Turkey Management Q&A with Dr. Will Gulsby

Join the guys and Dr. Will Gulsby for a fast paced discussion on various turkey management topics. Key topics include determining ideal management unit sizes, quantifying population responses to habitat work, establishing sustainable harvest rates for your property, and more.

Transcript

Intro & Guest Welcome

Moriah Boggess 0:02

Welcome to Wildlife Investments, where we discuss wildlife research, habitat, hunting, and land management with our panel of leading resource managers. Wildlife Investments. Resource management by scientists.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 0:22

Okay, welcome back. Today we are joined by Will Gulsby, Moriah Bogas, and Bonner Powell. And we're gonna have a a diverse conversation. So of course we're talking about Turkey, but we're gonna talk about ecology, we're gonna talk about management, we're also gonna talk about uh hunting and and hunt setup and things like that. So it ought to be a good conversation. I've I've

Roadside Management: When Does a Corridor Become a Trap?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 0:46

got a question, Will. And this this is gonna be somewhat theoretical, but I like theoretical stuff. You know, trying to work it out in my my brain. We talk about roadsides and how they can be beneficial, maybe not perfect, yeah, but how the addition of that management can be perfect for linking up different patches and so forth. Have you ever had a situation where you advise someone maybe not to do that because the width of the linear strip was too narrow?

Will Gulsby 1:22

Yeah.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:23

Is that ever a consideration for you?

Will Gulsby 1:25

Yeah, when I don't I don't like it when it turns into like a dense funnel with no readily accessible escape cover to either side. And I get asked this question a lot. I I guess Bronson, are you thinking about turning that into a potential trap?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:42

That's precisely what I was thinking.

Will Gulsby 1:44

Yeah, so I get asked this a lot. Marcus and I do both. And even when we have done these turkey habitat workshops the past couple years, we get that question when we start talking about roadside management. I do not like to have a corridor that is managed in a way to attract turkeys if I have dense woody cover on both sides and it's relatively narrow. So I'm thinking about, you know, your typical road through, let's say, a 10-year-old Loblolly pine plantation, or like even if it's a natural regenerating hardwood stand, you know, that's been clear-cut and it's you know, 10, 15 years old. I don't like that situation. That is dependent on scale. So if it's a relatively short section through there and then on either side it opens up, then I think you know, it it's probably a better situation, less likely to become a trap. But what's even better when I like when I manage those roadsides, what I like to do a lot of times is I like to feather the edge down into the woods. You know, most of the time our roads are going to be on our ridges and our higher areas of the property. So if I have my roadsides totally open, and then I have my woods thinned pretty aggressively on both sides for maybe, you know, whatever it is context dependent, but you know, maybe I have them at least like 25 yards, they're fairly open, and then the next 25 yards they go to more like a woodland structure, and then down in the bottom they turn back into a forest. I'm comfortable with that because it doesn't turn as into as much of an ambush site, right? So Turkey can go forward, backwards, side to side, and still be okay.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 3:25

I like what you did there, Will. You provided conditions and context without saying it depends. Yeah. That answer isn't very helpful. Yeah.

Will Gulsby 3:36

Say what it depends on.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 3:38

Yeah. So, Will, what are you in favor of sticking with roadside? Are you in favor of making those a food plot as well? Or would you like to remove the clover and the cereal grains from that situation?

Food Plots on Roadsides: Attraction Tool vs. Brooding Cover Priority

Will Gulsby 3:54

It depends.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 3:55

There you go. Got it out of them.

Will Gulsby 3:58

So on tracks that I work on where they have extensively daylighted roadsides, I usually incorporate some food plots. And what I specifically think about in that context is, and I know one of the things that we thought about discussing today was huntability. But, you know, let's just say we have a mile-long stretch of daylighted road on both sides. We've got 30 to 60 feet, you know, relatively wide open corridor. I'll oftentimes look for like a bend in the road, and I'll put my food plot back behind that bend from the direction I would typically be approaching when I'd be hunting. So that way I can kind of come around and I can get relatively close to those turkeys, get in the gobbler's bubble if I hear him gobbling out there, or if I can peek around that corner with my binoculars and spot him out there, I can set up and start calling, and I'm already close enough that I'm likely to get a response and actually draw him out of that field. So in those scenarios, I kind of let the soil dictate what we plant there. I use a lot of clover. You know, if it's gonna, if it's a relatively upland high dry site in the south, it's probably gonna be crimson clover that I'll recommend. And I'll even sometimes go at a relatively low to moderate rate of that. I don't think you even necessarily have to mix in a cereal grain with it for this purpose. But if it tends to be an area that's a little shadier with a little bit better soil moisture and and fertility, I'll go with like a perennial clover, like a just a Ladino variety. But I like to mix those in periodically on places that that already do have what I would consider an adequate amount of brooding cover. Now, if they're limited in that regard, I'm gonna focus my management more towards native grasses and forbs for that brooding cover. But if they already have that box checked, that's when we can start putting in some little features like that that I think improve the huntability.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 5:49

Yeah, that's that's that's that's pretty cool, your logic there. Yeah, so sometimes what I struggle with is and and this of course is context dependent as well, but making that roadside a food plot, I'm thinking of it, of course, from a the the effort and the the money for for the seed. And then depending on the width of the strip and the forest cover type adjacent to it, are you gonna get enough forage production out of that to justify it?

Will Gulsby 6:20

Yeah.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 6:21

So I know there have been cases where I thought, just go ahead and disc it.

Will Gulsby 6:25

Yeah.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 6:26

But let's not put any food plot seed because you're not gonna get enough biomass production out of it anyway.

Will Gulsby 6:30

Yeah. Yeah, not to not to affect individual quality or or population parameters. So I'm purely looking at those as an attraction tool. And a lot of times, what a lot of the landowners I work with do to get those planted is when they're just planting their fall food plots, especially if they're gonna put them in a crimson clover or cereal grain or something like that, I'll just tell them like have your little section, and and when you go plant your food plots as you go past this one side of the road, just you know, drop your seed drill or you know, open your broadcaster up. And it doesn't have to be perfect. We're just looking at attraction, and the only reason I really do that is A, the attraction aspect, and B, I like to have some areas of relatively low vegetation that gobblers are going to like to strut in in the spring, you know, because a lot of times these native grass forb communities are relatively high, and even if the birds do get out there, they're hard to see. And I'll do that same thing in my larger field complexes too. So like if I have, if I'm working with a landowner that has, you know, let's just say like an eight plus acre field that they're trying to manage for turkeys, I've divided them up several ways, but I mean you could almost just put like a like a cross through the middle of that field and have that cross be planted. It serves a dual purpose as like your fire breaks if you're managing some of those blocks of native with fire, but then they also turn into you know lanes for them to strut down to. Good place to hunt too. I had I had one of those places or deer hunt. I had one of those places on a friend of mine's property that he doesn't really deer hunt, so it kind of turned turned into my deer hunting property uh this fall, and we had one of those nesting patches right next to this nice clover cereal grain food plot, and the deer just poured out of that into the food plot.

Bonner Powell 8:20

A lot of times, Will, I'm working on a lot flatter ground than you, you know, a lot of times. So, you know, we've got bottoms that that have roads through them and things, and daylighting those roads mainly helps with, you know, keeping the road nice, helping it get dried out, absolutely, but also managing those roadsides for turkeys. A lot of times you can almost be bop around and rotate food plots through there kind of as like a disking, a disking management tool to kind of promote those herbaceous plant, those forb dominated herbaceous plant communities in different sections.

Will Gulsby 8:53

Yeah.

Bonner Powell 8:53

Uh, you know, and they're gonna deer hunt them in the fall as well, yeah. Kind of like you you had mentioned, but really moving those around and then you kind of can diversify. You've got an area that's been disked in the fall that's now, you know, going fallow after the crimson kind of goes away in you know, first of first of to mid of April, depending on where you're at. And then you've got something that was burned last year, something that was burned this year, you know, maybe across the road, and you can really kind of set it up nice where there's you know three or four different vegetation types kind of right there in a in a pretty tight area, you know, depending on you know, linear uh on linear strips, you know, that are a couple hundred yards long, maybe.

Will Gulsby 9:34

Yeah, I think those are good points, Bonner, and I'm glad you brought that up too, because I have some places that kind of fit that description that I work on in West Alabama. And if we're gonna daylight the road all the way through those those areas and and especially the ones that tend to stay a little wetter, I tend to prioritize those areas for my food plots versus trying to manage them for native early succession because a lot of times, like even when you do that, you know how it is you just get a bunch of like bushy blue stem and sedge and and all kinds of stuff like it's and gosh, why am I blanking right now? Rushes, you know, you get a bunch of rushes coming up in there, even if you keep it disturbed. And I mean good cover value, but not really any food value. So I I get what you're saying on that.

What Drives the Biggest Turkey Population Response

Dr. Bronson Strickland 10:21

So, Will, this is something we've been talking a lot on turkey focused properties where you're seeing the the biggest return. And so when you get to a property like, yeah, everything's working great, and you look around and go, Yeah, I I I see why.

Will Gulsby 10:37

Yeah. What I have noticed the biggest change from is, you know, especially when you go in and they've already they have a lot of dense woods and they get some thinning in there and then they start burning, it's like immediately their population triples or even increases fivefold. Like sometimes a lot of times over the course of a season, assuming they have, you know, a decent source population around them.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 11:05

What would you say? You know, you're generalizing here, I know. Would that be as little as fifty acres of treatment? Is that a hundred acres? Hundreds of acres?

Will Gulsby 11:19

No, I think you know, some of the on some of those places it's been just a few dozen acres that are starting to implement that. Yeah. Especially, like I said, especially on places that do not have a lot of openings and they have a lot of closed woods, they just I mean it's a magnet when they start opening them up and burning.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 11:38

Okay. And would the would the first response you see be an increase in nesting? And so you you might initially get more in in year one colonization because of nesting cover. And then after that, with successful development of brooding cover, then you start seeing numbers increase from there.

Will Gulsby 12:02

Yes. Yeah, I think initially you get that influx just from immigration, right? So you now have reproductive cover, which is what turkeys are going to be drawn to during the spring hunting season. And then I think, you know, longer term, you start to see those benefits of that investment in terms of increased nest success and brood success. And probably survival too. Yeah, we shouldn't forget that. I mean, Marcus and I on Turkey Science have been talking a lot about the importance of female survival based on that recent paper that we published, you know, showing that there's a lot of these areas nowadays that only have 40 to 50 percent hen survival, and most of those hens are dying on the nest or they're dying when they're breeding those pults. So having good cover for them to be in while they're participating in those activities is going to benefit hen survival as well. And so we not only get that benefit in the current year of increased reproduction, but it's really exponential growth because year over year you're retaining more of those hens and it starts to turn more into like an exponential growth rate, like we see with deer populations.

Bonner Powell 13:07

It's kind of like a positive feedback loop, like you're attracting more hens and more hens are surviving, and you're attracting more hens.

unknown 13:15

Yeah.

Will Gulsby 13:15

It is. And and not only am I seeing on those places that the

Density Dependence, Gobbling Activity & Why Turkeys Don't Gobble Like They Used To

Will Gulsby 13:21

overall population of birds is increasing, which of course you would expect would increase hunter satisfaction. But in addition to that, I think that as the gobbler population grows, those gobblers, and we and we've seen this, we've demonstrated it with quail, and I think turkeys are the same way. The more those males call, the more it stimulates the other males to call. And so you just get a lot more gobbling activity. And that's something that I hear a lot of folks complaining about these days is birds don't just don't just don't gobble as well as they used to. And I think you know, some of that is a numerical response, right? We just don't have as many of them as we did, you know, say in the early 2000s. But I think part of it too is when you get below a certain threshold, they're just not stimulating each other as much. So if we get back to the that moderate to moderate high density population, it it benefits the hunting experience as well in that regard.

Moriah Boggess 14:11

So, Will, do we need to go out and start just gobbling in the woods all the time? Make the other ones gobble.

Will Gulsby 14:17

Well, I mean, you think about it, that's what we do with locator calls, right? You know, we're stimulating them. And a lot of those locator calls that we use, you know, whether it's an owl or a crow or something else, it's because the reason it works and elicits that shot shot gobble is that that sound is in that same frequency band is a gobble. And so it stimulates that that behavior.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 14:39

But you don't have to worry about habit habitat degradation and kill a bunch of hens like we do on the on the deer side with that potential population growth.

Will Gulsby 14:49

That's a that's a nice that's a nice aspect of managing turkeys, is you don't have to worry about that female harvest that turns into work.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 14:57

The whole density dependence thing that is interesting. I think uh I know y'all have talked about that on on the Turkey Science podcast before. Did y'all talk about that with McConnell, maybe?

Will Gulsby 15:06

We did. We talked about that with several different folks, and just as kind of a really brief recap on that, in most states we saw populations peak about 20 years after restocking, and it's very consistent. And and and so not all states restocked at the same time, so it tends to be the case that states that finish restocking later have experienced peaks in populations later. And then along with that, you see some changes in vital rates that happen after that peak that would be consistent with a density-dependent response. So that was, you know, that was something that I think it was published now nine years ago. I think it was in 2017 by Byrne and Chamberlain, and they showed that they showed that trend for like I think it was a dozen or thirteen states, something along those lines. But that work really hasn't been revisited by then or since then, but I thought it was a really interesting pattern.

Bonner Powell 16:06

Yeah, we see it in counties in Mississippi, you know, like counties that were stocked later typically have more turkeys than counties that were stocked earlier.

Will Gulsby 16:15

Yeah, Adam Butler mentioned that when we interviewed him a couple of years ago.

Moriah Boggess 16:20

Do do you expect an oscillation when you drop off there to be up and down similar to you know what we see in other populations?

Will Gulsby 16:28

I think it would, yeah, I think it's eventually gonna stabilize around some kind of steady state, you know, and and just kind of fluctuate around that carrying capacity, kind of like a sine wave. But as opposed to deer, I think that you're gonna get a lot more oscillation, like the the amplitude of those waves is gonna be greater than it would be for a deer population because you know deer reproduction is so relatively consistent from year to year, whereas turkeys are much more environmentally dependent and they have a lot more variability in annual reproduction from one year to the

Environmental Factors in Annual Reproduction: The Wet Hen Hypothesis?

Will Gulsby 17:02

next.

Bonner Powell 17:02

Will, what are some of those environmental factors that play into kind of the annual reproduction? Like, you know, obviously a lot of it can be weather-based, a lot of it can be based on what kind of habitat you got, but what kind of what are you looking at there that kind of plays a role?

Will Gulsby 17:19

The only one that we really have good data on Bonner is is cold and rainfall, both of which, especially together, are have a negative effect usually on reproduction.

Bonner Powell 17:33

And that's just is that just Pulp's ability to thermoregulate, like once they're out of the egg, or is it that definitely happens.

Will Gulsby 17:40

So once they're out of the egg, especially until they get those flight feathers that are somewhat weather resistant, you know, they get wet, they die really easily. Marcus, if he were here right now, he'd be talking about his pulp facility and how even in that facility where there's no predators, pults die really easily. Now, in that situation, they pull them inside and they take care of them because they need to maintain their study population, so they don't just let them sit out there and die. But cold and wet is bad for pults, and hot is also bad for pults as well. And so that's one of the reasons that we talk about brood rearing cover so much is because you want them to be able to move through an area and feed while still having some overhead cover and not and it not being so dense that they're getting wet as they're traveling through it. So if they can get out into that and they can move around, they can have a little bit of shade if it's hot, they don't have to worry about dense grass that they're running through that's getting their feathers wet, that is going to increase their overall survival. But even going back to before the pults hatch out, probably the phenomenon that we have the strongest data on relative to weather and hatch is on rainfall. And specifically, we've even given it a name, it's called the wet hen hypothesis. And the I there's several data sets from multiple states that have shown that in years with higher rainfall during the net the peak of the nesting season, that nest loss rates are greater. And it's thought because that rainfall is increasing the odor that that hen is putting off. And so she's more easily detected by mammalian predators, and that leads to loss of the nest or the nest and the hen sometimes.

Heat vs. Cold Stress in Poults: What the Data Actually Says

Moriah Boggess 19:21

So with the typical structure of brooding cover, I could see you know the strong case for it providing overhead thermoregulation in the heat, keeping those pults cool. What about in the cold? What kind of cover? I mean, is there any literature out there supporting what kind of cover would help chicks or or polts thermoregulate when it is rainy or when it is super cold?

Will Gulsby 19:46

So that is one interesting thing that we don't talk as much about because we really do put a lot of emphasis on the importance of nesting cover and brood rearing cover. But there is some data that shows that when those when those pults get to an age where they can they get a little, they get their flight feathers, they can roost a few feet up off the ground, that they tend to select for areas with a little bit higher woody cover. So like maybe maybe some wood a little bit of woody understory, and perhaps even a little bit of a woody midstory too, that acts as a bit of a canopy over them to protect them from the rainfall.

Moriah Boggess 20:19

So maybe even dense pines having some value there.

Will Gulsby 20:22

Yeah. And and I've even personally seen like, and this is going back before spring into the winter time, but young pine plantations, I've seen turkey shelter in there during, you know, like this last winter. I came across a flock that was hanging out in one of those areas when we had a little spell in Alabama where it was getting down into the teens and we had like 30 mile an hour winds that day, and that and they were just hanging out in those dense pines, kind of the same way deer would in that same weather. So, and and I think that's an important point too, because we emphasize and really try to drive home the point all the time as to how much attention we need to be paying to this this reproduct these reproductive cover types. But don't forget turkeys are generalist species, so they they need it all. And the reason we emphasize those reproductive cover types so much is because those are the ones that are typically lacking on the average property.

Bonner Powell 21:12

There's not there's not much you can do, Will, as far as wet and cold kind of goes.

Will Gulsby 21:18

Yeah.

Bonner Powell 21:18

Pre pre-flight feathers, right? Like it's kind of like if they if they get pretty wet while they're pre-flight feathers, that's pretty much a death sentence for them.

Will Gulsby 21:28

Yeah, no, the the hen will brood them under her bullets. She'll shield them, yeah. The problem is when that rainfall goes for a long enough duration and those polts can't feed, they're walking this razor's edge where if they don't get enough calories, like it's great for them to be able to have that shelter, but if they don't get enough calories, they'll die anyway. And that's the same thing with the heat. Like, if they have to come in and shelter from the heat, and the only place they have to go out and forage is a Bermuda grass field, you know, they can't go out and feed in. That when the sun gets up. So then they have to go back into the woods where there's less insect abundance. And then again, you have the same problem. They could potentially starve. So that is why also when I'm thinking about my brooding cover, I like to have typically around 5% of it in open fields. And you'll see turkeys hit those first thing in the morning because they get some direct sunlight quickest, they dry out the fastest, and they're warmer first. But then as we get on into late morning, I like to have more of a woodland type area for them to go in and continue brooding. So they can keep feeding, but they have a little bit more shade and probably a little bit more woody cover and some structure in there as opposed to just being out in a field.

Bonner Powell 22:43

Yeah, or some of your roadsides, like your daylighted roads, you know, they'll get they'll get shade from the morning sun and they'll, you know, they'll get dry middle of the day, late afternoon.

Will Gulsby 22:53

Absolutely.

Moriah Boggess 22:54

Yeah, that's a good point. So context dependent, though. I'm sitting here thinking about this conversation. Where I'm at in the mountains of Virginia, we're right at the first of May recording this. Most nights are in the low 40s. We just had a couple days of rain. It's chilly. I went hunting this morning. I was wearing a jacket. Yeah. It's windy, 20 mile-an-hour winds up on those ridgettops, and the birds are gobbling, doing all this stuff. But compared to Mississippi, I mean, it's been hot in Mississippi for a month already. You know, and where I'm at is by no means an exception to the rest of Appalachia. I mean, yeah, western North Carolina, it often snows in turkey season. It's, you know, we've had that here last spring. And so I've got to think, and I'm curious, Will, if there's any literature that's looked at that that cold limitation in some of those higher elevation areas or even maybe northern latitudes, but looking at that cold stress specifically and comparing it to the heat stress in the south, because I've I've got to think, like in Mississippi, it's probably always heat that's getting those polts. I I've got to think it's very seldom cold. But where I'm at, I've got to imagine heat stress is probably pretty rare at that age.

Will Gulsby 24:09

Yeah, well, one of the one of the things that'll help out with that situation is just latitudinal variation and in nesting chronology. So, I mean, there's pults already on the ground in Alabama, Mississippi, of course, but really we should we shouldn't be seeing peak hatch here for another couple weeks. And I would expect that that's probably another week to two weeks later up where you are, Moriah. So it'll help a little bit of that weather get past us. But other than that, I'm not really aware of any literature that has directly documented the effect of cold temperatures on pulp survival. We just generally say that a warm, dry spring is usually associated with higher recruitment in that given year. And that, I mean, that that's the good news about a lot of this dry weather we've been having in the in the Gulf Coastal Plain states this spring, is I think we'll probably get a pretty good hatch from it. And the other thing I think it helps with too is a lot of our a lot of the areas that do have early successional cover, we we oftentimes struggle, even if we're implementing prescribed fire there, we oftentimes struggle with keeping those areas open enough until mid-May for pults to be able to move move in and brood them, brood in there, especially with winter fire. So I think you know, the limited rainfall this year will help that maintain a little bit more open structure going into spring and early summer.

Realistic Harvest Expectations

Moriah Boggess 25:31

Well, what should be someone's expectation on relatively productive habitat they put a lot of work into? How many birds can they realistically expect to be able to harvest year in and year out? And how does that vary across region?

Will Gulsby 25:48

Yeah, that's a really good question. So on average, forested what we would consider just an area that is could be occupied by a turkey across the southeast. You know, stuff that's not developed and stuff that's not just pure wide open, the general harvest density that we see is about a bird per 450 to 500 acres when we're making no improvements. Now, when you start getting into let's think about a fairly average property, you're they're maybe they're not managing intensively, but they do have done some forest thinning. You know, maybe they're harvesting a little bit of timber rotationally, but their prop burn program's probably not perfect. They also have some food plots here and there. And you know, maybe they do a little bit of burning or something along those lines. We start getting down to a bird per 250 to 300 acres. Then once we get to the folks that are very intensively purposefully managing for turkeys, they have a nice mix from fully open to savannah to woodland to forest. And, you know, they have nice hardwoods with good species composition, like have all the boxes checked for their brooding cover, their nesting cover, things like that. We start to see them get down into that bird per 150 to 200 range. And I even know of some properties that consistently kill a bird per hundred acres. Wow. And those are those are the really, really crown jewels of turkey habitat. But I know of a couple few places that regularly kill a bird per 100 acres and have done so for five to ten years and still have the same number of birds the next year.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 27:39

How big of a property would that be, Will? Can that be a 300, 400 acre property, or does this need to be thousands of acres?

Will Gulsby 27:47

It so much depends on the context, too, Bronson. Of course, like you, I mean, if you're on the smaller end of the scale, you're gonna be having to you're some of those birds are gonna have to come from populations around you. Generally speaking, those harvest rates are on multi-thousand acre properties, but I have seen a few smaller ones that sustain that as well. General and usually those smaller ones that sustain it, they don't have much turkey hunting going on around them.

Moriah Boggess 28:11

So on your on your classic timber property lease, you're saying a bird to 500 on your average recreational track where people are managing habitat, but not very strategically.

Will Gulsby 28:23

Yeah, a little bit of burn in some food plots, 250, and then the extreme end is 100 to 150. But, you know, I I do have a former client and friend of mine, and the reason he's a former client is because it got to the point I was like, you don't need my help anymore. And he hit he has gone over the past few years from having one to two birds to hunt on 350 acres each year, to now this season he had a minimum known population of 10 gobblers.

Moriah Boggess 29:00

That's that's pretty sweet.

Will Gulsby 29:01

Yeah. And and the really cool thing about this is like we were talking about earlier, if you if you have relatively closed woods and you don't have much understory structure and you haven't been doing much burning, that when we start implementing that stuff, that's when we see things turn around really quickly, usually. And I've had I've had other landowners experience the same thing within a short turnaround too. It's not, yeah, like I said, it's not uncommon at all to see like a three to five-fold increase. And I've had some even come back to me and say, you know, hey, like I already did all this that you asked. We opened up this area and we opened up that area. And when I put an initial plan together for them, I didn't want it to be too overwhelming in scope and scale. So I didn't, you know, suggest that we get a hundred percent of the acreage into this prime cover, but they get to that point or they've checked the boxes of what I'd already recommended, and they said, Hey, can we do some more over here and some more over here? Because they're seeing that positive response and they're encouraged and motivated by it.

How Big Should Your Management Blocks Be?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 30:07

Let me ask you another another way. So this would be the incorporation of management unit size and being practical about that as well as potentially and and maybe there's no agreement or correlation with what I'm about to say. But in my deer centric mind, I think that there might be. If you had a blank slate, Will, so let's go with a let's take topography out of the the equation, let's not worry about water. But let's say you had, you know, thousands of acres, and it's the same thing, whether you inherited a clear cut or whether you inherited homogenous pine forest that was thirty years old and and you're gonna go in there and harvest timber. So you're starting with this blank slate and it's all homogenous. What management unit size of these blocks would you grid out on your property? Are you gonna be doing 10 acre blocks, 30, 50, 100 acre? Is that even a legitimate question or concern? Is that something you would ever even think about?

Will Gulsby 31:20

I do think about it, and I tend to scale my management unit with the overall property size. On smaller properties, I like to be more intense and pr and precise with my management blocks, and so we may break things down into just a few acre blocks, you know, like on a hundred-acre tract, for example, we may have some patches that we burn that are only one acre, you know, and then we have like a little patchwork in that area. As you scale up property size, obviously that becomes logistically difficult. And so on those properties, my burn scale easily goes up to 40 or 50 acres. And I have some that, you know, go a little bit larger than that if they have to for logistical reasons. So I don't know. Did I just totally dodge your question by saying it depends without saying it? You know, I I feel like I feel like I don't want to see any area homogenous this bigger than this bigger than forty or fifty acres. And I don't really think I don't really think there's a bottom end of that where things become problematic at a small scale.

Moriah Boggess 32:36

So to ask that a different way, you're you use your one acre example there on a hundred acre property. Would that would that size be different depending on the objective for that like or depending on the cover type?

Will Gulsby 32:49

So run through those, like brooding cover. Yeah, so like most of the time if if on areas that were a one-acre or a two-acre block, those are usually going to be like nesting blocks or or brooding blocks or little food plots. I'm not like if they have a 10-acre hardwood stand, I'm not going out through that 10 acres of hardwoods and dividing it out into one-acre plots and burning those all distinct from each other. Does that make sense? So my my woodlands or my forest will still be managed at that larger scale, but when you have a small property like that, I think it's okay to split, say, a two-acre field into brooding and nesting and alternate disturbance on those at that scale.

Bonner Powell 33:32

That's what I was gonna say, too, is sometimes that's cover type driven by kind of what you have available to you on the property as well. You know, it like you said, you're not gonna break up forest stands into ten different forest stands.

Will Gulsby 33:46

Yeah. Right. The other thing that I pay attention to with scale in particular is on places, and there's not a lot of them that I deal with like this, but there are some that if they have really low basal area forest, and it doesn't have to be pine, I've seen it done this way in hardwood too, but you know, picture quail plantation type cut, you know, getting down to 20 to 30 square feet per acre. That's fine. That effectively becomes what I typically am going to manage just for like a nesting or a brooding block, but I don't like I I think turkeys are particularly sensitive to those areas becoming too large. And what I fear that you'll run into when they do get to the point where you have areas where you could go out on that stand and be three to four hundred yards from a denser cover type, I feel like those areas start to be holes in turkey distribution around your property where they don't get much occupancy, they don't get much use by turkeys because they're so far from denser, particularly shadier cover here in the south.

Moriah Boggess 34:55

Yeah. Going back to your two-acre field split in half example. I I oftentimes, I mean, thinking about a one-acre block that's being burned and like that's your brooding cover. Am I too much am I getting too much in my head when I'm I'm concerned about the scale of that in predation?

Will Gulsby 35:13

Is that if it's only that two acres in the middle of all mature closed canopy hardwood forests, I think absolutely you're creating a trap condition. But if you have multiple areas like that well distributed throughout your property, then it becomes more of a needle in a haystack situation for that predator to find that area. So again, this is context dependent. And this and it's also why I don't like to see. I mean, we're when we go out and we make write a management plan, we're not just writing it for those fields or those brooding or nesting blocks, we're writing it for the forest too. And so I'm gonna go off the edge of that field and I'm gonna feather the edge of that forest like I was talking about earlier with regards to roadsides, and the edge of that forest is gonna be really open, maybe even to a savanna point, and maybe that goes in 50 yards, and then I have another 50 yards that's woodland, you know, with and I've used these terms several times, so I'll define them. So savannah I'm thinking under 30% canopy cover, woodland, I'm thinking 30 to 80% canopy cover, and then forest, I'm thinking 80 plus percent canopy cover. So I may transition to full forest off of that field uh like 100 yards into the forested environment, right? So that means that it's not just all concentrated right there in the opening. That opening is where I'm gonna intensively manage my brooding cover because it's easy for me to get in with the equipment that I need to to disturb that soil or to spray herbicide. And then as I get into the forest, my management approach turns over more to prescribed fire as my disturbance mechanism because obviously it's harder to weave around through trees with equipment and disturb it that way. So in that sense, you know, you're expanding the usable space for turkeys and the cover that they have further beyond just that opening. So they're not all just concentrated there, therefore making it harder for that predator to search and find them. But yeah, I mean, and and that's what you see in the typical situation on unmanaged properties is it's just field and then hard edge, then forest. And I think that that situation absolutely could turn into a trap.

Moriah Boggess 37:17

Yeah, a lot of properties is their loading decks.

Will Gulsby 37:19

You know, that's what they have. Yeah. And they might not be able to do anything more if they don't own it. And I mean, speaking of loading decks too, a lot of times you'll have like top piles and stuff like that around the edges of it where, you know, every snake, raccoon, possum, bobcat, everything else is just hanging out or hiding in ambush.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 37:37

Well, what about a scenario where

Huntability Strategies: Setting Up Properties to Actually Kill Birds

Dr. Bronson Strickland 37:40

everything was set up pretty good? Or maybe even it would be you working with the client and you know, the first priority, we gotta we gotta grow more turkeys on your property. And so you check that box, you you you get that good. Do you ever move into a situation with a client where they go, uh, I need help with the huntability? Is there strategies you incorporate to help them set that up better?

Will Gulsby 38:05

Yeah. Burn blocks are definitely one way. So we can have some areas that we go let go a little bit longer. You know, typically when you go to about a three-year fire return in the south, you're gonna get a pretty good bit of woody cover in that stand, even resprouting the year after you burn it. Hands will nest in that, but it also gives us some pretty good visual obstruction to move around on turkeys as well. So if I have like, let's just say I have a situation with a landowner where he's got an SMZ or a drain that runs through the property that turkeys like to roost on, and then on maybe the property lines on the other side, and then on his side, let's say he has a 60-acre, twice-thin pine stand that's fairly open. Well, you could easily go out into that and find some areas that make sense, and this is where we might consider breaking that 60 down into smaller blocks, kind of what we were talking about earlier, and have some areas in it that we go allow to go a little bit longer. So they will, like I said, provide us some nesting cover, but they also break it up so that you can't just see you know the role of the topography throughout that whole stand because it's just wide open and a turkey spots you, you know, anytime you get within 400, 300 yards of them. So that's probably the primary thing that I do. And then also thinking about food plots, you know, almost every property that has turkeys have have these fields that turkeys like to end up in later on in the morning. And we can think about, you know, manipulating our our burn frequency, and we can even think about our forest management if we want to, you know, have some areas that are a little bit denser around the edges of that just to allow us to approach the edge of that field. Makes sense.

How Many Gobblers Should You Harvest? Using Jakes as an Index

Bonner Powell 39:55

Will, one more question about harvest that I get didn't get to ask while we were kind of on it.

Will Gulsby 39:59

Yeah.

Bonner Powell 40:00

We talked a little bit about environmental roles, you know, hen survival, and how all of that plays into kind of pulp production and turkey production on the property across years. Now, I I know across many of the south southeastern states we keep up with kind of whether it's pulp per hen or what whatever it is by state that you keep up with for kind of an indication of how nesting season and how pulp recruitment's doing in the south. Do you ever take that into consideration for following years, kind of, you know, judging your harvest? You know, let's say you have two really good years of hatches and then you have two years that are, you know, historically uh against the historical average or very, very poor. Are you talking to any properties that you work with and being like, hey, we might, you know, might dial back some gobbler harvest or anything like that? Does it does it matter at all?

Will Gulsby 40:54

Yeah, I have especially on small properties it's harder to do that because you know you're playing with such a small proportion of the population. But as you get on up to, you know, at least 600 plus, probably more like a thousand to 1,500 acres plus. I'll use jakes as an index for that. So, you know, that's a lot more solid. Their survival rate's gonna be a good bit higher, you know, in places that don't have jake harvest, like Mississippi. You know, if we have, if we're really down, let's just say this spring, I was out with a landowner, a landowner calls me and says he's seeing a lot of Jakes, well, then I'll probably feel comfortable with giving him a little bit more leash on his harvest that next year. Maybe if he wants to bring a friend and kill an extra bird or an extra two or three birds, that I'm more comfortable with that. But if for some reason he calls me the next year and says, hey, we didn't see, like, I didn't call in a single Jake on my property this year, then I'm saying, okay, well, we need to go back, especially if we have a record, a history of of how many birds have on average been harvested over the years, maybe we need to go back closer to that baseline or even more conservative than that baseline the following year to just kind of keep some birds around. And, you know, even with that, like bonner, like I I have never seen any evidence of mate limitation. So that's not really what I'm worried about. Like hens, hens are getting bred across across most of the country. Like I haven't seen anywhere where there's a problem with with a lack of fertile eggs, but but I'm thinking more about that standing crop and just making sure that we have some gobblers to hunt the next year.

Bonner Powell 42:36

Well, and and I asked that question from a hunter satisfaction standpoint. Like, you know, we could kill 10 this year and be, you know, pretty happy and kill none next year, or we could kill five of five and everybody's gonna be happier with two, five, and five years.

Will Gulsby 42:51

And that's how I feel about it. People ask me all the time, too, is kind of a closely related question, is if I'm hearing X number of gobblers, how many should I harvest? And the problem with that is again, like it's so scale-dependent, and we haven't even gotten into this. It was one thing I know we mentioned we might bring up today, but it is not at all uncommon for gobblers to cover a thousand to fifteen hundred acres over like have a thousand to fifteen hundred acre home range throughout the spring reproductive season. So that population is happening at a scale that's much larger than the average land holding. I sidetracked myself on that one. Where was I trying to get back to, Bonner?

Bonner Powell 43:33

Hunter satisfaction.

Will Gulsby 43:35

Hunter satisfaction. How many birds should I kill? My general answer because it is worked, it's not backed by science, but it's it's just worked, is like I know that we can usually get away with killing thirty percent of the birds and and still have a similar number of birds the next year. So if you got ten, you're safe killing three. But there are places where you could kill five or six of those ten and still have ten next year. So what I tell hunters is to start out on that conservative end and then if they want to, if they if if their objectives are to harvest birds at a higher density, ease into that slowly. You know, so maybe let's bump it up to four the next year and see what happens after that. And if if we're all good there, if they really want to take it to five, okay, maybe try five the next year and see what happens. But that's so hard to get a beat on just because of how annual re how annual reproduction is so variable too. There's a lot that goes into this and and it kind of makes turkey management frustrating as opposed to deer management is so much less predictable in that regard.

Bonner Powell 44:46

Yeah and I was just asking that Will just just to ask I rarely run into anybody that you know especially turkey hunters, whether it's club, whether it's a single landowner, they're willing to give up you know, harvest of a bird or two, you know, just to have birds next year or, you know, just because they don't have to kill three or four to feel like it was a successful year. Yeah. You know, as long as they're seeing birds and having a good time hunting. Right. You know, it's very different for you know a lot of turkey hunters and a lot of clubs are fine with you know the one bird rule. You know, one member gets one bird.

Will Gulsby 45:21

I think you're right, especially in the modern era that turkey hunters tend to not be very greedy. I don't know that that was always the case in the past and there's still some folks that that want to get their limit but one thing that I do I talk about with landowners fairly regularly is if we think about gobblers like we think about mature deer, like you know, killing a couple of mature deer on a 600 acre tract a year is not a bad outcome. You know so if you can kill a couple turkeys off a 600 acre tract a year you're doing pretty good. But people used to be really limit focused on turkeys and that sometimes is still a hurdle to get past.

Bonner Powell 46:01

Well and what I see Will is that you know a lot of your diehard turkey hunters have five, six places to turkey hunt absolutely I talk to people all the time that that you know they're like I'm in a turkey only membership at this other club down the road so if I want to kill another one I'll kill it there.

Will Gulsby 46:15

And I'm like, oh well you know well I think that's a good idea too just to keep the pressure off your birds too. You know spread out that pressure especially if you're one of these guys that likes to go like I do like multiple times a week it it maybe isn't a bad idea to lease some land down the road so that you can spread that out a little bit more and keep the birds relatively unpressured on your

Turkey Academy Recap, Season Stories, & Wrap-Up

Will Gulsby 46:36

place.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 46:36

Well hey I will uh jump in here and say plug for for Will and Marcus that covered a lot of this information and and a lot more at the Turkey Academy and we had a had a really good event the information that y'all shared was just cutting edge and uh it really had a context in terms of application. I know it was either me and Bonner or me and Moriah we noted several times like with some of the stuff you talked about Will some life history stuff at the beginning you could really see the light bulb turning on in people and understanding the you know the ecology of it and I th I thought y'all did an outstanding job with that.

Will Gulsby 47:22

So I appreciate that.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 47:23

Yeah really good event that we'll be doing again.

Will Gulsby 47:26

Yeah I think that's I think what you're alluding to Bronson is that was new material for this year based on some of my more recent data analysis where it's just showing like we can look at the vital rates and find out where the bottlenecks and habitat are and that's informative but you can even extrapolate that to the next level around the state at the county level and see how those habitat characteristics correlate with harvest which is ultimately what we're all interested in anyway right so we can take it all the way from this is the habitat we're after this is why we're after it because of the bird's biology and life history and here is where it directly when you provide that where it directly translates into that harvest.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 48:08

Moriah wasn't it specifically I think you and I were in the truck afterwards talking about it but Will wasn't it something about spacing behavior or you know certain gobblers will associate or not associate with others. So when you see that was a pretty cool little tidbit.

Will Gulsby 48:30

Yeah that's based on work out in South Texas on Rio Grande Turkeys and so we're not sure exactly how well it carries over to easterns and other subspecies I think that it's at least still partially true but generally speaking when you see groups of gobblers together that are together for the whole season those are brothers or at least they're clutchmates because now we know that like 40% of up to 40% of clutches have multiple fathers you know so they are at least they're at least hatched out together and so that's why you know you tend to see big groups of Jakes and then sometimes you see you know three groups of two-year-old birds that are three to four birds but then when you get to those older birds a lot of times they're by themselves or maybe they're with one other bird and that's because that cohort stays together throughout their life and attrition occurs and they never recruit new members into that group. So it tends to be that the older the bird the smaller the group that it's in pretty cool yeah they're just dudes hanging out in the woods hollering. Yeah that's right just got testosterone coursing through their veins how's your season going it's been a really good season it's been really good so I've harvested two birds in Alabama I've called in two birds for my daughter my 11 year old daughter that are still alive we'll just leave it at that yeah they're still alive and well to be hunted later on and then I've called up a couple more that were in shotgun range that we didn't get shots at so got to hunt with a lot of a lot of cool people and and and really good friends and have had a great time in the woods and I think I'm done in the south I did not hunt this week for the first week since the season has opened I've actually been trying to catch up on some work stuff because work gets in the way it does and it's been killing me not to be out in the woods but it's getting already so muggy here for the most part but going up to Pennsylvania this weekend to hunt and that's probably where I'll close it out. So going up there for their open opening weekend and and really looking forward to it. I've never hunted northeastern birds so I'm excited about that.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 50:51

Speaking of the Northeast I got an invite to go to Maine nice and turkey hunt. Can't pull it off this year but yeah I want to I absolutely want to do it. You should definitely do that.

Will Gulsby 51:04

Those birds are I'm not gonna say like they have a reputation for being easier than Alabama Mississippi birds for sure.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 51:13

Yeah I need that.

Will Gulsby 51:14

I shouldn't say they're easy because you know as soon as you call a turkey easy they'll humble you pretty quickly absolutely but yeah we're we're going up and doing that and actually doing a habitat workshop up there Marcus and I are this summer. So look forward to connecting with some turkey hunters and and some land managers up there as well cool.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 51:36

Well hey buddy thank you so much for your time as always appreciate you yeah I enjoyed it coming on and and educating at least me I'm I won't speak for the other guys here but it always educates me so thanks a bunch.

Will Gulsby 51:50

You should hold that fan up Bronson you're basically an expert now.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 51:54

That's right well you know I I don't I didn't want to brag about my success but yeah thank you for for mentioning that I did kill a turkey so well I enjoyed it guys a blind hog in an acorn you know always good to talk to you Will you too Bonner.

Bonner Powell 52:08

Hey bud

Will Gulsby 52:09

see y'all

Moriah Boggess 52:10

see ya thanks for listening to the Wildlife Investments podcast for more information on these topics or to see some of the projects our team is working on follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Wildlife Investments or visit wildlifeinvestments.com