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John's Journal... Entry 86, Day 5

How Fast Turkey Populations Grow

click to enlargeEDITOR'S NOTE: For more than 43 years, Dr. Dan Speake has researched wildlife. He has studied turkeys for almost four decades, beginning his love affair with the wild turkey in 1966. Retired as the leader of the Cooperative Research Unit at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, he now teaches at Auburn University. A very knowledgeable researcher and turkey hunter, Speake tells us about some of his findings that have increased everyone's knowledge of wild turkeys and helped to expand the population of the wild turkey.

One of the first studies Auburn performed for Alabama's Department of Conservation determined how many birds should be released in an area and how quickly the population would build to sustain a huntable population. At that time, the state would release about 20 turkeys at a time, five or six of them gobblers and the rest hens.

click to enlargeWe designated a part of a county that hadn't homed wild turkeys for several years in the east/central section of Alabama as our study site. Auburn University released 28 turkeys there in 1965 and used radio telemetry to track them. We studied the birds for eight years, including the first three turkey-hunting seasons in the region. We measured the increase in the turkey population and the turkeys' mortality rate. We recaptured turkeys twice a year, marked them and kept up with the number of marked turkeys and unmarked turkeys. From these figures, we evaluated population density and growth.

We learned that five years appeared to be the best time period to allow turkey populations to build before sportsmen were allowed to hunt the birds there. By that time, hunting seemed to have no detrimental effect on turkey populations. After the initial 28-bird release, the flock increased to almost 200 birds, an extremely good growth rate for any wild population in only five or six years. Today, I only have to go 15 minutes from my home in that county to hunt the plentiful wild turkeys there.

click to enlargeThe biggest surprise through all our research was the dramatic effect that fur bearers had on turkey populations. One of the studies where we learned a tremendous amount of information was conducted in west Alabama for five years where we designated two areas, each with 11,000 acres. On one study region, we eliminated fur bearers and kept good records on the hen and poult sites. On the control site, we did no predator control and observed the hen and poult sites.

We compared the hen and poult ratio at each location. At the end of five years, our study indicated that three times as many poults were produced on the area with predator control as on the one with no predator control. Each year when we did predator control, we removed about the same number of predators as we had the year before. The last year, we removed more predators than we did the first year of the study. From this research, we realized one of the best ways to produce more turkeys on large tracts of land was to intensively trap that land during January and February before the spring turkey nesting season.

If you can reduce the number of predators during the time the hens are on their nests and the first two weeks the poults are hatched, you're past the critical time when predation has a dramatic impact on the turkey population. We've learned that after the poults are two weeks old, they're much less susceptible to predators because they can fly up to roost.

click to enlargeWe soon realized no one could eliminate all the predators from the lands he hunted because each year we had about the same number of predators as the year before. However, if we reduced the number of predators during the turkeys' nesting and brood-rearing period, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of turkeys the land produced.

To learn more about hunting turkeys, go back to Night Hawk's home page, and click on books. You'll find information there on three turkey-hunting books written by John E. Phillips that contain interviews with some of the nation's top turkey hunters. Then call (800) 627-4295 to receive a brochure or to order a book.

 

 

 

Check back each day this week for more about What I've Learned In Almost Four Decades Of Studying Turkeys ...

Day 1 -Speake's Turkey Research in the Early Years
Day 2 -Why Turkeys Vanish
Day 3 -Where Turkeys Live
Day 4 -What Hunting Pressure Does to Turkeys
Day 5 -How Fast Turkey Populations Grow

John's Journal