The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 214: Gobbling Your Ass Off

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Michael Chamberlain, Brody Henderson, Seth Morris, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: Just how much is a unit of blood?; packin' tourniquets; how Jani's wife won't give Steve weasel trapping permission; etymology; hunting turkeys with dogs; the kee-kee run; how many critters kill and eat turkeys?; the wild turkey Bermuda Triangle; more things that make a turkey gobble; mesomammals; lies your daddy told you about wildlife; song meters and gobbling data; some big turkeys get all of the love; will hunting go to hell?; having an incredible sense of place and a big home range; hatching into a social hierarchy; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by OnX Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters.

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Real quick, before people listen to the show, I want to make it feel like they're being super constructive. And how would we do that? Well, we would have Giannis tell this story. You like that? I set that up.

I did. Which story do you want me to tell? I've got a couple of them The guy getting shot Okay Oh what do you mean You've got a couple of them Well we were just earlier

Talking about Oh the weasel in your yard Yeah Yeah but how does that Make people feel constructive That's just something in your yard They don't own your yard When I'm talking about

The shot The getting shot thing Would show like how this How this program Saves lives Oh Okay I'm reading up though Right now How much Does anybody in this room The getting shot thing would show how this program saves lives. Oh, okay. I'm reading up, though, right now, how much...

Does anybody in this room know how much one unit of blood is? It's a pint? I don't know. Yes, Brody. Roughly the equivalent of one pint. About 525 milliliters. Good job. equivalent of one pint about 525 milliliters good job so we had a podcast a while back which was number brody you were here i was not here episode 192 called bleeding out and uh a fella wrote in, Joey.

Joey wrote in to say that this podcast saved his father's life. Now, this podcast, were you here or not? Yes, you were. Do you want to give a quick rundown of what went down on that podcast? Well, we had our buddy, Dr. Alan Lazaro, who's an emergency room doctor. That's correct. Also a hunter in detroit near detroit michigan yeah he had been helping us out with various uh research questions and uh so steve decided to have him out because he's an interesting dude and uh one of his main points was that all hunters and fishermen too probably should be carrying around a

tourniquet in the woods because if you get cut bad that's really the only thing that's gonna save your life yeah and he's going well he had mentioned there but he thinks like well I'll just jury rig one right do you know that it's okay to say Jerry rig and jury rig no I looked it up people think a lot of jury rig one he's like by the time you jury rig one you're dead your buddy's dead how's it okay to say jerry rig i was about to say am i am i not thinking that it's the same like kind of like it's a negative like isn't it doesn't it come from jerry's kids and doing it the wrong way. That's what I always understood. Hold on a minute.

If that's the case, I don't say it anyways. If that's the case, I definitely wouldn't say it. You think it has to do with Jerry Lewis telethon? Yeah. Where does Jerry rig come from? I just thought it was people just saying the wrong thing. Where does Jerry can come from? Jerry can? That's a good one. I don't know. It just saying the wrong thing. Where does Jerry Can come from? Jerry Can? Ooh, that's a good one.

I don't know. It's not a jury can. No. Jury rig. Seth, you know how to type? He's just sitting over there watching us. Well, you were the one that said that you found out that it's okay to say both, so I want to know why.

I don't mean okay like socially okay. that said that you found out that it's okay to say both, so I want to know why. That isn't, and that it's, we should just. I don't mean okay like socially okay. Oh. The source I looked at accepts both. Now, it wasn't making a moral, it wasn't morally. Oh, I see. Anyways, you're dead by the time, like if you're going to go run back to your truck and get a whatever, you come back, your buddy's dead.

That's right. And he's got, like, a national campaign going on, right? It's called Stop the Bleed. A bunch of ER doctors going around and educating people about how to stop bleeding better, right? Yeah. Yeah, and he convinced all of us to start packing tourniquets. Yeah. I had never done it before.

Mine finally made it from my desk, the tourniquets that he left me, or you gave them to me, into my daily backpack, which I guess is better than at my desk, but now I'm going to take one and put one in my turkey vest. Steve was trying a fancy new tourniquet

out yesterday. Oh. It's a belt that you wear. Oh. It's pretty aggressive. But yeah, you'd have a belt. Your belt is a belt that you wear. Oh. It's pretty aggressive. But yeah, you'd have a belt. Your belt is a tourniquet. Your belt can be deployed.

So you would always just have it on. Well, just so happens that in this story, Joy writes in about, he uses belt as a tourniquet. They were out pheasant hunting, I believe, in Colorado, Kansas, maybe. Some place that has a lot of pheasants. And to cut this story a little bit shorter, they get to a spot where they're giving their dogs some water. And Joey's dad is in front of one of the other hunter's guns and the hunter's gun goes off. It's a 12-gauge at

approximately eight yards and catches him in the ribs, abdomen, and one of his arms. Pretty bad bleeding. They immediately realize it's bad. They call 911. It takes 50 minutes for them to get, for help to get there. I think Joey did a good job with his story. I like the way that he explained this part right here. He said when he was looking at the blood, he's a big deer hunter, and he said, if I was tracking a deer and saw this much blood, I'd be expecting that deer to be dead just around the corner.

He said it was like spurting, right? Yes. That's great detail. Yeah. Great detail. That's a bad sign. It gives you a great visual. And they're on snow too,

which always makes it look like there's more blood. It makes you think you're going to find deer that you don't. Yeah. So anyways, he's saying that they had started a tourniquet with some ripped clothing shreds. One of the other hunters had, well, he had just recently two weeks prior,

listened to episode 192 bleeding out. And he remembered three key points. One, nobody ties a tourniquet tight enough. Two, tying a tourniquet does not necessarily mean that the limb will be lost. And three, when tying the tourniquet,

it's necessary to go as far up the limb as possible. So he took off his belt, put it way up his dad's arm, and cranked on it. He made it to the hospital. He received 14 units of blood, which we now know is

roughly 14 pints. How could that possibly be true? How many pints does a human body hold? Seth? Come on. Eight to 12. So it might have been a situation where he was- They gave him more blood than is in your body.

As he was losing it. Yeah, probably as he was losing it. They were pumping it in. I think it's possible. I'm not calling the brother a liar. It's just hard for me to fathom. Okay, well, let's just say it was 10 and not 14. Yeah, it doesn't say anything.

He's got like an in-pipe and an out-pipe. They're just recycling it. The hospital complimented him dozens of times on the quality and application of his tourniquet. All principles that he learned on the podcast. So there you go, man. Good job, Yanni.

Listen to the Meteor podcast. Might save someone's life. Especially episode 192. Yep. Now, real quick, Yanni, tell about the real quick so i'm gonna give a little background okay uh well just tell them about the weasels okay i was gonna talk about how i can't get permission on your property and whatnot yeah well my gal just loves the wildlife more alive than dead sometimes.

She loves them more than your chickens. In a way, in a way, because there's a long list of things on your property that are on the go list or that are on the okay list. Listen, yeah, as soon as they took out a chicken or two, an ermine, long-tail weasel, it'd be game on. Like we had some squirrels attacking the house this winter. and the ermine, long-tail weasel, it'd be game on, you know? Like we had some squirrels attacking the house this winter. She's out there with the 22 hunting them, you know? She contemplated. She even set a bait pile for those squirrels, which she didn't.

I think she got a shot off, but she missed. But later, I think one day I'd come home, and you know how you pull up in my driveway, you can kind of see past the back of the house. I look down there, and I'm like, oh, I wonder what that squirrel's doing there. And I get a little closer, and he's just sitting there munching away on whatever she'd put out, some seeds. So I went inside, got the.22, and dispatched him. She even almost declared war on a fox. Well, she did.

She killed the fox. Okay, she did. She killed the fox. Okay, so don't give me the whole wildlife thing. So it's pretty cool having these ermines around because you get to see them hunting every now and then. Maybe once or twice a winter. And we have a decent cottontail population that lives in and around the house. And the ermine's usually hunting. I've never seen them hunting anything besides decent cottontail population that lives in and around the house, and the ermine's usually hunting. I've never seen them hunt anything besides the cottontail.

Anyways, the other morning I'm up. It must have been this weekend. It's snowing. There's like three, four inches of fresh snow, and I see a bunny rabbit hopping around our plow truck. Watch him for a minute, go away, come back. He's hopping around, and then next thing I see is I see the bunny sort of tumbling erratically down our driveway, which immediately, because I've seen it before, means that he and the ermine are locked together.

The ermine's trying to grab it by the neck and suffocate it. And they're tumbling away. I've seen this two or three other times. The bunny rabbit always gets away. So they kind of go out of view over kind of the crest of the hill and wait for a bit, don't see them. Come back maybe five or ten minutes later and a little farther down the driveway I can just see a dark spot

and I can see a magpie like five feet away. So I grab the binos and I look down there and it's actually two dark spots because the white ermine is bisecting the cottontail rabbit. And now he's just sitting there. The bunny rabbit was still alive a little bit. He was sort of, the ermine was finishing off, but it's amazing how fast the magpies were

there sort of like, all right, we're going to get our piece too. Well, as long as I watched, he fended off the magpies and eventually drug the bunny rabbit into the sort of hawthorn thicket, and I couldn't see him. I didn't want to go. I wanted to go investigate, but I didn't want to go disturb his piece and his kill. So I don't know if the magpies eventually ended up getting a chunk or not, but he drug him out of the road and into the Hawthorns.

Big one. The ermine? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. 14-incher. Really? That's a good one. I just had to throw a number at it. Well, we wanted one because we want one to get tanned.

We want one big exemplary specimen to get tanned. So we want to collect up, in addition to all our stuff, we want to collect up one of all fur bears as a little project. We're out. We got our big one because we were out.

I don't think I told this story. Me and my kid walk out of my friend's ranch house and he's like, there's a coyote, there's a coyote. And I look, I don't see any coyote.

So now I'm a little bit annoyed.'m like dude you know don't just be like crying out that you see stuff yeah but your boy usually doesn't he's got a good game yeah well check this out so i mean not 30 seconds goes by he turns and looks the other way and yells there's a weasel now you can go like a long time yep without seeing a weasel so then can go like a long time yep what i was seeing a weasel so then i lay into him i'm like james you gotta and i'm in the middle like you just don't trust this game i'm in the middle yelling at him this weasel runs back across the road the other direction and he runs over there his little 410 and the weasel went down in the hole and i started doing one of those like making mouse noises with your hand.

He popped his head right back out of the hole, and Jimmy got him. Nice. Tanker. But then, in skinning it, I broke the whole thing is in skinning the tail. I have a tail stripper that's used for, like, getting the tailbone out of tails, but it didn't have a fine enough, it doesn't have a weasel setting. And I tried to flub it and broke the end of the damn tail off, man. A little black tip. I know.

I'm going to tie a fly up. My wife's annoyed because she doesn't like it, this whole thing. I was like, we just need one. And she's like, well, there just need one. And she's like, well, there's your one. And I'm like, yeah, but the tail's broken now.

So I might just stitch the tail back on. Winter's kind of winding down. Michael Chamberlain, special guest here today. Oh, one last thing. Are you Dr. Michael Chamberlain? Yes.

Oh, okay. I like that. That kind of adds, that kind of builds our resume here. Just call me Mike. On the show. You just want to go by Mike? Yeah of builds our resume here. Just call me Mike. On the show. You just want to go by Mike?

Yeah, only my wife and my mother call me Michael. Dr. Michael Chamber. Wild turkey researcher. Yep. I got one last point I want to make before we get into that. Are we good on weasels? I'm great. Good on weasels.

One last thing I want to mention, and this has to do with turkeys. You know how when you're hunting turkeys, you don't use use a blind it's called running and gunning uh a guy we're talking about on social media we had to think up about like when you you guys don't where you're from you don't ice fish no and ice fishing there's a thing now and then where you just strike off across the lake drilling thousand holes000 holes, right? It's the ice fishing equivalent of, like, walking along the bank, casting all over the damn place. And you call it hole hopping, prospecting.

What else do you call it? Taking a poke. Taking a few pokes. Whatever. You just, like, leave your area to start drilling holes all over the damn place and see what's going on. And a guy in Canada said, in Canada, that's called running and gunning. Which I thought was because there's no gun. Okay, how does a turkey researcher, you're affiliated with a university.

Yep, University of Georgia. How does, lay out how that happens, that you become an official turkey researcher. Hard work and good luck. Did you grow up hunting turkeys? I did. I did. I grew up in Virginia as a suburban kid that got to hunt on Saturdays with his dad. We had a fall season that was actually as popular as the spring season then.

So we, I actually learned to turkey hunt during the fall. Calling them. Yeah, you'd actually go to turkey hunt during the fall. Calling them? Yeah, you'd actually go and bust the flocks up, just walk until you'd run across a flock. Did you use a dog to scurry them up? Sometimes. And as soon as the dog would flush or you would flush the birds,

you just sit down where they flushed from and start calling. And usually the juvenile birds were the first ones to come back, often jakes. So you bust them up and they all fly in different directions. I want to know about the busting them up because I keep thinking I'm going to go out and do this. I want to know. You see them 50 or 100 yards out, right?

Are you running and yelling at them? Well, what we would do is get up on high ground on ridges and call. Well, you would. Yeah, and as soon as you could get a response, you'd just start moving towards them until you could see them, and then you'd take off running. Also, I didn't know there was, like, a locating component. So you're, like, really deliberately heading out to do this.

Yes, yes. It's not, like, opportunistic. And it's a bit on the redneck side because there you are running through the eastern hardwood forest, you know, open, trying to bust these birds. Just shooting? No, just running. Usually they would flush like quail. A lot of them would go in one direction, but the ones that did not, they were money. How close would you have to get to flush them, to really break the flock up?

It just depended. We used to do the same thing in Pennsylvania. Yeah, that was popular. Growing up. Popular way to hunt. Oh, I thought when you opened your mouth next, it would be to tell us about jury rigging. No.

Did you find anything out? Yeah. You had two research projects. Well, Yanni covered the lawn. Oh. Jury rigged means something was assembled quickly with materials on hand and jerry-built this says or jerry-rigged means it was cheap or poorly built but does it say that does it give the etymology uh for you folks at home the etymology of a word is sort of how it came to what am i trying to say oh there

was hold on it's the words history yeah origin origin yeah uh the wikipedia says its origin lies in such efforts done on boats and ships sail powered Okay, anyhow, what were you saying, Seth? No, I cut my teeth on turkey hunting in the fall the same exact way. Just walking. We used to get a group of guys and just walk until you'd find them. That's how we did it, too. Spring hunting was not. Fall hunting was way more popular in Pennsylvania than spring hunting.

Really? Yeah. That kid, there's no way in the world that's true. Fall hunting was way more popular in Pennsylvania than spring hunting. Really? Yeah. That can't. There's no way in the world that's true. It's true. When I was a kid, before that turkey population blew up, there was really only turkeys in the mountains, like down by where Seth lived, and fall hunting was the way people hunted them. Seth from the mountains? Yeah, man.

Yeah. That's exactly how I grew up. Yeah. It was mostly fall. It just was not as popular, the spring hunting. Well, the spring hunt's limited, and that's exactly how i grew up yeah it was people like it just was not as popular the spring hunting where the spring it is now limited and that's why it was just gaining popularity at that time i mean yeah but you grew up where there always were turkeys yeah yeah it was just not as popular wasn't as the thing that it is now and now know, of course it's done a complete script flip, if you will.

I mean, spring hunting is. Yeah. It's hugely popular and fall hunting is declining in, you know, most of the states. Oh yeah. How old are you? I'm 48. Oh, so we're like basically the same age. Yeah.

My grandfather still to this day will take fall turkey hunting over anything else. That's like his favorite thing to do. Well, you don't have to figure out if it's male or female in most places. No. Right. Okay. So you guys were systematic though. Yes.

Climb up on a ridge, locate a group, a flock. Take off running. And then just talk about the use of the dogs. Because I got a friend of mine from back home from high school. He's got a turkey dog. Mm-hmm. Trained up to bust them. You just probably get a more effective bust with something as fast as a dog.

Oh, absolutely. So the dog would run into the flock, scatter the birds in all directions, and then you sit down, put a coat over the dog or put the dog behind you and start yelping. And usually, like I said, the birds that scattered by themselves, they would immediately come back to you. And you're, so the call you're making is called a kiki. Yeah, just a kiki and a, you know, a real raspy yelp. Anything that would make you think, make those birds think it was mom, because most of those birds that scattered were, I mean, they were juveniles. Gotcha.

So anything that would bring those birds back to you. What is the difference? I never understood this. There's a kiki and a kiki run. Is that not true? You hear people refer to them as, it's basically just this, you know, kiki, kiki call that birds make when they're younger. Oh, so just different words for the same thing. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's the same thing. It is. Got you. I didn't know if it was a difference between a kiki and a kiki run. Yeah. And that kind of originates from, you know, when you scatter poults in the summer, you'll hear the poults start whistling. Like, kiki, kiki, kiki. And then, you know, and mom will start putting, clucking, trying, you know.

So, they do it, but she doesn't do it. She can do it. She can do the whistle. Yeah, turkeys have all sorts of vocalizations. Show me the sound. it she can do it she can do the whistle yeah turkeys have all sorts of vocalizations show me the sound like if you let's hear you out you're hunting the fall you you bust up a group of turkeys show me a sound that would spring like that yes yeah it's basically i mean all you're trying to do is say hey here i am that's them collecting up yeah come back over here everything's

good when it's not i got a buddy that used to get huns that way really he would bust huns up he lived not far from here he would bust huns up and He lived not far from here. He would bust huns up, and I don't know what vocalization they have. I've probably heard it, but didn't. It's a whistle, if memory serves me. That's been several years. He would bust them up and hide and start doing that, and eventually he'd start drawing them back in. Really? Yeah.

Hmm. Yeah, because they make that raspy kind of cackling once they get on the ground and start running. Yeah, there's a bunch in my neighborhood, and I hear it all the time. And if you bust them up, you'll hear them all in different directions making that noise. Yeah. So you guys did that growing up? Absolutely. Did you know?

Were you like, man, when I get old, I'm going to be a turkey biologist? No. No, I went to Virginia Tech, just wanted to be a game warden, wildlife biologist, wildlife manager. And next thing you know, I ended up in grad school at Mississippi State and realized research was kind of my thing and got the opportunity to stay on and do a PhD. And the project that I studied when I was a master's student was a turkey project. I was basically, I didn't plan to study turkeys. I just ended up in this project and became infatuated with the bird and their biology. What was the project? It was just studying turkeys in the Mississippi Delta, just flood prone areas. Didn't know a lot about the birds in that area. Got to get my, you know, feet wet, if you

will. And then my PhD program was actually looking at predation on turkeys. So I was studying turkeys using radio telemetry, but then I also put collars on coyotes, bobcats, gray foxes, raccoons, and studied how all those species interact with turkeys. And then I landed in academia, which was just fortuitous. What year was that going on that you were doing that initial research? 93 through 99. Do you feel that at that time there was a lot of low-hanging fruit from turkey research because the country had gone so long without that many turkeys around? Yeah, that, man, that was the heyday. I mean, turkeys were exploding everywhere. They were being restored throughout their range and beyond, as you know.

And the research that was ongoing was grabbing low-hanging fruit, partially because we could answer those questions with the technology we had at the time. And there were studies everywhere. There were research projects in all sorts of states. Multiple universities had work ongoing. And then all of a sudden around 2002, 2003, it just kind of started stagnating. And I think part of that was complacency. You know, there were birds everywhere. They seemed to be doing well.

People were, harvest was increasing, at least in most of the eastern United States. And agencies stopped putting research money into turkeys at that point. And then you kind of saw this lull until the late, you know, 2009, 2010 period when I think a lot of people in the east and southeast realized there was there was an issue oh and you've kind of seen a resurrection of turkey research in my eyes and like people stopped taking turkeys for granted yeah absolutely humans got short memories man we do we do short-sighted and short-memoried in some cases yeah yeah when you were doing that work that initial work you did like a lot of predator work. I did.

What, if you look at that, but also all the things you've learned since then, and I want to get back into, in a minute I'm going to get back into your sort of like professional biography, but what kills turkeys in your mind? Not in your mind, but I mean, it's not like you have to guess. I know, as a matter of fact. You look at a national sort of picture. What kills turkeys? All of your larger mammals, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, horned owls. Great horned owls are an efficient predator of turkeys because they kill them in the tree. Oh, they do? They do. Someone was telling me that just the other day.

That dude we were driving around with. Remember that? Yeah, they are really efficient, and they kill adult toms too. And we find that they do that early in the morning while the birds are gobbling. They single in on birds in the tree. No way, really? And then they just get them on the ground, and they actually hit them in the tree, and you can see a plume of feathers that goes away from the tree in the direction that they carry the bird down to the ground.

And then they kill the bird on the ground, consume what they want, and leave. And they, you know, horned owls are bad, man. Dude, that is a big, big thing to hit. Yeah. Horned owls, when they're in breeding pairs, I used to call it the Bermuda Triangle. I had, really, when I was doing my PhD work, I had four raccoons that were collared, a skunk, a gray fox, and two turkey hens in the same kind of general area. And this pair of horned owls killed all of them. Holy smokes.

It is. Oh, I'm back up. Give me the list again. It was four raccoons, a gray fox, a skunk, and two turkeys. And that pair of foxes. How does he kill a raccoon? A raccoon can put up a fight. Me and Yanni almost seen a raccoon kill a dog one time.

Remember that? Horned owls are vicious, and they're so, if you think about it, the way they hit their prey with the force that they hit their prey, and they blindside you. You don't know what's coming. They have the element of surprise on their side, and they're incredible predators. But what's the actual method of killing? What dispatches the animal? It's not just the hit.

Because you can hit a raccoon with a car. It's the talons. It's the talons. They strategically put the talons. They strategically put the talons around the neck, I'm guessing. Neck, vertebrae, back, anything to disable the animal. And they hit it like a peregrine hits. They hit it hard.

Absolutely. It's like a baseball bat. So they'll blow a gobbler out of a tree. Yes. Yes. You gotta wonder why they respond to owl hoots. Well, it's in their frequency band. That owl hoot is in the same frequency band that a gobble's in.

So some of the gobbling work we do, it's very, the technology we use to tease out the gobbles, it's in the same frequency band as an owl hoot, as a crow call, as a coyote howl, a gunshot, a cow mooing. They're all within, on the sonogram, they're all within that same frequency band. So it makes sense. We need to give him one of our t-shirts that shows all the things that make a turkey gobble. You ever seen this shirt? No, but I'd love to have one. Dude, we got a running list. I'll wear it with pride. We got a running list that includes some incredible things.

Oh, they'll gobble all sorts of things. It's crazy. Sonic booms. Yeah, yeah. Thunder claps. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, a guy hucking rocks at a stop sign. That's on their list.

That was me. When you say, like, same frequency band, it's almost like they can't help themselves. Like, they just. Yeah. You hear of shock gobbling. Yeah. Oh, I want to to get i want to talk about this in in like later detail later but first i want to talk i want to finish up on the great

horned owls gotcha so hold that thought about shot gobbling like what is he thinking um the great horned owls they ride it to the earth? Yes. Yes. Wow. So they hit, we lose, routinely lose, if we, let's just, for numbers sake, let's just say we put 15 GPS units on Tom's, on this site. We'll lose at least one or two before the turkey season starts to horned owls, at least every year. And it always occurs from about right now, you know, late February, early March, when they first start gobbling in the tree until right before the turkey season.

When we see gobbling really is starting to ramp up, that's when those horned owls hit those toms. We had a gentleman the other day explained to me and Seth that he believes that his bobcats go up into the roost tree and kill the turkeys off the roost. Cats can obviously climb. I can't really discount that, but I wouldn't speak to you. It does not because when you get under a turkey roost, they know exactly. I mean, they know you're there. They know you're there long before you ever get there. And yes, cats are much more stealthy than we are.

But bobcats are primarily stalk and sit hunters. They sit and wait on things to walk by them. They're lazy like our house cats. Your house cat sits on your refrigerator and smacks you in the head when you walk by. Bobcats typically kill birds. We see they kill birds while birds are out foraging. So it's, you know, the kills made during the day sometime or early morning, late afternoon when birds are kind of strolling along roads or rights of way or whatever.

And all of a sudden, boom, there's the kill. I'm not saying they couldn't climb a tree and kill a bird, but, man, if you think about it, that would be. It's hard to imagine them wrestling a turkey off on a tree branch. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it could happen, but, yeah. Well, it could be a heck of a fall.

You're putting yourself in a dangerous position to take a, you know, 20, 30-foot fall. Yeah fall with a 25-pound bird. Yeah. Yeah, he seemed to think that he would get up there when they're still sleeping and surprise them. Isn't that what he was saying? Yep. And get a whole bunch of them. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I would say the whole bunch probably doesn't work. Yeah. I'm going to have to call BS on the whole bunch. Well, let's not be harsh on the guy. No, no. He was just sharing. Maybe one of the times.

He was just sharing a perspective with us. Yep. Okay, so you did all that, and your PhD project was in the Mississippi Delta. Well, it was in Mississippi, yeah. My master's work was in the Delta, and my PhD work was in the kind of upland piney woods. And what was that work? Because PhD work is very specific, though, right? Yeah, that was the predation.

That was where we went in and we marked, we radioed turkeys, hens, and all those predators. And basically what I did was I recreated GPS data, but I did it manually tracking. There was no GPS at that time. So I would track these animals simultaneously. So I may have three or four cats, a coyote, two foxes, five hens, two raccoons, whatever. How are you getting all that stuff collared up? We trapped our butts off. Live trapping? Yes. We foothold trapped for the cats, coyotes, and foxes and used cage traps for the raccoons. And, of course, used rocket nets for the turkeys.

And I did all that simultaneously. So there were several students working with me that, let's say, student A, he was studying raccoons, and student B was studying bobcats. And then I was kind of overseeing all of it, trapping birds, trapping this, trapping that, making sure all of it. So you didn't get a collar on. Both years of that project, I tracked about 150 animals simultaneously. How were you catching the bobcats? Foothold traps.

What kind of sets did you make? We could trap with bait because we were permitted under the state. You mean visible bait? Yeah. Visible bait. We used, it was funny based on your story this morning before we started, we used beaver because the caster has such a strong odor and we had a local trapper that provided beaver carcasses and we would use the liver, we would use deer liver, deer ribs, anything

we could get our hands on that had a sight to it. We would hang feathers, you know, anything, because cats are such visual hunters. The cats were pretty easy. The coyotes were more difficult. But because we could use meat, we were pretty successful. And then you had to have used, like, rubber jaws, laminated jaws, because you had these things, you couldn't cripple them up, right? Yeah, yeah.

So we used either offset jaws, but most of them were padded. Uh-huh. Yeah. Soft catch. Yeah, soft catch. So we would, you know, we would catch the animals. We ran traps every morning, every afternoon, pulled animals out of the trap. We didn't drug foxes or coyotes, but we would immobilize bobcats and raccoons because they were vicious, obviously. Oh, it was harder to wrestle a bobcat than a coyote?

Coyotes are so docile. They, with few exceptions, when you catch a coyote, they know they've been beat. They, you can take a bath towel and sedate a coyote, truthfully. Really? Yeah. They, even, you know, we use catch poles or the dog catchers nets. As soon as the net would go over them, they kind of lay down because, and they would just lay there. And we, of course we would hobble them, you know, with, with leg

hobbles and we would put a muzzle around their mouth. But I can only remember two that ever tried to, to nip at me. Yeah. The cats on the other hand, when you try to throw a net or something over them, it is like hell on wheels. Oh, when you put a catch pole around a bobcat, it's like an explosion. It is. A lot of times they'll kill themselves. It is. Oh, fighting a cat.

So when we're talking about a catch pole, I used to have one that I made. It just took a piece of conduit and took like a a it must have been maybe three-eighths cable three-eighth diameter cable and imagine that you run you take it like four feet of conduit let's say and run both of the ends of the cable through it so that on one end you got coming out the two ends of the cable and on the other end you just got like the loop and you can pass that loop over its neck pull tight with the other hand and they make more sophisticated versions but that when we're talking about a catch pull that's like a catch pull then you can kind of control it and you got it where you want it you can get it out of a trap or whatever yeah you just have to be careful with

cats because if you put a lot of pressure on them you can because they're fragile a lot of times we would try to get one leg in the catch pole too, like get them under the armpit and around the neck. Oh. That way when they freaked out, you know, you weren't snapping their neck. Yeah. We used mostly dog catcher's nets, and because they were big enough to cover the entire cat, I found those to be a lot quicker.

And, you know, as you know, Seth, they start hitting the catch pole. You know, they swat at it constantly. But that big net, they you know, Seth, they start hitting the catch pole, you know, swat at it constantly, but that big net, they would grab it and chew on it. But most of the time you could kind of wrestle it over them and then just take a, believe it or not, we would just find beaver sticks, chewed sticks from beaver huts that had all the bark chewed off that were waterlogged. So they were, and we would just pin the cat down, drug them in the butt with a mobilizing drug, and then remove them from the trap. And then did you guys have pretty good luck when you're doing that type of work? Do you have pretty good luck with turning them out and they're fine? Yeah.

Very, very seldom would we have any issues. Cats are pretty sensitive to their feet. Obviously, that's their gun, so to speak. So you have to be careful foothold trapping with bobcats to try not to injure their digits. If you do, you could lose them. Coyotes are a little more resistant to foot damage, but we trapped again with the padded foothold trap, so we very rarely had any issues. So when you did this, when you did your PhD work, what was the biggest takeaway from it? Everything likes turkeys? Everything likes turkeys. And this bird shares space with a lot of things that kill it, whether it be adults or nest. Now, granted, this was back in the mid to late 90s, and it was kind of startling to me how many animals were within a turkey's home range that would eat it or its nest.

And since then, as most folks in the southeast and the east can attest to, predator populations have exploded. Since then they have. Yes. I mean, all science points to higher raccoon populations, higher meso mammals in general, all of the smaller mammals, raccoons, opossums, skunks. Explain the term meso mammals. Just a midsize. Okay.

Just a midsize mammal. You know, coyotes were common in Mississippi at that time, but they were just starting to invade the eastern Atlantic states. And they're still not at saturation in a lot of the work. I do coyote work as well, and we still see that their territories are not completely like puzzle pieces on the landscape yet. There still are voids out there where coyotes are backfilling so we're not we're not at saturation with that predator yet and To your question it startled me back then how many animals were within a turkey's range that could eat it or its nest and now The predation that we see on nest which is about 80% of all our nests are lost. It's crazy.

80%. That's the thing I wanted to ask you about because I had heard this, and I heard this was a ballpark thing that someone was telling me, like as a general rule of thumb, 75% of the eggs that hit the ground never hatch. Yep. 75% of the hatchlings don't hit their first birthday. Yep. Of the birds that hit their first birthday, 75% won't see their second birthday. She's saying like ballpark. Yeah. What we see is about 20-ish percent nest success. Now my work right now... Nest success? Nest success. My work right now is I do work on a lot of Eastern populations, the Eastern subspecies. Rios are a different ballgame. I have some work on Rios, but Rios are precipitation driven, so when it's really wet, a hatch is better. But just talking about Easterns, we see about 20% in that success.

And what classifies success? It hatches one or more eggs. One or more? Oh, that's a success no matter what the hell happens to them? Yes. And then it gets more bleak. So you have 20% in that success. And then we see about a third of our broods have at least one poult that survives the first month of life

because we track broods that first month. The assumption is once they get about 28 days old, they're pretty safe. And that's a good assumption. For the most part, once they start roosting off the ground when they're two weeks old, they can evade predators. And by the time they're Bantam rooster-sized chickens at 28 days, they're pretty hardy little things. It takes them two weeks before they can sleep in a tree? Yeah. They'll climb up shrubbery and things to get off the ground,

but it usually takes, and there's some debate. Turkeys are like people in some ways. Some grow a little faster than others, and that depends on how much forage they have and the quality of that forage. But some early researchers like Lovett Williams, who was a famous turkey researcher in South Florida, he saw that some of those Osceola actually would start roosting off the ground eight or nine days after they were hatched. But they're in a really southern latitude, lots of bugs everywhere. They grow fast, but we typically see about 12 to 14 days, they'll start roosting off the ground with mom. And at that point they're,

they're in pretty good shape. So she leaves them on the ground at night when they're young? She stays with them. Oh, she, she, she stays with them and broods them under her at night. And then once she can get off the ground, she roosts with them. But again, they're right beside her and right under her, particularly during inclement weather, they're tucked up under her. And then as they get bigger, obviously they can't do that. So they just kind of assimilate themselves in the tree around her. And then as they get bigger and bigger and bigger, that's when they start kind of moving out on their own and you'll flush them you know let's just say we walk in on a brood that's 25 days old there may be two or three in this tree and one in the tree beside it three that

are on the branch under her and so they're kind of you know in the area around her when when mom's on the ground with the uh uh, with the clutch, do you find that like hens are getting killed more when they're on the ground with the young? Absolutely. Yeah. When, you know, if you think about it from mom's perspective, she needs to be off the ground as well. I mean, that's why, that's why a 10 pound bird sleeps in a tree. It's because of predators. predators so that 14 days she's much more vulnerable to being killed while she's brooding so it it behooves a turkey to grow fast quick and get off the ground so from a brood habitat perspective they need lots and lots of forage so they can grow quickly and start roosting off the ground. Got it. For sure. But of those 20, this is the, you ever heard the analogy about the golden egg,

you know, the probability that one of those eggs becomes a gobbler. So take 80% of your nest and they're gone. Of those 20%, only a third of those that hatch produce one pole or more that survives the first month. So if you do the math there, what we see from about East Texas all the way over to South Carolina is that about 7% of nest produce one or more poults that survive. No. Yes. And then you start thinking about the probability that one of those birds is going to end up being

an adult tom that you hunt in the spring. The odds are stacked really steep against that happening. It's pretty remarkable. For every, like, rope dragon mature bird out there, hundreds have died. Yes. Yes.

A hundred have died or whatever. And that, those issues are what has driven research, particularly the past decade. Because back in the nineties, if you picked up literature on turkeys, you would see nest success of 30, 40, 50%. Times were good. Turkeys were hatching everywhere. Oh, so you believe those were true numbers. It wasn't because the research was bad.

I think, no, not bad. I think what we ended up doing years ago is we weren't able to track nesting as well as we can now. We missed birds that would incubate because the GPS that we have now is so clear. I mean, we can see with utmost clarity when she starts incubating. So we missed some nests back 20 years ago because they would start incubating and we wouldn't know it. Sure. But so what you, you tended to overestimate nest success because you missed some nests that were failed, you know, that failed. Oh, I'm with you. But still, the numbers were better then.

And you consistently saw it across studies. It wasn't like one or two studies, you know, would say, oh, it's 40%. Most studies were showing much better nest success than we see now. And that's one of the things that prompted the eastern, southeastern slash states to say, we have an issue because we started noticing declines in nest success. And that popped up from brood surveys. Basically, all the states in the southeast have brood surveys that they conduct where agency personnel and the public record how many hens they see in the summer that have poults with them. And if you look across the last 20 years,

it's been declining every year without exception. So this has been a problem that's actually been ongoing and it was right under our nose and we didn't see it because like we've talked about, there were turkeys everywhere and harvest was really good. And then about the late 2000s, you know, 2009, 2010, the Southeast states, and then about a year or two later, the kind of the Northeast states and the Midwestern states kind of put their heads together and said, you know what? We're kind of all in this together. We're seeing fewer poults per hen or fewer hens that have poults in the summer, which the only possible scenarios there is fewer are hatching and or more broods are dying. That's the only thing that could translate to fewer birds

being observed that have poults with them. And that kick-started some research that I think has really opened people's eyes to the fact that this bird is suffering in areas and it's not, obviously not uniform. I mean, turkeys are doing really well in some places particularly urban kind of suburban areas you hear about low predator loads exactly hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Do you think there's a lot more predators on the ground because we've had low fur prices for 30 years? There's no question. There's no question. I mean, if you go back and look at pelt prices, people actually trapped raccoons and made money off of them. And you can't give raccoons. Oh, yeah.

It used to be like if you found like a coon den tree in the mid-'80s, it was a big damn deal. Yeah. And you'd have to get there on opening day because someone else is going to get there ahead of you. There was a big nighttime raccoon hound hunting culture in Pennsylvania when I grew up. Yeah, same thing right here. Nobody does it anymore. No, the guys with hounds would mop up more than trappers. But I mean, yeah, but you could sell a coon for 40 bucks.

Yeah. In those days. Yeah, and you can't give raccoons away at this point. So there's no motivation. And as you know, as we all sitting here know, that trade has declined. I mean, there aren't trappers being recruited into the ranks of people that would go catch fur bears like there were years ago. You put all that together and what we've learned about some of these predators, for instance, raccoons, is you'll see five or six males sharing the same home range. So this thought that, well, you just

go trap one male and you got him, that's garbage. There could be half a dozen there. They have all sorts of kind of unique breeding strategies. Males will den together, which is pretty interesting. Again, they share home ranges. You see females that have pretty high litter survival rates because what would eat a raccoon, right? Greyhound owl. Other than a greyhound owl. How does a raccoon kill a turkey? We don't see that raccoons are a big predator of adults.

They can kill adults. They will kill poults. Basically, if you think really young poults, they can kind of disrupt the brood and get a poults off by themselves. But they like to hunt the nest down, right? They do. But we found through some experimental work, they don't actually go looking for nest. They just end up in areas where nest are. And most of that is because raccoons in the spring and summer are

looking for soft mast. So like in the south, that would be blackberries, dewberries, you know, those types of things. They're looking for that, invertebrates, amphibians, anything that they can kind of get their hands on. And a lot of that ends up being in areas that are dense, shrubby, brushy, grassy sites. Well, turkeys end up nesting there and the raccoons stumble across the nest. And raccoons, once they find the nest, they'll consume. Usually, if they don't consume the entire clutch, they'll move eggs away from the nest bowl and consume them and then come back. So within short order, the entire clutch is lost. Now, here's a research question for you. How in the world do you,

how can you say that you don't know that they're looking for turkey nests? We actually set up an experiment where we supplementally fed raccoons and we did this this to look at how it's called area restricted searching. Basically, just think about it like this. So predators walking across the environment and all of a sudden cues in on something that, hey, it's a smell, a sight, a sound, something that I can eat. So they do, they start doing this kind of circuitous movements back and forth, back and forth through the same area hunting for whatever it is that they detected. Well, we needed to figure out what that looks like in raccoons. So we set up this, this experiment where we tracked raccoons and we stood there with them all night, basically. They were wild,

but we stood out there with them and tracked them as they exhibited this behavior. And then we went back out on the landscape and had turkeys marked, had nesting place, you know, places where nests were located. And we tracked raccoons that were not supplementally fed. And it clearly demonstrated that those raccoons are not going to areas where nests are and then start, they don't start searching. Oh, I'm with you. They just start bebopping across the environment and all of a sudden they would end up in something that would look kind of like a turkey nesting area and they'd start foraging. But most of the time, they ended up in areas that were not nesting cover. They ended up in areas that were more wet, that a lot of our birds didn't nest in, which led us to conclude that most of the time when they bump into a nest, it's just them walking

from one point to the next, and they encounter something, I suspect it's smell. You know, they get some whiff of, there's a bird over there on the ground. I'm going to go check it out. And, of course, when they flush a bird, I mean, turkeys are pretty, some turkeys can be pretty resilient to nest predators. They'll attack snakes. And we have pictures of Gould's birds that sit while foxes nose up under them on the nest. No. Yeah.

But that's not uniform. So a lot of times, as you know, you flush a bird off the nest when you're hunting or something. That's what happens when a raccoon approaches. They don't abandon that nest if they get bumped off of it. They will. If it's, we find that typically their abandonment is if it's early in incubation. If she's only tied some investment into that

clutch for a few days and you flush her off, there's a pretty good chance she doesn't come back. Just from getting flushed off. Because it's happened to me a couple of times where I've almost stepped on a nest and I'm always, I've wondered, will she come back to that clutch of eggs? Yeah. I had, this is a true story. I had a bird back in the nineties that had her radio telemetry unit was faulty. So I couldn't tell how close I was to her. And that's back on the day that we would approach to within a certain distance and kind of put a flag so that when she hatched, we could go find the nest. And inevitably I would try to, this bird, I went into her nest five days after she started incubating, and I went to put the flag in the tree, and she got up right under me. I was like,

ah, damn, you know. Well, she's not coming back. Well, she came back. So one day, about 20 days in, I drive down the road. I get out of the truck. I check her. She's, she's standing there and she flushed from the road. I have no idea why she was like 30 meters from the road and she flushed off the nest. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. She did that every day from day 20 until she hatched. Every day I'd pull up there, she'd flush off the nest or she, if she didn't flush, she would run. Like I'd actually listen to the signal and think, that bird just got up again and started walking off of that clutch. And I'm 30 meters away from her. No idea why she did that. Usually, once you start flushing the bird, it's over.

And that makes sense if you think about it. If you're early in incubation and something flushes you, that's not a good spot. You better go. Oh, yeah, you don't have a lot You better go. Yeah. You don't have a lot invested in it. Yeah. You know, better yet you need to live and turkeys are a long lived bird, relatively speaking. So they need to live to the next year. So if you haven't invested much in that clutch, you know, the sage decision is to go somewhere else and either try again or just quit for the year. So if it's early enough in the season, they'll just lay another clutch. Yeah. They'll just re-nest. Yeah. And that depends on

a lot of different things, but yeah. How many attempts can they make in a spring? We've had four. The most are, if they try more than once, it's just twice. You'll get the occasional bird that will try three times. And we've had a few that did four, but most are one or two. A minute ago, you just said that they're a long-lived bird. But then when you lay out all the ways they get killed and the frequency with which they get killed it would feel that they're not along with bird and that and that that's part of that's part of the the conundrum here if you will this bird is supposed to live a long time they're supposed to live the the hens anyway are supposed to live through multiple breeding cycles. Otherwise, you don't have a

shot at being successful. So this bird needs to live years, given their high predation rates on their nest. In order for it to replace itself. Right. Because if she doesn't produce, if you think about it, if she doesn't produce one or more hen poults that survive to be her age, then the flock declines through time. And from a male's perspective, you know, these toms, their reproductive success is driven by how many times they can breed. I mean, they need to breed with as many hens to be successful in their life as possible. So if he only lives two years, he doesn't have near the reproductive success if he lives five years. So this bird is supposed to live longer than, say, a lot of them. I mean, they're a large-bodied bird, and large-bodied birds are supposed to live longer. And what we

see with these hens is a lot of these hens have the strategy during incubation of living. They spend more time away from their nest than other hens. They may be in areas that are more open where they can see. There appears to be a strategy within every population we studied where some of these hens, they want to live. Their strategy is nest where I can see, evade predation if it shows up and try again next year. Whereas other hens forego that and they tend to be hens that die on the nest, but they're more successful. So there's kind of two different strategies in these populations. The strategy of live until next year, that works if the bird lives multiple years. Oh, because, all right, because her strategy of live till next year

decreases the likelihood. She's more playing her own game rather than protecting the thing. That's right. She's more invested in herself than she is the clutch. Got you. Because we're talking about a bird. It's like a mother, like your house catches on fire. You got the ones that go in and get her kids,

and you got the ones that just book. Yeah. And what we see is the birds that are less invested in their nest, when they take recesses, when they take breaks during the day, they go farther away. They spend more time away from the clutch. And that makes sense if you think about it because when you're sitting there, you're vulnerable. But when you're off, turkeys have a periscope head. When they're off standing around foraging, they're hypervigilant. They can see, they hear. And when she's stuck there on that clutch, she's at the mercy of things around her. When she's away from the clutch, she's much safer. The birds that end up dying, as an aside, almost all of the birds that we have be killed during nesting are killed at the nest. Almost all of them are killed at the clutch. So there's a

predator that is detecting her on the ground, approaching her, and then killing her as she's trying to escape from the nest. Almost all of them. What's an old hen? Well, one problem is in the wild, unless we have banded known age birds, we don't know how old they are. We just know that they're either juvenile, so they were hatched this year, or they're not. Now, we've had birds, I had a bird back years ago in Mississippi, actually, that we know was nine years old based on we used to put wing tags on them. And she was nine. And that was in a hunted population of birds? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and she was pretty slick. We see routinely, you know, we'll get band returns of toms that are 5, 6, 7, 8 years old. We had one that was killed. In hunted populations? Mm-hmm. We had one the other last year. It's like Sneaky Pete, man. That was eight.

So, yeah, we get some older birds, but by and large. You say you had a gobbler in a hunted population, lived to be eight? Yeah. What the hell is he doing? He's pretty slick. He doesn't make a lot of noise. No. No.

He's probably not doing too much breeding. Huh? If he is, he's using an alternative strategy for sure. He's one of those gobblers that gobbles and then catches his, sticks his foot in his beak, if you will, to shut himself up. Don't call too loud. Don't call too often. Yanni's got a question. Well we are you happy no i want you do the question you just wrote oh but because i think it has to do

with that how hunters think they can so reliably age males sure um i was just gonna ask like what environmental um what's the word I'm looking for? What makes a long turkey spur? Subspecies, for one thing, that's an overriding factor, is you tend to see patterns across the different subspecies. Osceolos have the longest by far, and then Easterns and then your Western subspecies tend to be much shorter.

Can I tell you why that is? Sure. In hunting lore? are and then easterns and then your western subspecies tend to be much shorter can i tell you why that is sure in hunting lore it has to do with how rocky the ground is yeah is that legit i think there's some truth to that also think it's some of it i've been telling people that for a long time i think some of that is probably just lore you know you do um you know if you for as far as aging goes and and i may be crucified for saying this but i'm right um you don't want to crucify an innocent man yeah if you if you go back and look at text from years ago they would tell you spur length is a reliable age indicator and it is not we oh no that's not true because we can tell he's one, he's two, he's three, he's four. I can promise you, you can't.

You cannot. We have known age birds that were banded as jakes that end up at two years old with inch and a quarter spurs, some with seven eighths inch spurs. We had a five-year-old killed that had three quarter inch spurs. Yeah, but hold on a minute now because he ground him down on rocks no he was he was an eastern he was an eastern so not many rocks but is it true or not true that it takes him to be and i know this is gospel that when he gets a pointy spur that you could prick your finger with that's because he's three that is false so what you're saying is it's kind of the same as guys looking at antlers and being like

that buck's four yes because he's a six point right yes and you know the other thing you have to think about just like you know with deer you're dealing with deer, you're dealing with genetic issues. You're dealing with body condition and things that would facilitate one animal growing bigger, faster than another. So the bottom line is spurs are not. I mean, about the only thing a spur will tell you is you're looking at a really young bird or not. That's pretty much all it can tell you. What about beard? Beard is useless. Really? Yep.

About the only thing beards will tell you in general is if you combine them with the primaries on their wings, having bars and or their tail feathers, you can pretty much back your way into that's a Jake and therefore his beard is quite short versus that's a Tom and he has a longer beard because you see all sorts of issues with beards. You see freezing, you see mites, you see birds that are in brushier climates tend to wear their beards off more than other populations. So beards really don't tell you a whole lot beyond what you can get from their primaries and their tail feathers. Well, here's why a little bit that's a lie. Because have you ever seen a Jake throw like a nine-inch beard? No, and that's what I'm saying. In general, you look at that four or five-inch beard,

and you're probably looking at a Jake. just confirm like that's what i teach students just always confirm with their tail feathers and their primaries gotcha if those last two primaries are barred have have barring all the way to the end of those primaries and they have a little tiny beard that's an adult that just has a short beard but on a jake on a jake the center feather two it's the two centers the outer two primaries of their wing are not barred. They have black end, black tips. Really? I didn't know that one.

And then their tail fan. Is that true about the tail fans? Yeah, because they molt beginning with the center feathers of the tail. So there's 18 feathers there. So they begin molting from the center, and then they molt out. So that's what causes that notched-looking appearance. The two longer feathers in the center. Yeah. So the later you kill a Jake in the spring, the more likely he is to have the notch is bigger. It's not just the center two feathers. It'll be the four, six, eight. And then by the summer, he's replaced all

18 of those feathers. Hold on, the notch gets more pronounced as the spring goes on? It gets wider. The width of the notch gets wider because he's molting those outermost feathers. I wish we could explain this to people. I wish we could explain this. I think he's doing a fine job. No, on people who never even looked at a turkey's tail. I have a fan on my desk.

Yeah, so just look. If you want to kind of think about it visually, just look at the tail from the front. When he's fanned out. When he's fanned out. And look at the center two that are directly over his back. Okay. Goes straight up from the base of his tail. That's the two that he starts.

That's the first two he molts. But that means they're long or short? They're longer. Okay. So he molts. But that means they're long or short? They're longer. Okay. So he molts from a juvenile plumage into his adult plumage, and the adult plumage is the longer feathers. Okay. So he's replacing shorter feathers with longer feathers. Gotcha. And as he replaces the shorter feathers working out from the center, that's why that notch gets wider and wider and wider because it's working it's what the longer feathers are replacing the shorter feathers as you work to the outside of the fan as it's fanned out yeah so

yeah uh but will he ever by the end of the season he'll he'll never like the way most seasons work he's always going to have lopsided tail yes as a jake he won't get there during season yeah they get there during the summer okay they finish that molting of their tail during the summer. They also molt those primaries during the summer. So by the time they pop in as a two-year-old, they have the full fan that we know and their primaries are all barred. And that's diagnostic? Yes, that is foolproof. That's the two ways. I teach students, don't worry about the spur. Don't worry about the beard.

If you want to look at them, great. But if you really want to age turkeys, you look at their primaries and their tail fan. And that's only to age them one year or more than one year? Yep, yep. Because what turkeys do, once they go through that first molt to become an adult, they then continuously molt a little bit at a time. So they, they're always going to look like an adult once they're about a year and a half old. Yeah. So you can't tell, you can't tell a four-year-old from a five-year-old. No, no. Yeah. He's got big spurs.

Yeah. Big, long beard, big, long beard, big, long spurs or not. Maybe short beard got big spurs yeah big long beard big long beard big long spurs or not maybe short beard short spurs it's a crap shoot hey uh who pays for all the research mostly state agencies um most of my work is is funded by pitman robertson funds that is that right yeah that that hunters are contributing to their state coffers. That money then goes to agencies, which earmark it for partially for research. And then I work under contracts with state agencies to do the work. Nonprofits like, you know, NWTF, they also provide a little bit of money. But by and large, when we're talking, these are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of

dollars to do these studies. And it's mostly almost entirely driven by agency funding. That's great. Yeah. You've been doing a lot of work on gobbling. Yes. Yes. There's a thing that a lot of times people will come at like hunters, dudes like me will attribute low gobbling on some particular weekend no one was gobbling because there's a lot of hunting pressure yep but what brings that to what makes me curious about that is that i remember talking to a former turkey researcher no no no he was a state agency guy who did a ton of work, but he had to do some turkey work. He was talking about they had collars one time on five gobblers or transmit GPS units glued into the feathers, I believe, on five gobblers.

And they were fine all winter. Spring came. They all got killed by bobcats. You were just mentioning that great horned owls will smack them more once they start gobbling. Right. So if all these predators, like native predators that the turkeys have always coexisted with, if all these predators are queuing in on gobbling and it makes the toms more vulnerable is the added pressure of humans queuing in on gobbling enough to like tip the scales yes it is absolutely what we see so we track gobbling using these song meters they're called

song meters they're just boxes that we put in a tree. We put a microphone 30 feet up to get above kind of the vegetation, you know, on the ground. And that thing listens all day, and it records all ambient sound in an area several hundred yards around it. And then we run. That can detect, like there's software that picks the gobbles out of that? Exactly. So we run the data through a software package. It extracts the gobbles out. And like we were talking about earlier, it also extracts crow calls and owl calls.

So we go through and we listen to verify that it's a gobble or not. And then we can track gobbling activity, you know, through time from weeks before the season starts to the end. And we do it all the way until the end of June. And what we see very clearly is that birds start gobbling, at least in the southeast, they start gobbling 1st of March. It really ramps up before the season starts. And then when hunting starts, it takes a nose dive. And if it's heavily hunted sites, it may stop, like entirely stop. And if it's not a heavily hunted site. Entirely stop.

Yes. Yeah. We just published two papers. They're not even ripping one in the dark. No. In fact, two papers that we just published, we showed the gobbling activity in there and it, by April 15th on that site, it was two study sites, with the exception of just a couple of days where we detected a dozen or so gobbles, it was zero. Like these birds stopped

gobbling. And then- And you think it's because hunting? There's no question. Is it because the ones that like to gobble a lot got killed or one individual turkey's like, man, I'm going to chill out because every morning I got some dude standing below my tree? It's both. If you think about it, all toms are not being killed, right? So even though we see pretty high harvest rates, they're not all dying. What's happening is it's a combination of vocal birds are being shot, vocal birds are being disturbed and deciding, okay, I'm done. And other birds are just taking the strategy of, you know what? It's not worth it. Every time I start calling, I get a dude that

walks under me and starts yelping, or I get a cat that chases me, or I get a coyote that comes into the pasture and runs me off, or I get an owl or whatever. And through time, it just, the bird, I think the bird sees such a predation risk that they adopt a different strategy. And that strategy is call less, move about their range. I suspect strut more, drum more, try to use more subtle cues and or go to places where they know they're going to interact with hens and just do it quietly. And that's what we see. The interesting thing is on, we also have gobbling data on a non-hunted site, the Savannah River site, which is one of the very few places in the South and Southeast that there's no hunting. Is it like a park or?

It's a nuclear plant, basically. It's Department of Energy. So it's about 200,000 acres, very limited hunting on one little chunk of it and no hunting on the rest. And we see that gobbling does not do that. They gobble all spring. No. As you would expect.

And we also have a wildlife management area where they're only allowed to hunt two days. And I bet you, you can predict before I say it, what happens. They gobble their heads off during the week. And then when hunters show up on Friday and Saturday, gobbling tanks. No way, really? Yeah. And then- hunters show up on Friday and Saturday, gobbling tanks. No way, really? Yeah. And then. Just the increased activity.

Yep. Cars, parking. Yep. And then they pick back up around Tuesday and Tuesday, Thursday, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is pretty good. And then Friday it tanks again. And you see this pattern through the season, just like that. There's no question this bird detects, it perceives the risk that we put on them on the landscape when hunting is at a heavy rate.

You know, when there's lots of hunters out there, there's no question. The data clearly show that they perceive that as a risk and they behave accordingly. Are there, are we part of the problem? I mean, of course, part of the problem is we kill turkeys. But do our activities, I guess it'd be this. Are there hens that don't get bred because we're interrupting their cycle too much during the breeding season? We don't see many hens that don't initiate clutches. So they're being bred. What we do see is that there are some infertility rates in some populations where some of the eggs, you know, say one or so in every clutch is infertile.

We also see, which I think is more problematic, that in some of these populations that are heavily hunted, the nesting season is taking 65 to 80 or 90 days, meaning these hens are starting to breed at, say, late March, early April, and there are still clutches hitting the ground in July, which... Puts those hens in a bad position, or puts those poults in a bad spot, right? It puts the poults in a bad spot. If they don't have enough time to get big. Yeah, and if you think about it from a predator standpoint, it puts nest on the landscape scattered through time instead of a big pulse of nest out there at once. That's called predator swamping.

Yes, so there's no swamping in our population. So what happens is you have, for instance, I just showed, I just gave a talk at the, in Arkansas to, to their commission. And, and I showed a figure where we tracked the same group of hens throughout the nesting season, this one bunch of hens that were one social group, they were all caught together. So they're all kind of one group. And the first hen starts and she loses her clutch and she tries again a few weeks later and she loses that clutch and she tries again a third time. It was 65 days across that period.

Well, she didn't start until the, I think it was April the third or fourth was the first day. So if you think about it, she's on into June before she's trying a third clutch. And even if that hatches, those birds are behind the eight ball compared to a clutch that hatches April 20th. When winter hits. Yeah. I've got a question related to that breeding disruption regarding like how seasons are structured. Because you'll hear people say in many states the season starts too early.

Yep. Like in Pennsylvania, it doesn't open until May 1st. So they've got all of April to do their thing. And I think they do that to give them time to breed. Yes. But here in Montana, it starts what, Jan? It's like the 11th of April. And granted, it's a different climate.

But do you think that those early starts are pro could be a problem yeah how much time do we have um yeah so i think some historical perspective is would be good so back 30 years ago there was a guy named bill healy who's who's retired now he he was a guy named Bill Healy who's retired now. He was a famous turkey researcher and he's a great guy. And he, this was 70s, 80s, 90s. He was asked by the Northeast states to write a set of recommendations for timing hunting seasons. And he very clearly noted in this document that is widely used and cited that you do not shoot this bird in the spring. You do not shoot toms until most, and he left out a bit vague, most breeding has occurred. And he goes on to say, to make sure you've hit the sweet spot, just time it when

incubation, you know, peaks in incubation. So the bottom line is start removing toms when a lot of your hens are already bred and on the nest. That reduces illegal kill of hens because they're sedentary. And those toms have already bred those hens, so there are some that are expendable at that point. And by and large, the Northeast states accepted those recommendations. If you just mentioned Pennsylvania, Michigan, a lot, the Northeast states accepted those recommendations. If you just mentioned Pennsylvania, Michigan, a lot of the Northeast states, their seasons don't start until May. And the Southeast states have largely entirely ignored that. If you look across the South, seasons open three to four weeks before peaks and incubation. And that's uniform across states with very few exceptions. Louisiana has a little later opening date. Arkansas has a later opening date.

But by and large, you have states opening weeks and weeks before incubation peaks. And what that does, the research, we're just trying to grasp, kind of put our heads around this, but here's my thinking. And Bill pointed to this in his writing. So you have these dominant toms, and we don't know who they are. We don't know who the dominant toms are in a population. But what we clearly do understand is that you have these groups of toms that breed a group of hens, right? So turkeys use a mating strategy that's like a lek. So you know what sage-grouse do, right?

Okay, so sage-grouse are all out displaying for each other, and all the males are there together so they can see each other. But what turkeys do is more of an exploded lek. And all that means is you take that sage-grouse lek and kind of blow it up on the landscape where you've got pockets of turkeys across the landscape. And they maintain contact with each other through gobbling. They don't see each other like a sage grouse. They hear each other. And that gobbling activity maintains those leks. So if you go out and you hunt Merriams or Rios,

and even Easterns, if there's a lot of birds, you'll hear this gobble over here, gobble over there, gobble over there. That's those exploded leks that are calling to each other saying, I'm still here. I'm still here. So each one's kind of got his zone and they're telling each other, don't come here. I'm here and I have my hens with me and I'm going to breed them. Within that group of toms that are in that little exploded leg, there's one breeder. There's a dominant breeder. And the others are not always breeders and in some cases are not breeders. So you have one tom and he is the breeder. He's breeding with those

hens that are around him and his brothers, his siblings, or toms that he grew up with as a poult. So he was hatched and amalgamated into the same brood back years ago. He's been spending times with these other toms since he was a poult. These are the groups of jakes that you see on the landscape running around. Those group of jakes all hung around together, and then they get older together. And as they get older together, they have an established hierarchy. There's one guy that's at the top of this ladder, and we've all seen this. I mean, and they fight constantly to maintain these hierarchies.

So you have this one breeder, and you have this group of hens. And if we go in, say, a month early and we remove that dominant tom, which we've clearly seen early in the season, dominant toms are more easily harvested than they are later in the season. There's been a number of studies showing that. So if we go in and we remove that dominant tom, and I'll be honest, I'm guilty of this. I used to think years ago, well, hell, the next guy will just step up. That's not how it works. So this researcher, Bill, I spent some time in his house with he and his wife. He used to imprint birds to himself, right? He imprinted them as poults, and then they moved around. He basically took these turkeys and he observed them.

And what he told me was that these birds, they have their pecking orders like a ladder. There's a guy on the top step and then there's a bunch of steps under him. If you remove the top step, the second bird just doesn't step up. They tear the whole ladder apart and they start over and somebody figures out who's the dominant tom. No kidding. And meanwhile, what is the hen doing? Okay, so you remove the dominant tom. That's the one through sexual selection she's already picked. That's the top guy. So if you remove him too early, you're expecting her to just say, well, okay, well, hell, he's good enough. Number two is fine. That's not the way sexual selection works. So you see this in prairie chickens. You see it in fallow deer, you see it in sage grouse, species that use lecking strategies. If you just go in and remove a bunch of these

males, the females don't just breed with the next guy standing there. They go evaluate everybody all over again, which they've been doing for weeks before we shoot them. And all of a sudden, he's gone. Well, if he's gone, I need to go back through my checks and balances and figure out who's the most fit tom standing here, and then I'm going to breed with him. It just doesn't happen the next day. What about, are deer different than that? The work on fallow deer is shown, they do the exact same thing. Okay. So they reshuffle. They do. And the work on fallow deer shown,

which is kind of crazy, is that some of these females delay breeding so long that they actually, some don't breed. Like they just can't figure out who the best buck is. So they just stop and they move on. And again, we don't see that in turkeys. We see that most of them try, they lay a clutch of mostly fertile eggs. So they're being bred, but the thinking, and I'm not the only one that's tooting this. There are many managers in the South and East in particular that have discussed this over the past few years, that maybe what we're doing is we're disrupting breeding to the point where there are these subtle effects to populations that are contributing. They're not the cause, but are contributing to some of these declines we're seeing because we're taking these dominant toms out of these leks too early. And in so doing, we are compromising the hen's ability to pick the best tom who theoretically also has the most fit sperm, and we're removing him. Because what she's

supposed to do is she's supposed to breed with a dominant tom, and then she's supposed to be able to go find other dominant toms. So there's good evidence showing that these hens will visit multiple leks. They don't just stay there. Some of them will actually go and find other toms and copulate with them. So what she's doing there is she's taking sperm and she's storing it, which turkeys do, they store sperm. And I basically liken it to Tupperware containers. They're putting sperm. Yeah. Think about a turkey Tupperware. You've got all these tubules inside of her body that are storing sperm. And when it's time to produce a clutch and lay an egg, her body allows that sperm to be released. There is mate competition right there.

The best sperm wins, right? The most viable. Because she's got sperm from multiple males potentially. Multiple males. Maybe. Maybe. And if she does, then that should confer her better fitness and her clutch better fitness. We see this in mallards.

We see it in the waterfowl world is replete in science showing this. There's supposed to be multiple males in clutches. And there's some turkey work previously showing that a lot of clutches in a population of Rios that wasn't hunted did have multiple toms. We're collecting this data now in hunted populations and we don't have the results yet, but hopefully we will soon.

But I kind of use the analogy, if you were to ask a duck hunter, if I were to give you the opportunity to go to North Dakota and shoot mallards in May, what would you think? And the analogy is, well, that's when they're in their courtship flights, right? So you have five or six drakes that are flying around harassing one hen, and she's supposed to be able to pick the best males out of that courtship flight. And she will breed with more than one male. You wouldn't even consider harvesting males out of courtship flights. You'd kill deer during their courtship.

Different mating system. So if you look at turkeys, they're the only game bird in the conterminous United States that are hunted while they're breeding. They're the only one. That's a good point. So should we be hunting them in the summer?ous United States that are hunted while they're breeding. They're the only one. That's a good point. So should we be hunting them in the summer? No. No, we just need to – I think the science is going to demonstrate

that we just need to be more thoughtful, which we were warned about years ago. Again, this is not new, that we need to time our seasons more commensurate with the bird and not our own desires. Oh, I want to get out there as soon as the snow melts. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, I've been there. It's like, well, they're gobbled out.

They're bred out. And here, you know, like we're pretty extreme north. I mean, you're dodging snow patches and being in snow storms. They haven't even started breeding yet. You can't. I've been out turkey hunting, but there's not a lick. Well, even down in Missouri, remember? Not a lick of green.

It's early. I think it ultimately hinges on the harvest rate. Because if you go into a population up here, and let's just say you kill two or three percent of all your toms a month before breeding, who cares? Probably, but it's a lot higher now in these Southern populations and Eastern populations. If you're going in and removing 30, 40, even 50% of your toms, which we see on some areas prior to breeding or during the kind of the midst of breeding, frankly, to me, it's nonsensical to think it wouldn't have some effect. It's just what effect does it have? That's kind of what we're trying to put our hands around.

You know why I think listening to you is important for people? It's because you're not a state agency person, but you're a turkey hunter. I am. Because a state agency guy has got to be careful not to piss everybody off. And I don't. You can afford to piss people hunter. I am. Because the state agency guys got to be careful not to piss everybody off. And I don't. You can afford to piss people off. I can. But then we know your motivations are pure because you like to hunt turkeys.

That's why I give what you say extra validity. I appreciate that. And that is true. I mean, I kind of look at it. You can be the bearer of bad news. It's not going to screw you. I can. Your voicemail is not going to blow up with irate customers.

It will. I mean, I have people that attack me on social media every week. I post every Tuesday, Turkey Tuesday. I post science tidbits every. Yeah, I want to talk about Turkey Tuesday, but what's the, what, they don't think you like to hunt turkeys? They, I think, you know, honestly, Steve, I think there's people out there that look at biologists in general. And you've had, I've listened to some of your previous podcasts. And I think people look at me or Jim Heffelfinger or some of these people that are biologists and they think, well, they don't hunt.

They're not hunters. They're not in the trenches where we are. And like I said, I don't hunt. They're not hunters. They don't, they're not in the trenches where we are. And like I said, I grew up hunting. I mean, the reason I'm where I'm at is because I loved to hunt everything. And I was a steward of the outdoors. I soaked up everything I could. And then I fast forward, you know, 25 years and I look at my, my 18 year old and I'm thinking, is he going to have the opportunities to hunt turkeys or any species that I had? And if I shake my head and say no, then it's a failure on my part. It's a failure on our part to grasp what effect we may be having. And I tell people, turkeys and other species are

facing all sorts of problems. It's not a hunting issue. Habitat and predators and these things we've talked about. But to me, we have to do due diligence and understand what effect we might be having. And if there's something we can control, then we need to try. Because I really look at a lot of the species that we hunt and I think, if they're not here when my grandkids come along and the numbers that they are now or were, then it's been a failure on my watch. And that's, that's tough to take. It's tough to stomach. Especially, I think when you're, when you're pointing at it, when you're looking at a game management problem

and you're finding solutions that don't entail screwing ourselves over, that's not that hard of a pill to swallow. Right, right. Right? Someone's not coming and saying, like, listen, man, I'm not saying let's stop hunting turkeys. I'm saying let's think about our start dates. Yeah. Let's be a little more smarter about season structure.

I don't know why that should be met with a bunch of hostility. Well, especially when the end result possibly could be that instead of a two turkey bag limit, you might have four or, you know. I think, I think there's a number of issues there. One is just, you know, we're greedy. I mean, human beings are greedy. It comes down to a lot of, yeah, it's a lot of what, this is what I want. And what I hear from hunters is, well, they're gobbled out. If we don't get to hunt them early, early, I'm not going to get the opportunity.

Well, okay. So I try to couch this to people, and I think about it in my own, as a person, I think, okay. So in Georgia, I get about five or six weeks to hunt. And if you told me you only get four, but 10 years from now, instead of going and hearing one bird, which is about what I hear or two that I could hear four, I personally would look at that and go, I'll take that all day long. Um, but the complaints I hear a lot are, well, you're taking my opportunity. I've been allowed to hunt turkeys for six or eight weeks, my entire life or whatever. And I get that. But in the, at the end of the day, I look at it from the standpoint of the resource.

And I think, again, we have to do due diligence and, you know, turkey hunters, I'm biased, are one of the most cerebral hunters out there. I mean, they're, they're hunting at a time of the year when you don't hunt other things. So they are solely focused on this bird. And you look at all the gear and the technology, these folks really get into this and they think about it. And I don't talk to many that don't perceive an issue. Even folks that hunt Rios and Merriams, outfitters that I've been with that look at this and think, and in conversations they go, you know what, come to think of it, I hear a lot fewer birds than I did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. I still hear a lot of birds, but I don't hear or see the number of birds that I used to see. And I've heard some other agency biologists in the Southeast. One is

a really good friend of mine, Charles. And I've heard him say in open forums, if you don't have a problem right now, just wait. Just give it some time. If you're not seeing declines in your area, just, just wait. So how, um, like how precipitous are the declines like in certain areas and like how widespread are the declines? Like, is there certain regions of the country that are seeing more declines than others? Like how, how, how has it spread across the country? The productivity declines, which back to what we were talking about earlier, the poults per hen has gone down threefold. In what places? Across the board?

All of the southeastern states, several of the eastern, more kind of eastern, northeastern states, they're also seeing that decline in productivity. What they're not seeing, by and and large are drastic declines in harvest. I suspect they may at some point, but we'll see. And then several Midwestern states have shown the same trend, but it's a little different in the Midwest because you tend to see turkeys more in that agricultural belt or more in kind of pockets. not they're not heavily hunted in some places and they are and others and we don't have a good grasp on reproduction in rios and merriams and ghouls we just we don't have those broad data sets gotta do some more work there huh we do because they roam in larger chunks of land they're they're less visible well if you think like rios for

instance a lot of them live on on private lands that are large tracks and they're everywhere. And what we do find from, we've banded thousands of rios in areas that are hunted and we see really low harvest rates in general. Huh. Some really high in pockets, but by and large across the landscape, really low, single digit percent. And in Easterns we see see 30-plus percent on almost every population. Wow. Yanni's got a couple for you. I don't even know what the hell one means.

Is it a sports question? No. Oh, you're looking at it. I had written down Arkansas versus Wisconsin. It seems like, and this is just in my little world but it seems like you hear a lot of griping recently out of arkansas for what's going on with their turkey population a lot of people are saying that it's just down and out and then you go to and then in wisconsin they're killing like what between 50 000 40 to 50 000 turkeys annually and just you know it seems to be nuts like what? Between 40,000 to 50,000 turkeys annually. And just,

you know, it seems to be nuts. Like what's, what's sort of like the, if, can it be possible to put it in a nutshell to say, yeah, this is why one's doing great and one's not? Yes and no. The yes would be in Arkansas, what you've seen is a strong precipitous decline in productivity that's been happening for decades. This is not just something that started. It's been 20 years plus of declining productivity to now where in Arkansas, in some areas, they're less than one poult per hen, which means the flock has to be declining because a lot of the poults you see are males. So in Arkansas, you have a productivity problem to the point where their harvest has declined.

They've gone through a number of season changes. In fact, they've changed their season 20 times in the past 30 years, trying to come up with a sweet spot. And that was one of the reasons I was there the other last week was to talk to their biological staff about why would you even consider moving a season later? Like the things we just talked about, those are the things that I think people need to hear so that they understand why an early season could be problematic. Not saying it is, but why it could be from the broader sense. So Arkansas is now trying to move to a much later opening date in hopes that most of their breeding has occurred. In fact, I think what they were considering is an April 19th opener, which for the Southeast is really late. But that's by far would be the latest, except for some pockets in East Texas that have a later April opener.

You know, Wisconsin, I think two things. One, you tended to see that turkey hunting exploded in the southeast long before it did elsewhere. Yeah. And the northeast states are just now getting, you know, really heavily hunted populations. They've got a lot of toms. They got a lot of birds out there. And to my buddy Charles's point, maybe they just need to wait because if you keep on down this road, you may see problems.

Now, the good thing about Wisconsin is their season dates are more appropriately timed with the bird. But they also allow you to kill a shitload of them. Yes, and you have other— Says that right in the regs yeah yeah yeah um i don't know what the bag limit specifically is in wisconsin is but in some states like alabama it's five i should tell you it's interesting wisconsin they uh i never thought about how it's interesting until right now and it might be to do with timing out the breeding because they got what a b c d e f seasons right

six six separate weeks a season opening day is very competitive to draw a tag from not especially non-resident you could try for years and not get a very limited hunting pressure by the time you get to c which is three weeks in right yeah then you can pretty much rest assured you'll get your tag drawn right after d you can hunt all the damn seasons right so they're greatly limiting or early they're in some way putting a throttle on how many people are out there pounding them opening day which is what first first second week in April? Whatever the hell it is. Yeah.

Very few people. And then by the time you're into mid-late May, they just open the floodgates. But a lot of people are burned out by then. They already got a turkey. And their assistant game bird coordinator is a former student of mine. She actually studied at Louisiana State University, but I was on her graduate committee, and she has sent those regs. Some of the southern states do something similar to that. Like, Missouri has, when their season opens, you can only kill one bird the first week or so.

South Carolina just changed their regulations to mimic that. They're still opening the first of April, but you can only, theoretically, legally, you're only supposed to kill one bird early. And then, and obviously that's to delay some harvest on into the, you know, the later part of April. Other states are just moving the season, the entire statewide season. I suspect, given the momentum that I've seen in the discussions that I've seen recently, I think most states, at least in the Deep South, are considering trying to entertain discussions about bumping it later, even if that only means days. Yeah, and they'll catch a bunch of grief, too. Absolutely.

Egghead biologists. Yes. absolutely egghead biologists yes hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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Hit them with the other question, Yanni uh back to gobbling because a lot of some of these states you can't hunt afternoon or one or four i mean we've hunted at least three different states i think california was like 4 p.m when we hunted it missouri's noon or one i think where else did we hunt last year it might have been like a one where you had to quit in time pennsylvania's noon first two weeks it used to be all sane man but i don't i don't like it when i'm there but man it keeps you sane right get rest right if not but you're pulling you're on 18 hour days the proponents usually we've talked to like it because they think that it helps the gobbling limits the pressure helps the goblin what are Limits the pressure, helps the gobbling.

What are your thoughts on that? What are they trying to solve? I suspect just pressure. We don't see a lot of gobbling in the afternoon anyway. But I suspect. And when they do, you can't kill them anyway. They're hard to kill at night. I tell you what.

I have nights. But go on. Oh, I mean the last hour a day, you'll hear some gobbling. I get it. Yeah. And you can't help but get all fired up. But if you, like, review your life, there's not a lot of death dealing that happens at 5 p.m. But anyways, go on.

Yeah, see, by 5 p.m., if he's an hour from the tree, he's already, he has an agenda. Yeah. I have had tremendous success killing birds 1, 2, or 3 o'clock in the afternoon. If you can get them to gobble, it's money. I suspect the states. Nah, that's giving me chills, man. That just open later or have that type of season. They're just trying to keep hunters out of the woods and keep the disturbance to a minimum.

I honestly can't answer your question. I don't know if that translates to any change in turkey behavior because, one, the populations we study don't really have that, and two, like I said, very little gobbling happens in the afternoon anyway. So the signal would have to be so strong in our data set for us to be able to detect it because such little gobbling is in that time of day. I'm with you. Right.

There's not that much to disturb anyway. And plus you're saying that there's the daily hunter disturbance is there anyways. Yeah. Of every morning. Yeah. So you'd have to untangle that too. Yeah. And most of our, what we see is most of the gobbling, more than 70%, is either in the tree or within the first hour after they fly down.

So they're gobbling early and shutting up. Has anyone done a study like this to capture this sentiment that I'm going to lay out for you? Like imagine that you put out an electronic caller, the hen call, and you could somehow measure how many gobblers came within some specified distance of that electronic caller. And then you watch that play out over the spring and measure that like as the season wears on our gobblers less meaning do they get do they get harder and harder to call as the season wears

on because they're scared of getting shot or is it some other thing at play if there has been work in that vein i'm not aware of it. Dude, I would be putting that on top of my list of shit to study. I think we see that in a lot of populations anyway because if you go to the east or southeast, you see scouting starts weeks in advance. And I hear horror stories I read on social media all the time you know hey i was out scouting it's a week before the season dude pulled into the cul-de-sac up the road from me

hit the box call five times bird gobbled then he walked in spooked the bird type of thing the flip-flop flasher here's already been out scouting scaring them all up didn't make one call though oh yeah just looking so i think i can see where they're at you you may i i suspect there's some and scaring them all up. Didn't make one call though. Oh, yeah. Just looking. So I think- Looking, seeing where they're at. You may, I suspect there's some truth to the notion that the more we call, because our calling is often associated with some type of disturbance, whether we try for that to occur or not, that the bird realizes through time, that is not a hen.

And even if it is, I'm going to be really cautious. And we see this in some of our data where we track hunters and toms at the same time. So we put GPS units on the toms and then we give the hunters. This is my next question. Yeah. And we actually see birds that show up at the site a hunter was at three, four hours later. So the hunter's already left. He's gone. He or she's already back at the truck and hunter was at three, four hours later. So the hunter's already left. He's gone. He or she's already back at the truck and going to work.

And the tom shows up. Comes sniffing around. At 1 p.m. Oh, that's a question I was going to ask you. Like if you're in the morning calling to a bird and he just like drifts away, is it smart to just sit there? Yes. What we have repeated.

Put science to work. Yeah, we have repeated examples of birds that end up where a hunter was hours later. Hours later. Well, that goes back to what you were talking to Guy about. He talked about how they'll come back hours after. Right, yeah, because he heard you, he marked you, even though he's got like his morning agenda. And then later he's like, oh, but you know what? I'm going to go and check on that one. If you think about it, it makes complete sense. What we're asking these birds to do is against

their ecology. The toms are supposed to stand there and display and the hens are supposed to go to them. Okay. So that is true. That was one of my questions. Absolutely. In nature, the hen should always go to the goblin. Yes. Think about the lek. Back to the lek. Those males stand there and display and the hens come to them. We're asking them to flip that. Okay. So if you think about the tom that wanders off, he's not wandering off. He's going about his business, even if he's not gobbling and he's displaying and he's doing his other things because in his world, she's supposed to seek him out. And then three hours later, he goes, you know what? I haven't scored any opportunities doing the route I was going to take. So I'm going to go over there and covertly kind of check this area out and see if she's still there. And he doesn't need to gobble to do that. All he's got to do is

strut and drum and look. And if he doesn't see her, he hightails it out of there. He moves on. How well do you think he, like spatially, how tight is he thinking? As far as where he thinks she is? Yeah. Turkeys have an incredible sense of place. They know, and this comes from conversations I've had with Bill who imprinted those birds. He would take these birds out and let them forage. And then he woulded those birds. He would take these birds out and let them forage. And then he would take them back. He was the hen. He would take them back to their pen and put them up at night. And when birds would get lost, he put radios on them. So his pet birds, he had radios on them. So he would go find them the next morning

and help them come back home. And what he found is they didn't need any help. So they would take this kind of circuitous route while they were foraging and they'd end up lost, if you will, at night. The next morning, they walked a straight line distance directly back to the pen. Like they knew exactly which path to take because they knew exactly where they were going. And what he likened it to, he said said they have an incredible sense of place they hear they know exactly their mapping system is so acute they know exactly where they think you are or where they're roosted or whatever resources are there and they know exactly how to get there so at any given point in time if that tom decides he's going back to the place where that hunter is he knows exactly exactly where that spot is. Is it safe to say they won't leave their

lek zone to go into another gobbler's territory? Let's say you're hunting and you hear a gobbler on one ridge and then a quarter mile past that, there's a gobble on another ridge. It's giving me the chills. Like, would that second gobbler come into another gobbler zone? If their home range encompasses those other birds, which in some cases they do and in some cases they don't, if their home range didn't encompass those birds, it's very likely they're not going to just go wandering. They're going to stay in their range and continue to signal because that's their range. We do see some toms that make some kind of, you know, weird movements, particularly when hunters bump them or something. But by and large, this is not a bird, this is not an animal that's just going to abandon its home range and start wandering around so i think what's happening is you see like to your point you've got birds here gobbling and

over here gobbling well when this pocket of birds stops gobbling why would the other birds gobble if they don't have to go if there's no gobbling near them yeah what's their incentive to gobble so they're once they do let's say mid-morning start maybe looking for a hen that they heard a little further away and they're just going back to check that area they're only going to do that like with a with that noise that they heard in their zone not only but primarily yeah yeah absolutely talk about what you guys found looking at when you put a gps track and devices on hunters what do hunters do they hang around the roads you don't say they uh they almost all hunter locations we found were within 100 yards of a

road or a path. Yeah, but I mean, like, but in some states, how the hell, I mean, it's hard to get that. And we haven't, that work has all been southeastern, eastern stuff, you know. I mean, it's hard to, there's a lot of roads. There are. And people know they can skirt down this fire break and hear birds, so they stick to the roads, they stick to the paths. And what we found recently with some work is when the season starts, turkeys and hunters do the same thing. So folks start going to places where turkeys are. Because they scouted them out or whatever. And then we see this clear divergence. After a week or so of the season, turkeys are doing one thing and hunters are doing something else. In fact, the turkeys are moving away from hunting pressure.

Into human habitation or into like remote areas? Just into other parts of their range where they're not being disturbed as often. But how do you typify what they like to go toward? Just away from roads. Oh. Just away from roads. Not into subdivisions? Nope.

Just away from roads. And that's not all birds. We see some birds that just hunker down and stick it out. And presumably they just quit gobbling and they just hunker and stay there. But we see this divergence in behavior where by the middle of the season, hunters are doing one thing. They're still sticking to the roads. They're behaving the same as they did two weeks prior. Turkeys have changed their strategy. And then by the end of the season, they come back together because hunters by and large quit towards the end of the season and turkeys realize it because there's not as much pressure. So they go back to doing what they were six weeks earlier. Pretty interesting. Yeah. Definitely pressure sensitive. We got an email.

No, no. I can't remember if it was an article. I think it was an article someone sent us that in this state here in Montana, they've had, I think in the last two years, like 24 requests. You know what I'm talking about? Of citizens demanding GPS tracking data on game animals really and they have little choice but to give it to them they have to give it up and they're so people like hey i want to know where there's a bull elk in such and such area wearing a radio collar right and i apparently apparently the way it works they have to divulge it it's public information sure have you guys had

that no no we have people want to know where your turkeys are. No, we have not. Um, cause you can tell them exactly where they are. We can, we can tell them with certainty. Now we have in the past in the interest of getting data, we have put, I have personally put hunters on birds, trying to see how the birds would respond to hunting pressure when I was putting a really good turkey hunter on them and found some pretty bizarre, crazy things. Like what? Like what? I had this one bird that the youth season opened and I put a kid and a really good guide, a biologist, turkey hunter, really good guide.

He's a killer. Put them two on this bird, gave them the GPS, basically said, put this in your GPS and you're going to be a hundred yards from him when he, when he gobbles. The bird, um, came up to him several times during the morning. They never saw him and he ended up spooking and moving North about a half mile. And then he hung out and he stayed there all week. and then when the general season opened the next weekend i put another hunter on him and the hunter went in knew exactly where the bird was bumped the bird after he flew down the bird saw him he traveled a mile and a

half to the north to no really to an area that was about 200 yards from the check station. And he stayed there for weeks until a guy killed him who was fighting with his wife and took off for the afternoon to get away from home, went to the check station, parked his truck, walked over the levee to just, I'm just going to sit in the woods, didn't call, put his face mask on, was playing on his phone and he hears a bird gobble and he calls him once and he kills him. What were they fighting about? I didn't ask.

Turkey hunting. Probably turkey hunting. Yeah. Yeah. We've, we've seen some pretty, you know, we've seen some pretty bizarre behaviors. Whereas some of these other toms frequently encountered hunters. I'd love to know what they're fighting. And, and they just hunker down. Like we had this, we have this one Tom, I cannot tell you how many hunters he ran into and none of them ever saw him. We'd interview the hunters when they come out of the WMA.

So we had their GPS data. We knew where they were and we knew where the toms were. And we'd interview them and say, how many birds did you hear? How many hunters did you see? You know, et cetera, et cetera. And we had this one gentleman who was right there where the bird was. And he's like, I didn't hear a bird all morning. Didn't see a bird, nothing. And he was literally under this bird all morning. The bird was right there where he was and he never heard the bird yeah but when they're not that's the thing man when they're not calling and not out chasing around they're just they're there they're there that's the thing i always tell myself when you're hunting turkeys in the middle of the day it's like deer you could be in some spot hunting

deer in the middle of the day and be like he is laid up in a briar patch nearby and you're never gonna get like you're not gonna get onto him he's laid up in a briar patch you're not gonna get a shot at him laying there if you try to go in there you're gonna blow him out it's like he's essentially untouchable yep but with turkeys it could be two in the afternoon like that son of a bitch is out right now eating yep loafing. He's out perfectly visible somewhere on his feet. Yep. Unless he sees you first. But I'm saying, but he's not, it's like he's findable. Oh yeah. And what we see a lot of turkeys do during the middle of the day is they don't move much. They forage in the morning and then they settle down into a relatively small area during the

middle of the day and they're just hanging out. And then they pick it back up in the afternoon. So I think a lot of these toms, during the middle of the day when you happen to strike one, is you just happen to end up close enough to him where he was comfortable in that little loafing area. He may periodically get up and feed or strut or whatever, and you just struck gold and hit him. Got him in the right mood. And he's there because he's loafing there because he's comfortable there. So you happen to just by dumb luck get close enough to him where you could strike a cord with him and then you kill him. I think that's a lot of it.

We were in New Mexico. We were coming down that narrow little canyon. We were coming out into sort of where maybe a couple of dranges sort of, I don't know if they came together or were departing each other, but it opened up, you know, into like a flatter zone. They don't depart each other. Well, it depends on what way you're moving up and down and right.

We're going down. Yeah. So another drainage was coming in from our left. It was a big wide open zone. You want to tell them what we were looking at seconds earlier? Yeah. A turkey carcass that we believe was taken out by a cat, some kind of cat. But

somebody had eaten him. Anyways, we were in a narrow drainage canyon-y sort of thing, and so a group of us, five or six probably, were fairly well hidden from this bigger opening. And right when the first two or three of us sort of popped out and you could see a couple hundred yards, not far away, almost within shotgun range, there's a gobbler. And what does he do? Because he thought he had caught us early enough that he just sunk.

I mean, just melted into the ground. Laid his head and neck out on the ground. And I'm just thinking when you're talking about that guy that was right on top of that turkey, if the turkey was on the ground, he very well just could have sunk into the ground and just laid there for two hours. How big is a turkey's home range? Several thousand acres in the east, southeast, as you move in the western states much bigger the and in fact like merriam's have and rio's to a lesser extent they have fairly large ranges that can change by season so you'll see you know birds that disappear from areas in the winter and then show back up in the spring i was going to ask you about migrations as well yeah because i feel that here they migrate

absolutely they follow the snow line. They do, and they have much broader ranges. But if you think like, you know, easterns are forest species, and the forests don't change that much from year to year. So they tend to have several thousand acre home ranges if you encompass the entire year. How many trees, take your average gobbler, how many trees does he have that he will roost in and does he have well he just add randomly add trees to that list or does he like got like i roost there there there there and there and that's where i roost each bird has roosting areas that they go to

they don't necessarily use the same tree every time they go there, at least Easterns. Rios and Merriams, obviously, roost are limited in some of those populations, so they go back to the exact same tree, but Easterns don't do that. We see that almost every gobbler has a handful or more range areas that they use, but they don't use them back-to-back nights during the spring. They tend to use a roost site here, and then they move to a different roost that night, and then they move to a different roost the following night. But other birds will come to the roost that they abandon. Oh, that explains a little bit.

Because I read in Colorado they did a study, and there's only a 13% chance that a turkey roosts these gobblers. There's only a 13% chance that he'd roost in the same tree two nights in a row. That's right. And if you think about it, back to these leks, they're very likely are places that are good for sound, for sound to travel. And they're somewhat static unless there's clear cutting or something that changes the force. They're probably fairly static. So there are certain places where I hear this all the time i've been hearing turkeys there for 20 years

yep you have and you didn't hear the same birds night after night what you actually heard was the this bird moved and his buddy came in and roosted in that same area because these birds know there's certain places where sound carries and that's why they're gobbling they're gobbling to hear each other and to attract hens so there's probably some places that are just good roost areas yeah so what do you think the odds are that uh on monday i went out season wasn't open or or let's just say you know it was evening and I went out and roosted a bird, heard him on a ridge, but I couldn't hunt for two or three days.

I go back in there three days later in the morning on that same ridge, there he is, gobbling. What are the odds that that's the same bird I roosted three nights earlier? If it was three nights later, there's a decent chance it may be the same bird. If it was the next night, there's a better chance it's not. There's a better chance it may be the same bird. If it was the next night, there's a better chance it's not. There's a better chance that he's somewhere else than him being there two nights in a row.

Now, turkeys are like people, and they're like deer and everything else. They're all different. Sure. So we do, we've had some toms that, man, they were money going back to the same spot every night for three or four nights in a row. Sneaky Pete. But by and large, across the population, that's not a strategy they use. And which is, what's interesting is if they don't do that from the time they're poults. I mean, brood hens don't roost in the same spot two nights in a

row. They move roost every night. And if you think about it, that makes sense from a predation standpoint. Don't go signal in the same spot every night because you're just attracting undue attention. Move around a little bit and don't pigeonhole yourself to the same place. You know, like rios have to do that. They have limited roost sites and there may be four or five trees in an entire home range that are roost locations and they go back there every night. But rios roost in large numbers and in large numbers there's safety there's more eyes there's more ears there's more predator detection you got an eastern that's standing there with him and his buddy is right down the ridge and there it's just two of

them just so people who aren't familiar rios have limited roosting because they're riparian they're limited to riparian areas. That's right. They could be surrounded by a big arid area with no trees. Yes. And you're seeing across the Rio range, you know, cottonwoods are really important tree species for them. And in many areas, you're seeing widespread loss of cottonwoods to disease issues and that's causing a drastic reduction in roost availability to the point where some of our rios only have we have several marked birds that have

only had two roost in their entire home range no kidding so you flip a coin they're going to be at one of those two clumps of cottonwoods every night you know you're talking about having a great tree where people can hear you um you see that with blue grouse in alaska yeah when you can you can hunt them in the spring when they're calling right and you go and find them and sometimes they'll be like you got like a big main ridge and there's a finger ridge coming off it and that finger ridge would have kind of a hump that sticks out and it'd be some giant tree leaning out over that thing and then he's up in that thing and he's just broadcasting to the world man you know he's just like hanging out looking out over everything you know and you get up there and be like I bet you he's got to be in that tree right and he's

in just some crazy tree where he's like like got a megaphone up there yeah that's interesting that is the one other bird than big game bird that you can hunt during this spring that's right but it's limited in scope very limited it's only a few weeks and i suspect how many are harvested during the spring i don't i think that it's we were it's a it's a tough hunt and it's like it's like everything like everything's at a 45 degree angle it's yeah we took like a 45 minute boat ride to go to a remote island to hunt them. I don't think there's a ton of pressure. I wouldn't think so. But, man, it's great.

If I could do that or hunt turkeys, I'd have a hard time deciding. I've never hunted the blue grouse, but I'd try it for sure. It's fun, man. But you've got to go with our friend Barb. Whatever. She'll show you what's up. If not, you you pull your hair out i could i could see that be very being very frustrating just thinking about what you just

said steep inclines a lot of work and then it doesn't pay off well kind of like the thing being that like when you hear a turkey guy when you start getting close you kind of be like well he must be right over there these things the sound the sound, the noise they make, which is – you can't place it. Oh, so it breaks down in the environment. You're just like, I don't know, man. Somewhere within 100 yards of me, there's a bird doing that noise. I don't know what direction.

Yeah. That would make sense, yeah. It's tough. It's more like – it's like you kind of feel it yeah like you can't tell if you're hearing it or feeling it like a drum it's a weird you kind of know he's drumming over in that area but when he pops out it is like a rough grouse drum the drumming is a little different from where you thought it was i had it right there and in reality it's right over there yeah you can basically be like within a, I can tell you within about 180 degrees where he is.

Yeah, yeah. What else we got, Yanni? I just want to follow up a little bit more on the predator populations. Like outside of low fur prices, what else is causing the big boom? We see snakes are a huge predator of eggs and poults. And I don't remember seeing that when I was a student. If you look at many areas of the United States, particularly that, you know, where I do most of my work, it's become brushier, shrubbier, woodier, less prescribed fire, less land disturbance, pine monoculture, edges, fragmentation, and snakes benefit from that. So we see snakes account for 40% of nest loss on some of our sites.

Yeah. Eating the eggs? Yes, rat snakes. And they kill the poults. And a friend of mine who's a herp guy at UGA has told me that rat snakes are – Snake prices are down. Yeah. He said that rat snakes are really savvy sage predators that they tend to revisit nest.

So if they go and they eat three or four eggs in this area, they'll go back and keep searching and keep searching and keep searching until they get all the eggs. Really? Yeah. So if you think about it, even if she's laying, right, if she hasn't finished the clutch and the snake shows up and picks all four, that snake's going back to that clutch before it's over, all said and done. Yeah. The Old Testament was right, man. Yeah. And John was telling me, this buddy of mine, he was like, man, if the eggs are there, they're going to find them. How do you think they're finding them? From smell?

Keen sense of smell as a snake has it. They also are visual predators. They sit in shrub mid-story, under-story, and they watch. Really? And there's – They got some type of long-range vision. Some type of vision that they know something is there. And I think probably what's happening is as these birds are leaving their clutches for recesses, right, they're moving away and back and forth, that through time, the snake keys in on that nest site and it doesn't take that many days. And if there are numerically more of these snakes than there were, that just through the law of averages, more nests are going to be eaten.

So to your question, that snakes are an important predator by far. And there's more of them because the habitat is good for them right now. Yes. Basically what we've done is create a landscape that's better for predators than turkeys, basically, in many areas. Here's my last question for you. Why do, why do turkey,

when you shoot a turkey, sometimes his buddies beat the hell out of him. Yep. How is their desire to get each other when they're down higher than their desire to like get away from a loud, sudden gunshot? Like what is it in them that's so keyed up to wait for a moment of weakness? That's their social hierarchy. That's that pecking order where turkeys, I've been told turkeys, they fight from the time they're young and they never forget a grudge.

They carry a grudge their entire lives. So they're around these other birds that have beaten them. Just looking at them out of the corner of their eyes. And when you shoot that bird, he is suddenly vulnerable, even if you're the dominant. But they make that decision so fast. Because this is what structures their populations. These social hierarchies start from day one of hatching. And this is the ladder.

That ladder has dictated their entire lives. So when that ladder, when one of those steps gets broken, the guy that's under, that's the step below, immediately sees that as a sign of weakness and he is going to attack that bird that's socially above him and win

so that he can move up a step. Would he kill it if he could? Well, they don't really kill each other. They just beat the hell out of each other. But you never see one actually get like, let's say they're in a fight and he gets or whatever a bird gets weakened by something will they ever harass it to the point of killing it oh yeah well they they will they will they will injure each other to the point where they can suffer mortalities from it because then it's just

it just compounds and gets worse and worse yeah they spur each other they cut each other they if they get injuries the other birds peck at those injuries if it's on the head so you kind of have to isolate birds that are injured if they're in captivity because they'll they'll hurt each other got you so when these toms see the other their buddy on the ground that's an opportunity to move up in the pecking order that's what they're doing and they're able to make that call like that instantaneous because that that pecking order has structured their life from the time that they were little so So that's all they've known. See, I'd like to think that if something happened to me, Yanni wouldn't just instantaneously be like that.

I've seen him looking at you funny out there. Like, I trip and he just jumps out and he starts beating the hell out of me. I'm like, Seth, Seth, I know you know how to do that tourniquet, but you don't need to do it that tight. Not that tight. Put it around his neck. We never got back to Shot Goblin. We got to have him back. Oh.

We didn't get to Turkey Tuesday either. Oh, no, we're going to do that. Okay. Tell people about Turkey Tuesday. I like Turkey Tuesday. Yeah, Turkey Tuesday started. I go check it out by slant. I got to click the follow button.

Please do. That would help. Yeah, just open up Instagram. Yeah, so it's at Wild Turkey Doc on Twitter follow button. Please do. That would help. Yeah, I just opened up Instagram. Yeah, so it's at Wild Turkey Doc on Twitter and Instagram. Like doctor. Wild. Wild Turkey Doc. There you are.

Wild Turkey Doc, Mike Chamberlain. I'm opening the page up. Yeah, so every Tuesday I post some science. I like it already because I'm seeing like diagrams and charts. Yep, yep. Not a lot of grip and grins yet. No grip and grins. Not yet yep that's my lot of grip and grins yeah no grip and grins not yet that's my way there's a duck grip and grin that's my way of putting a little bit of science out to people who may not see it and in a digestible way where they can appreciate why we do research and

what it means oh here's a's a diagram, just for instance. It's a chart showing prescribed burns. Yes. How the scale of fires affects turkeys. Yep, yep. And some modeling work. That came about to a point you made earlier. Former student, works as a state agency biologist.

He posts on Facebook Facebook and he absolutely gets chewed alive. And it really made me mad because he couldn't respond. And I said, right then, I was like, you know what? Every week I'm going to put something out there because I can respond. I have academic freedom and I can, I can go back and forth. And it was so clear to me when Jeremy, who's the turkey coordinator in Arkansas, when he made that post, he couldn't respond to people that were criticizing him because they were misinformed. And right there, I said, you know what? I don't get paid to do this, to post on social media. I don't get credit for it per se. But I'm going to do this because this is a

forum where people can digest what I do. Now, if I can just take the ability to give it to them in an easily digestible way where they can appreciate what research is being done and why it's important to them, then every week I'm going to post something and I'm going to get as much momentum started as I can so that people understand the issues facing this bird. And it's, it's been great. I mean, it started, as you can imagine, it started slow, but recently it's really exploded. And it's awesome because I get people that, that don't see academic work. They have no idea that I even exist. They don't, they don't know what I'm doing. They I've been studying this bird for 25 years. They have no idea that I even exist. They don't, they don't know what I'm doing. They I've been studying this bird for 25 years. They have no idea who I am. They don't know the research

that's ongoing, but when they see those posts, they suddenly realized that there's something being done that I can relate to. And I think is, is relevant to me as a hunter and a land manager. So I'm going to follow it. And if every post is not to their liking, fine. But I also respond to the naysayers, people that are critical of me or the work. I try to go back and revisit those posts and try to help explain to people that may not understand the science and what we're doing, why it's important to them. I'm looking at your March 3rd post right now, and it's a map. It's a satellite photograph of an area that's 16 square miles,

and on it are 6,100 yellow dots. All GPS locations. Where a hen turkey hangs out. Yep. So she's using 16 square miles, but the dots show of that where she likes to be. Yes. Think about that mouse. And there's big areas where she doesn't do shit.

She never goes there. And there's big areas where she really, really likes it. Yep. She has to maintain a 16-square-mile home range to be able to find those pockets. That's a problem. That bird should only maintain a couple of square miles. Back 25 years ago ago we didn't see 16 square mile home ranges the only reason a bird that scaled to be the size of a turkey

would move 16 square miles is because they have to doesn't have what she needs exactly so she's trying to balance energy intake with energy loss and it takes her 16 square miles to do that to me that's a habitat problem. That's something that I think most people would look at that map that Steve's looking at and think, wait a minute, if he's telling us that is, I mean, if you think 16 square miles, that's a huge area. If a turkey's using that and I only own 500 acres, that bird's disappearing from my land for weeks or months on end. And I, whatever i'm doing is not benefiting this bird because they're not even on my property anymore right you know it speaks to the need that we need

to cooperate we need to we need to think bigger about how we're managing habitat for this bird that was kind of the reason for that that four hours ago you posted uh a chart that shows gobbling activity and barometric pressure correlated to barometric pressure yes yeah so all shows gobbling activity. And barometric pressure, yeah. Correlated to barometric pressure. Yes. Yeah, so all the gobbling research done previous to this used people to record gobbles. So their data sets had like 500 gobbles. That has 170,000. Seriously?

And we relate it to weather variables, and we see like that figure shows that if you on on any given day if you have an average barometric pressure whatever the average is that day if the barometric pressure starts rising 0.03 inches right or 0.3 inches you see this market increase in gobbling activity and conversely if the pressure is declining you might as well stay in bed right because really and if this is going to create like a bunch of be hard this is going to create a bunch of Mark Kenyon type turkey hunters man that's it you know this next year Tuesday the third looks like a good rising barometer what's uh so what's that you know you always hear people i heard 500 gobbles

this morning heard that it was a thousand gobble morning what in reality since you know i'm in off of one sensor how far can you hear how several several hundred yards all the way around what's the most gobbles one of those things ever logged in a day? A couple hundred. Okay. Yeah. That's it. Yeah, because, I mean, if you think gobble, gobble, gobble. That's it. Fly down, and then they're moving away from the song meter. Yeah. Oh, okay, so you think you're not picking up a lot of the stuff he does on the ground because he moves away.

Some of them do. I just think that sometimes I've sat there under a bird in a tree, and you think he gobbles 100 times before he flies down? When you start actually counting that, you don't get anywhere close to 100. I've done the same thing. I've sat there and thought, man, he is gobbling his head off. 18, 19, 20, and he flies down. It was like 34. And I would have texted my buddy and said, he gobbled 250 times. It was 34, right? Well, it felt like 250. like i'm gonna do a better job of counting yeah in your uh 25 years of research what's the most like surprising thing you've learned about wild

turkeys the most surprising thing cook them drumsticks long enough they're good yeah they're good um i would say without question the things that I've published that were false, that's been the biggest surprise. Like I published a paper years ago saying that hens went out and searched for nest sites, right? They went and looked for these really good nest sites because a lot of people had found the same thing. And in reality, we see now they don't do any of that.

They don't, they literally fly down the day they're going to lay the first egg and they go find a spot to nest. They don't visit these sites days in advance or weeks in advance. They don't go pick this perfect spot like I thought they used to. So I've actually found that my own science was garbage, that that work was flawed and it was flawed because of technology. We just didn't have the technology that we had so we were inferring things that were inaccurate it's good that you're comfortable um admitting that moving on and not doubling down on it i don't because that's what science is about yeah you can't admit your own errors and flaws then you shouldn't be in the academic world that's why my father liked to discount all science is because story would change. Yeah, yeah. So if the story changed, he just was like, ah, screw the whole thing. Yesterday it was this, and today it's this.

So therefore, I'll just live in a factless world rather than just sort of embracing the process. If somebody comes along 20 years from now and proves me wrong, then I would welcome that because that meant that somebody cared enough to go revisit those questions for the resource. He'd be like, these people change their minds all the time. They're wishy-washy. If Mike is wrong in his assertions, then he was wrong.

But at least science is moving forward. Yeah. Seth, that was Brody's concluder. What do you say to people that say turkeys are dumb animals? They can do some stupid things you understand they have a brain that's quite small in their environment they're incredibly savvy until it's time to breed uh and then they can do some toms can do some stupid things as we all know yeah but by and large i mean this is a bird that in its own environment is quite intelligent

in the breeding season all bets are off so that's kind of what even though even like what you just said it uh sounds like they smarten up to their the pressure during during the breeding season during the hunting season if they didn't we wouldn't have many. I mean, they obviously become more wise. Yeah, adaptable. Absolutely. Absolutely. Dr. Michael Chamberlain. C-H-A-M-B-E-R-L-A-I-N.

Found it on Instagram. Wild Turkey Doc. Twitter too. On Facebook. Oh, is that right? Yeah. On Twitter, it's the same handle. And on Facebook, it's just my name. Yeah. I'm an Instagram man. Twitter too. On Facebook. Oh, is that right? Yeah. On Twitter, it's the same handle. And on Facebook, it's just my name. Yeah. Yeah. I'm an Instagram man.

Me too. But I'd... You know why? Because people don't get all keyed up on politics. Facebook, they get all riled up. Well, it's a different demographic. They get on Facebook and they're like, Hillary Clinton. You tend to get...

And then they go over to some hunting thing and they're pissed. Yeah. It's a different demographic. Yeah. For sure. Instagram, they're just like, oh, what's going on? Oh, it's cool. Yeah.

You catch them in a different mood. Yeah. If somebody gets cranky and fussy at me, it's usually on Facebook. Almost always. It's never on Twitter. Oh, because they're already riled up. Or Instagram. Yeah.

They were mad before they ever logged on. Donald. Yeah. What's this guy, Turkey? He thinks he knows about turkeys. Yeah. I've been hunting turkeys my whole life. What you're saying is garbage.

I get that. Yeah, I'm sure. It's okay. All right. I followed you. I had looked previously, but now I follow. Awesome. Thank you.

Thanks, Mike. That was great. Thank you. All right, buddy. Go follow him on Instagram. Let's smoke his number up. Oh, also, we got to present with our t-shirt. So here's our t-shirt. So, here's our

t-shirt. It says it's a circle and inside the circle is a turkey and the circle says, Meat Eater. Sounds that make a turkey gobble. And then within the turkey is filled in with things that make a sampling. Ice cream trucks.

Sonic booms. Cattle guards. Antlers rattling. Revving motorcycles. The calls of a loon, monastery bells. These are all user sourced. Shotgun blasts, rumble strips, loosening lug nuts, artillery fire, ambulance sirens, dropping anchors, the braids of a jackass, kicking rusty hunks of metal, the calls of a peacock, woodpeckers hammering on trees, squeaky door hinges, dry heaves, rocks thrown at stop signs, train whistles, dog whistles, elk bugles, coyote hauls, helicopters, and thunder. The dry heaves. But we only just scratched the surface. We got a list to curl your hair. I'll wear it with pride.

Here's your t-shirt. I'll wear it with pride, knowing that whoever came up with the dry heaves example, that had to be a hell of a story. Three people. Really? Wrote in about puking and getting rips from it. I'm not going to try that. Three people. By design.

By design, anyway. Yeah. Yeah. We're too old for that. Well, I appreciate you. I laid off the puking considerably, man. I just feel like a real part of life. Been there. Been there. I appreciate the opportunity I appreciate you. I laid it off the puke and considered it, man. I just feel like a real part of life. Been there.

Been there. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. All right. Thank you. Yep. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

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