorthodox colors? What does it mean? What are the implications? Is there a bigger story here? I think there might be. To be honest with you, some of the things that we observed before we ever started the project is ultimately where I wanted this to go. And I'll explain. So we were seeing and are seeing instances in some of our populations that we're capturing birds and marking birds of very low genetic diversity. And when you get very low genetic diversity, the population is less resilient. You see higher inbreeding potential. And when you see higher inbreeding potential, there's reproductive consequences to that. When you start seeing low genetic diversity, you would expect

birds to be less productive. And as you know, throughout broad areas of the southeast and Midwest, we've seen ongoing population declines for many years. Oh, now, back up. Most everybody knows that concern around turkey population declines have been a big topic of discussion in recent years. But are we about to find out that this turkey DNA project might provide some answers there? If so, this is an even bigger story than I thought. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated. with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called

Prime Cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record.

If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts.

Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.

I get paid to turn stones. That's what I get paid to do as a researcher. And the way I looked at this is if this is a stone I can turn that offers at least even just a tiny partial explanation for some of the issues we've seen, then it's worth turning the stone. And so as we've collected more data, we are continuing to see these perplexing signatures in some of our populations.

Because what I had to do, when we started getting these odd plumage bird, samples. We don't know what they are. We have to have comparative. Right? So we have to have reference samples. So all the birds, my trapping crews have caught, all the birds that have been caught in Louisiana or Tennessee or Kentucky by colleagues, Nebraska, I started reaching out

to colleagues in the same space and saying, hey, could I borrow your samples? Could I take one drop of blood from your vials that are frozen? or you already analyzed yours. Can I use what you found because you're using the same techniques we are? And I built a large reference set. And that allowed us to start identifying, okay, that's a bird that looks odd, but it's 100% wild. And so now what we're doing is we're actually isolating the genes that control plumage color so that we can nail down how.

How did this bird get to look like this? Particularly, and there's several routes, you can get an odd-looking turkey. You can get a wild bird that's 100% wild that has certain traits, you know, certain gene sequences, combinations. You can have a wild bird that crosses with a domestic bird. Or you could have a wild bird that either crosses with a heritage turkey, which is a turkey that's created by breeding domestic. domestic forest, wild birds. Yeah. Or you could just have a heritage turkey that escapes somebody's property.

Somebody's tractor supply turkey. It gets shot by a hunter. Yeah. We've seen all of that. Yeah. We've seen all of that in the results. And now we're trying to understand what are the consequences of that. When you have these recessive or these odd traits in a population, particularly if they're

a hundred percent, if they're fully wild birds and they're expressing these genes in this way through this odd plumage, what does that mean? Is it a problem? Is it linked to low diversity? Is it linked to inbreeding? And that's where we're now headed. And you'll see this in the upcoming weeks. We are going to start sharing some results from birds that, quite frankly, have stumped us. This is so fascinating to me, especially all the different routes in which a turkey can take to end up with an odd color phase. But what does it mean? If anything, I feel like we've just scratched the surface. here and there's a whole lot more to find out. And heads up, remember how I've been saying that the stars lined up just right on this one?

And this pairs up so well with our episode with Mr. Benny Herring and how we relocated turkeys. Well, we're about to find out why. When social media exploded, that's when you started seeing really weird-looking turkeys pop up. Yeah. And they were getting a lot of attention. And I would look at some of those and go, I'm not convinced that's a wild turkey. And I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag, but some of the birds that were submitted this year or last year,

I 100% said that is not a wild turkey. And Katie would send me the pictures and say, do we want a sample from this bird? Because that's how it worked. Sure. And I would respond to her and go, yeah, we definitely want one. I even responded by email several times and said, I pretty much know what that is, but let's get a sample.

I've been wrong. About, oh, there's some that you thought were not, wow. 100%. And that stuff's going to come out pretty soon? Wow. 100%. They were birds that were submitted that I thought there's no way that's a wild turkey. Yeah.

And they are fully wild, 100% wild. That's crazy. Yeah. And what we've figured out is there's multiple ways to get a turkey to look the same. In other words, there's multiple routes to get two birds. that look the same that have a different background or origin. No kidding. And so it's because of the genes that were isolating that control plumage.

And so I didn't know any of that. I was ignorant to all of that. And to quote Phil O'Reskey, we talk about this all the time. He's like, turkey genetics are so much more complex than duck genetics that it really just kind of blows your mind. And part of that is traced back to our restoration activities when we were training. translocating birds all over North America. We were introducing novel genetics into populations through our trap and transport activities. And what we were also doing, which is an important thing that you don't often think about,

is we were going in and capturing flocks and moving them, right? That's how it worked. You know, a state biologist or game warden would fire rocket net over 10 hens and three jakes. I'm just pulling that number out of the air And that all those birds would be boxed And they would be driven to the next state Or to 10 counties away And released on your dad's farm or whatever

Sure Well now what we know about wild turkeys is Most of those birds in that flock Were related to one another And some of them were siblings For instance, those three Jakes were all brothers Yeah So if you had 10 hens and six of them

Were related to one another then you moved an inbred unit to create your population. And so instead of the population exploding and genetically, the numbers may have exploded because you released them into a habitat that was vacant, predators weren't keyed in on them. They went nuts. Population expanded really rapidly, but genetically, the population was eroding very slowly. We were introducing novel genetics into populations through trap and transport activities,

and we were going in and capturing flocks that we now know were related. This is highly relevant information. It's fascinating information. And look, I want to throw out a quick disclaimer. I myself, Dr. Chamberlain, and probably any wildlife biologists that you would talk to would tell you that we still celebrate the successful efforts of the earlier generations of conservationists to trap and relocate turkeys in this country. It is largely in part as to why we still have them around to enjoy and hunt.

No one would ever take anything away from that. The point we're trying to make here now is that we now know that many of those flocks that were moved were likely related, which meant we were setting these turkeys up for a future of low genetic diversity. But again, what does that really mean going forward? Let's find out. This is just a hypothesis at this point. But we are wondering whether that's part of what we've seen across parts of the species range. No kidding.

The decline, as you know, the decline has been very slow. Gradual. Yeah. And we're wondering if this is part, not all, but part of an explanation for that is that these populations have been eroding from a genetic standpoint as a consequence of just kind of how we conducted business. business sure back then yeah versus say like in if you look like out west as you know you go out west and their turkeys came from all over the place and were released in states like Idaho and California right and just literally it was a hodgepodge turkeys came from

everywhere yeah um versus in the east where restoration focused on using the eastern subspecies Oh, like Mississippi, the restoration came from like three key places. Yes. Yes. So that would lend exactly to what you're talking about potentially. Yeah. And some states actually didn't use birds from out of state. They only used birds from in-state.

New York and South Carolina are two examples where they just took birds. It's called serial translocation. They just took birds from within their own state and kept going back to those same. sources and moving them. Huh. And so is there potential that that is part of the issue that you basically moved the same maternal lines to everywhere? Yeah.

And now what's happened through time is you kind of see this degradation, if you will, in genetic diversity and potential. And is that some missing piece of the decline that we didn't understand? You might, you may have turned over a big stone. We'll see. And I said that, you know, and I appreciate the compliment about the metaphor, but that's the way I see it. Yeah. I get up every day, and I'm paid to turn stones.

Yeah. As a researcher, that's what, I mean, that's what I'm charged with doing. If you turn the same stone over every time and you don't get the answer, you've got to turn different stones. Yeah. And so, you know, I've been studying movement and behavior and habitat use and all these, you know, gobbling activity and all these things. And I'm interested in all of that, but I still don't have the answer that I wanted. Sure. And I'm not retiring until I get it.

So good to know. I have so much respect for Dr. Chamberlain and the tenacity he approaches his work and research with. I think turkeys and turkey hunters should be thrilled that we have folks like him around. But we still haven't gotten to the bottom of this yet. Let's keep going. Back to what I said earlier, when we started seeing these signatures in the genetics data, it's like, man, that's perplexing. I wonder if that's just a thing on this study site, right?

Is it just this site in Georgia, for instance, that we're seeing this? And we started looking at our other population. It's like, no, this is more widespread. So, yeah, that's kind of where we are. Areas of low genetic diversity. Was there like any known ways that that could happen prior to this hypothesis that it could be like because and how does that happen outside of that? Yeah.

So unlike say quail or grouse, turkeys are already kind of predisposed to having relatively lower genetic diversity within an area because of their social structure. You know, you've got you've got a flock that has dominant individuals within it. We know this for sure that dominant individuals produce most of the poults in population, both hens and tombs. We've seen, and published this recently, very strong, what's called reproductive skew, meaning a fairly small segment of your tombs are producing a lot of the poults. We see that dominant hens who are nesting earlier are more successful and they produce more

pults. And so you already have a bird that because of its social structure and its dominance hierarchies kind of lends itself to having a few individuals be a significant part of the productivity in the population. And if you see flocks, they split up and they go back to the same areas every year to breed, right? They have really strong fidelity to their breeding sites. And that kind of lends itself to this, as you know, as a turkey hunter, you have pockets of turkeys. You don't have turkeys everywhere. And so I think turkeys just kind of lend themselves naturally to having, you know, relatively lower genetic diversity.

Gotcha. And what we may be seeing is that because we're losing habitat and populations have declined, that instead of having flocks adjacent to each other that periodically might mingle, you truly have in some situations isolated flocks that are not individual. are not dispersing in or out. Yeah. It's the same group of turkeys on these five farms for the last decade. Yeah. And you're not having some random gobbler show up and breed with a hen that's, you know, brand new. Yeah.

And the GPS data clearly shows that. We don't see male, we don't see Jake's going a long distance from the year they're one-year-old to their two years old. They may literally move over to the next farm. They may go a mile down the road or whatever. and we don't see juvenile hens, they're the disperser in turkeys, the young females are, but they're not going like 50 miles or something. They're going to the adjacent home range or maybe a few miles down the road,

and that's part of the issue as well. So turkeys are naturally vulnerable to having low genetic diversity. I can honestly say I have never thought of that before, but after hearing Dr. Chamberlain explain it, I've got to say it makes sense. he's asking some big and important questions. And personally, I'm awful glad he's digging into this. Yeah, and if you think about it, when they split up out of their winter flocks, and let's say you have 20 hens that are in a winter flock and they split up to go breed,

you've got four groups of five, let's say, and they kind of blow up and go, some come to your farm, some to go to my farm. Well, what we've found is within that group of, say, five hens, there's usually only one juvenile hen, right? And in some cases, that juvenile hen is related to one of the other hens in the group, probably her daughter, right? But in a lot of cases, they're not. And so if you think about it through time, as our populations are producing fewer young turkeys, right? Sure.

Reproduction is declining. The probability that you would have these breeding groups have no juveniles. in them increases. They're all adults. So you've got a group of five hens, and hen survival is about 70% per year. So let's just say you get a few bad years of productivity, and those five hens go from five to four to three,

maybe even down to two. And now when they drag that tom to your farm, the reason there's not two or three or four toms, is because there's only one or two hens that are going to that breeding area. Yeah. At what point does the group get small enough to where, and there's no juveniles in it, nobody knows to go to your farm. At some point, does the fact that they just disappeared, is it an artifact of because

there's been less production, there's no institutional knowledge to come to your farm? Yeah. And suddenly they're gone. and I think that is a plausible explanation for what I see on some places I've hunted. Sure. They went from we had a lot to we had a lot fewer to where we had very few to where we have none. And I can take you to properties right now that I haven't had a turkey, a hen turkey in the spring or a gobble in four or five years. Whereas 20 years ago, I could take you to those farms.

We were going to hear some turkeys. And so many, you talked to, we talked to dozens and dozens of people that have the same scenario. Yeah, I could take you to places like that that I know of. I've heard those same stories. Like, man, I don't know. They just kind of slowly trickled away. We don't know what happened. You know, we're still trying to burn.

We're still trying to do this. We're doing the right things. Right. Yeah. And I'm not seeing any effect. Yeah. Interesting. And I just wonder, back to the turning every stone.

Yeah. Is anything genetically related? Does that have anything to do with this? And if it has some partial explanation, then I want to know what that is. What if any of these hypotheses are true? What if genetics do play a key role in some of these scenarios Dr. Chamberlain is laying out? Fascinating stuff to think about, say the least. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls

and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I want to ask Dr. Chamberlain more about getting some of these oddball samples in. you get you get sent one of these samples you test it and it comes back that it is has some sort of domestic you know non wild turkey what are the what could the implications of that be okay so what we've seen so far and that's a great question what we've seen so far is there

appear to me multiple scenarios that are getting those genetics into our flocks we're not seeing instances where there's like the turkey you'd get at Costco, those genetics are not out there. Okay. It is situations where heritage turkeys are either being introduced, released, or escaping into wild flocks and breeding with those with wild birds and producing hybrid offspring. That's one route. Some of the situations we're seeing are they're fully heritage birds. that are being harvested by hunters that have that are not wired at all.

They're heritage birds. Yeah. But now we're trying to understand, okay, does that matter at all? Does it matter that those genes have been introduced to our population? Yeah. And how prevalent is it? Because this year we, we got targeted samples, right? If the hunter, you know, the hunter shot a bird, he thought it looked odd.

Well, now what we're seeing is these, these trees. traits can lay dormant in turkeys for several generations. And so what if those genes are in other birds, they're just not expressed? But we won't know that until we expand our sampling effort. Yeah. You know, when you start looking for things, right? When you start testing for things, you know, the CWD example, when you start testing, sometimes you end up finding that something is more pervasive than you thought it was.

And I won't go into that debate. But bottom line is we're wondering, as we expand our sampling, do we have some pockets of this, you know, where these genes are more problematic? And if so, does that even matter at all? Yeah, does it matter? Like, is it causing a problem? Yep. And on the flip side, we've already identified what appears to be scenarios.

where there are truly 100% wild turkeys that have very distinct plumage that is identical from bird to bird. They look the same, which makes complete sense because how many of us look at a hen turkey and think, oh, I can see the difference between her and her plumage and her plume. They all look the same. Yeah. So there does appear to be scenarios where we have these really odd looking birds that are 100% wild. And then the question becomes, how did that happen?

Yeah. Is that an embreeding issue? Literally like, is it just a perfect storm? Is it the, you know, the canary in the coal mine kind of thing? Or is this a sign of something that we need to be more concerned with? Yeah. And that's where we're headed. And we don't know.

We don't have the answer yet. And it's going to take us, it's going to take us some time. And I was talking to somebody, multiple people about this. if you look at the data that we've already collected across all of our study sites, there is very clear signatures in the Turkey genetics world. For instance, birds in the Great Lakes are genetically different than birds in the southeast, south-central United States. And so Phil, as he's gone and clustered these birds based on similar genetic signatures,

it's very clear that there's clustering at the landscape scale. As you'd expect, you know, birds in the northeast are a little different than birds in the upper Midwest. Oh, yeah. They're all a little different than the southeast. But then when you zoom in on clusters of samples within a region, you're also seeing very fine scale structuring. And what I mean by that is there's a clump of individuals that are related. There's a clump. There's a clump.

And in between those clumps is dead space. And what that implies is that within a population, there's finer scale structuring, meaning there's a lack of gene flow from flock to flock to flock, back to what we talked about a few minutes ago. Yeah. That maybe these flocks aren't mixing the way that we think they would. You know, turkeys are mobile.

They can walk around. They can walk anywhere they want. And while we do see, you know, extraordinary examples of hens that, you know, move along ways like the hen we had. And I posted on social media last year that went like 86 miles, you know. That's crazy. Went from Nebraska to Colorado and stayed there.

Man, y'all tagged a duck on accident. But we don't see that. That's very, very strange. And so to the question is, you know, maybe, maybe this finer scale. structuring is part of just their natural ecology, their natural behavior. That's got that's going to be my question. It was like, do we know that's a bad thing?

Or it's just a question mark right now? It's a question mark. Yeah. Yep. And then it, you know, the question becomes, and we, Phil and I were talking about this a little while ago, I think what we're going to see is that we're going to, we're going to find some places in certain states that the flag is thrown, that there's going to be some situations like we've already seen in some of our data right now, that there are some places in

certain states where the imbreeding coefficient is high enough that you would be concerned. It's a problem. Yes, that it's high. We've already seen this. We have some populations that I've been studying for years where the imbreeding, the levels of breeding are high enough that they are at levels where you would expect to see reproductive consequences where essentially every bird in these flocks are cousins at least yeah that can't be good yeah and so we're curious is that just a thing in a few pockets or is it more pervasive

and widespread and until we expand the sampling we don't know but we we suspect what we'll see is that, yeah, there are some pockets that maybe we need to be concerned about. And if so, you know, we give the data to the state agencies and then they react to it. But then the question becomes, if we can do that and we end up seeing that, what do you do about it? Yeah. Yeah. What would you even begin to do about it? The logical outcome would be that you introduce birds into those populations.

Try to bring in some new genetics. Yep. And I was talking to. to a group yesterday about this is when restoration was proceeding, it was just, let's get turkeys and move turkeys. Yeah. Well, they were trying to do domestic turkeys before that. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. It was like, what do we got to do here? And so I think we're, you know, technology is advanced now. We can see the signatures of the source populations in our current populations. We can predict with certainty how many individuals of each sex. would need to be introduced into a population, once we know effective population sizes, we can predict how many animals you need to move

and what their genetics need to look like to increase genetic diversity to get it above where we're concerned about it. So I think if we ever had to go back down that road, and not saying we will, but if we did, we have the tools now to be much more start. You could be like way precise with it. Very precise and surgical with it, which would be, I think,

necessary in the world we live in because the days of restoration are gone. The world was a very different place. Moving animals across state lines was a, it wasn't simple, but it required NWTF and state agencies to collaborate and it required a lot of effort. And in many cases, that that's not going to be practical right now. With all the interstate transport issues and disease transmission issues, the science community is going to have to be much more surgical when we inform agencies. And I actually have the restoration records in my office on campus. Oh, that's cool.

And it's state by state folders. And you open up some of the folders, and there will literally be a letter of a handwritten letter or typed letter, dot matrix printer or something with a signature from somebody you know for instance james ril kenimer saying yeah as per our agreement i've arranged we've arranged to get 40 pheasants and we're going and in return you need to provide 12 hen turkeys or whatever and so it was literally a you know barter and trade system and i i love the history of the turkey yeah particularly science and and I go back and I don't have time for this and my life's so busy but I literally will

take a break at work sometimes just going and pick a state yeah just open the folder and start flipping through until I see a letter because I know the letter is going to be gold yeah it's going to be a correspondence about who's getting what and trading for what and I just see that is so fascinating y'all know how much I love hearing about the old school conservation stories I think it's just so cool. And it adds so much to the appreciation that we should all have for the hunting and wildlife they would get to enjoy today. So hearing Dr. Chamberlain bring up some of that old stuff and actually be able to reference it, find inspiration in it, and then use it for some of the work he's doing today. Well, that's just too cool. To wrap this up, I want to ask Dr. Chamberlain a more broad question.

What about the greater future of turkey hunting? Turkey hunters are, to a man or one, woman, regardless of their perspective, regardless of what gun they shoot, what ammo they shoot, they all want the same thing. In their heart, they all want sustainable turkeys. They want to be able to hunt turkeys, and they want the kids to hunt turkeys. And if you told the average hunter, would you support something that is going to help sustain turkeys? If you find somebody that says, no, then I don't want to be around them.

Yeah. I mean, that's not who we are. Yeah. Because to your point, and I think I made this illustration to somebody one day. I'm curious if you agree with it or not. We were talking about a similar thing, and they said, every turkey owner wants more longbeards at the end of their barrel. And I said, they do. Don't get me wrong.

They do. I think overall, more of them are interested in be able to go out and hear one in the morning. Yes. That outweighs the turkey at the end of the barrel. Yes. And research has shown that. Hearing and gobbling turkey is the primary to. terminate of hunter satisfaction.

Yeah. If we know we're in the game, that's what matters. Yeah. You know, when you go out there and don't hear something, it's a gut punch. It's deflating. When you, if you know you're going to hear a turkey, your step is a lot crisper. I completely agree with you. I think if you particularly, I see this particularly with turkey hunters my age and older,

that have seen the days when you could hear 20. I can remember as a grad student hearing so many turkeys that I didn't even know which direction to turn. Like I could take you to places in the Mississippi Delta that in 1993 I was paralyzed. I didn't know what to do. They were everywhere. There were turkeys gobbling everywhere. And I've seen that. And then I saw the population crash.

And I saw it get to where you couldn't hear a turkey. and in states that I see it starting to recover, and I'm hopeful, I'm optimistic, I don't ever want to go back to where I'm not hearing them. Yeah. So, and I think older turkey hunters that have seen those days, the 90s, I think we all know we'll never get back there. But if we can get back to a point where I'm going to hear a goblin turkey,

then I think we've won the battle. at that point. Yeah. That's the goal, man. Yeah. Knowing they're out there hearing them, knowing they're on the landscape, that's, that's it for me. As a turkey hunting community, we have to keep that in mind that our goal needs to be,

at least one goal needs to be that there needs to be a turkey hunter that replaces us. Because hunters in general, the audience of this podcast know we're the minority everywhere. and turkey hunters, if we're not replacing ourselves at a minimum, who's going to speak up and champion for this bird? Yeah. 50 years from now. Yeah. It's funny, man. I didn't think I would be able to draw back to Mr. Benny's interview so much talking to you, but it's cool how it's worked out.

It's supposed to work out like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's perfect. But I was asking Mr. Benny, because a lot of things you hear about today, you hear about, you know, places, you know, so many hunters. and public land spots getting crowded and this, that, and the other. And I asked him and said, would you, would the turkey relocation, the restocking, sorry, would the turkey restoration and restocking been nearly as successful in Mississippi

if you didn't have these hunters and private landowners that worked with you? He said, no. Yeah. He said they would have hung on on public land because we were doing it on public land as well, but to the degree where it's at statewide right now, I said it would have been impossible. And I brought up the overcrowding thing. and he said, as long as you have hunters interested in turkey hunting, there's going to be turkeys around. And it's as simple as that.

Yeah. It's as simple as that. Yep. Yeah, we just have to harness our love for the bird and try to seek ways to, you know, make sure our landscapes are functioning as well as they can. whether it's habitat management, managing our own activities. I mean, I agree with that. I think as long as there are people like us that have a true passion for the bird and chasing it that we'll have wild turkeys.

Man, I tell you, I can't sum it up any better than that. As long as we have people who have a true passion for the bird and hunting it, then rest assured, turkeys will be around. And hey, maybe this wild turkey DNA stuff will shine a light on some critical influence. Who knows? I can confidently say we have the right man on the job. If you want to follow along with some of the cool work they're doing or potentially sign up to be a part, be sure to check them out at wild turkey dna.com. That's wild turkey dna.com. You can also follow along with them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Just search Wild Turkey DNA. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Greece and this country life. And I know I say it all, with you. time, but it sure does mean a lot to all of us that all you find folks continue to tune in week after week. If you like this episode, send it to a friend this week, maybe one that's jones and for some new spring turkey content. And stick around because there's a whole lot more

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