Habitat management IS predator management | #139 - Wild Turkey Science

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
If we can get people to widespread understand this and adopt these things, I mean, we're

(00:05):
potentially talking about substantial increases on turkey productivity across the landscape.
Folks out there, I know you've got buddies and friends and family who are
thinking this is all about predators and if you have those people, share this episode with them.
Welcome to Wild Turkey Science, a podcast made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow.

(00:37):
I'm Dr. Marcus Lashley, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Florida.
And I'm Dr. Will Goolsby, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management at Auburn University.
We're both lifelong hunters and devoted scientists who are passionate about hunting,
managing, and researching wild turkeys. In this podcast, we'll explore turkey research,

(00:59):
speak to the experts in the field, and address the difficult questions related to wild turkey
ecology and management. Our goal is to serve as your connection to wild turkey science.
Well, I think that we're good to go now as far as I can tell. Now I just have to make sure that

(01:24):
I abide by the rules of the road while trying to podcast. Don't get pulled over. Yeah. Well,
I guess I'll start the conversation with this. I have said on a number of occasions,
something along the lines that habitat management is anti-predator management.

(01:47):
Right. And I don't know if it resonates with people exactly why I would say that.
And I think the thing that most people go to immediately is, oh, if you have better
nesting cover or brooding cover, the hen is more able to avoid predation because she has better

(02:14):
ways to escape it, right? Or avoid being detected. Exactly. And I think that is a relevant
part of the discussion, but I wanted to go and dig up some information to show
another side of this coin, so to speak. So I have researched some practices that I promote

(02:43):
frequently, and I know that you do as well, particularly prescribed fire because there's
a lot of information on fire, and most of the information comes from open forest systems,
particularly open pine. So you can kind of equate that to you go out and thin and burn like we

(03:05):
often recommend for turkeys, right? Right. So I went out and have found a few studies. One of
them is hot off the press. It was published in 2024. So it's literally just come out.
But I wanted to see how did those practices affect the relative abundance or habitat use or whatever

(03:30):
by things that will eat turkeys. Right. And after I did that, it was a little bit remarkable.
Yeah. So I'll just start with the paper that's hot off the press because I think it's really cool.

(03:55):
So one of my colleagues led a project, Bob McCleary, his student at the time was Wes Boone,
who is now a postdoc with Chris Morman working on turkeys.
So small world where a lot of the people coming up through the ranks are shuffling around between

(04:18):
labs. And this is one that's doing that. And I'm sure if it says intent that he'll soon have his
own lab and be one of the ones shuffling around. But right now, I wanted to focus on his PhD work
or at least part of it that he's just published. So in this study, there were five study areas

(04:42):
across essentially the panhandle and northern Florida. And they had one hundred and ten grids
of cameras in the study. And almost four thousand days of sampling, six hundred thousand plus images.
So pretty extensive study. What they wanted to do in this study was look at multiple scales,

(05:10):
how the occurrence of fire affected basically all the mammals they were detecting. But of course,
for our purposes, we're mainly interested in those mammals that eat turkeys,
or at least at one life stage, they do. So, you know, they basically modeled the occurrence

(05:32):
probability as a function of how many times on average an area was burned in a 20 year period.
So you think about that for a minute. If it's burned, you know, five times in a 20 year period,
that's a four year return interval, right? That's five times, that's a four year return interval,
so forth. So it's a little bit, it was, I understand why they did it from the modeling

(05:55):
standpoint, to be clear for the paper. But I think we should continually, you know,
translate that into what it means for us with application of fire, because we think of fire
return interval, right? So when you do that.
Yeah. So you said the average is four years.
Say that again.
Said the average is four years, in your example that you used, right?

(06:21):
Yeah, yeah. If it's...
So there may have been some years that it went five for fire, and then maybe there were some
years that it went three, and then...
Well, it's actually...
Long story short, on average, they're burning every four across that...
Yeah.
What do you say, was it 10 year period?
No, 20 year. But yeah, you're pretty close, because they have lots of stands.

(06:48):
Not only could the, or I should say that a different way, they had many grids of cameras,
and those cameras were kind of grouped based on their average fire history.
So some of them might have had a four year return, and they met that exactly.

(07:08):
And then other ones might have had variation in the return interval that averaged four.
They would both be the same variable in the model, if that makes sense.
Right. And I would assume that a lot of this, in order to take that fire history,
was probably conducted on public land, on wildlife management areas, or state forests,

(07:33):
or national forests. Is that right?
That's correct. All five of the areas were really large
public lands. I think two or maybe three of them were military bases, and then...

(07:53):
Yeah, all five are definitely public land. I can't recall what all of them are.
Yeah, so I'm just kind of trying to understand and set the stage to provide context. So I would
assume that since these are public sites in Florida, that there's probably not a whole

(08:13):
lot of traffic going on. I don't know what the legality of that is on public lands there,
but I would definitely presume that there's no feeding.
Yeah, there's definitely no feeding, but the trapping stuff could vary somewhat.

(08:33):
But in general, I think all of these are probably open to small game hunting, where
some of these things might be harvestable. But it's relatively common. I'd have to go through
the individual regulations, and if people want to do that, we're going to link this paper,

(08:53):
and they all have a reg book that you can go look at it if you're curious about that,
but I did not do that for the purposes here. But I would say that it's very likely that the
trapping is a very low presence compared to what it often is on private land.
Yeah, they're definitely not doing like what they did in that rabies study that we covered,

(09:14):
where they had a trap for 25 acres, and they were intensively trying to reduce the population.
No, and that's not even the point of management of any of these places. Their intent is not to
reduce these mammals. In fact, their objective is probably more often to increase biodiversity,

(09:35):
which would include these species. So I just think we're taking something that was done for
a different purpose and talking about it as it's relevant to turkeys. So it's a good point.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just trying to help folks understand the study.
Yeah, there's definitely not intense persecution on purpose of these turkey predators. And the

(09:59):
paper is titled, Frequent Prescribed Burns Reduce Mammalian Species Richness and Occurrence in
Longleaf Pine Sandhills. Their turkeys aren't even... Say it again.
I was going to say, well, that's quite a takeaway.
Well, I didn't want to read it.
Well, I guess we're done.

(10:20):
Yeah, we'll wrap that one up. Yeah, my point is I don't even know that turkeys are mentioned in the
paper, but I care, just like our audience cares, about things that eat turkeys because it's
relevant to turkeys. So I really wanted to address that statement that I've made some,

(10:41):
some, and I'm sure that you've made something similar, but I wasn't sure. But I just wanted to
catalyze this thought, right? So they detected a whole bunch of different things that will eat

(11:01):
turkeys at some life stage, including armadillos, feral hogs, gray fox, raccoon, possum.
I didn't list any other ones. They may have...
Actually, I think that's all of the ones that are relevant to turkeys.
Did you say bobcat?

(11:22):
They didn't have bob... Oh, they excluded bobcat and I believe black bears also because they
detected them so little they couldn't model it. They didn't have enough data to work with.
Got it. So there were a couple of relevant species that they would have included,

(11:42):
but they just detected them very little.
And I would assume that these camera grids are unmated, correct?
That's correct. It's just a grid of cameras out in the woods.
And they're set up... Each grid is set up so that there is a similar amount of area covered per

(12:04):
camera and they're arranged the same in each location to standardize that. So anyway, they
did it at the point scale, which would be basically detecting one of these species or the probability
of detecting one within 25 meters, about 30 yards of the camera. Pretty relevant to a nest, right?

(12:28):
So this is kind of a good view of how likely something would be to encounter a hen on a nest
or a nest that the hen is recessed from or whatever. So at that scale, there were two
predators of interest that were detected fairly commonly, and that was the gray fox and armadillo.

(12:53):
And with both of these... Well, we'll just start with gray fox. With gray fox,
when you're on the zero burn part of the scale, so in other words, the stand that they were
sampling had no burns on average in a 20-year period, the probability of detecting gray fox

(13:17):
is about 70% at that point scale. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's pretty high, and I think it's important
here to make the point because a lot of people don't think about gray fox as being a significant
turkey predator, but I can remember with our simulated nest study in the Talladega National

(13:38):
Forest in Alabama, we found that gray fox were actually... I can't remember exactly where they
ranked out, but I think they were right behind raccoons in terms of the number of documented cases
of nest predation on the simulated nest in that study. So they can be relevant to some landscapes.

(13:59):
Right. Well, same thing with armadillos. I don't think armadillos are eating the majority of nests
anywhere, but they have been documented eating them, and so gray fox. So I think the point will
become clear when we get through all these species. It really doesn't matter which one

(14:20):
you're talking about. So gray fox, 70% detection probability with zero burns. By the time you get
to four burns or more per 20 years, so that's a five-year return interval or more frequent,
so that's where it's all about. Yeah, and I'm not asking much.

(14:42):
Yeah, so you're returning fire at least every five years on the space. The detection probability at
that point scale drops below 10%. So we go from 70 with no burning to five-year or more frequent
interval, we go below 10%. Armadillos at that point scale is a 40% detection probability,

(15:09):
and if we do the same thing when we get to four or more, so that five-year return interval or
more frequent fire, we go to less than 10%. Wow. So at the patch scale, I was able to aggregate
these because basically the same pattern applied across the board. At the patch scale, armadillo,

(15:31):
feral hog, gray fox, raccoon, possum all go from greater than 70%, so the lowest of those would be
a 70% detection probability. Oh, I don't think I said at the patch scale what that meant. Patch
scale means 200 meters, about 250-yard circle. So this is, are we detecting them in that 250-yard

(15:56):
radius? Yeah. So armadillo, feral hog, gray fox, raccoon, possum, where we have greater than a 70%
probability that we're going to detect them in that area, that patch,
that goes to less than 20% across the board by the time you get to seven fires or more.

(16:21):
So if we get to a three-year fire return interval, we decrease, as compared to not burning,
the detection of all those species from greater than 70% to all of them are less than 20%.
Wow. And if you continue on and go to 10 fires, so a two-year fire return interval,

(16:44):
they're all less than 10% detection probability. Yeah, so that's really interesting. I'm trying
to think of a way to like reframe that or put it into the context of, you know, it's not like
we oftentimes we think about predator reduction or thinking about reducing abundance, but in this
case, we're not really, we're not reducing abundance across the landscape, we're just

(17:09):
reducing it in the burn unit. Because presumably those animals are still kind of in the area,
they're just somewhere else. Well, I guess, I think it'll become evident. Yeah, I think you're
right. I don't think we're necessarily getting rid of them on the landscape, although they're
probably in relatively low abundance across these landscapes because when it is frequent burned at

(17:33):
the landscape scale, but I think what we're actually seeing is they're being relegated to
the bottom ones in the system, and that'll be evident here in a few minutes because of another
study. Okay, well, I hope I'm not like getting too far ahead, but one of the things that is
interesting to me to think about in terms of this is that this is a very frequent fire

(18:02):
landscape. Like in general, Northern Florida, compared to a lot of other areas of the country,
burns a lot. And so imagine what the differences would be in these values for a landscape that is
not burned is often to the extent that Northern Florida is. Yeah. Well, I mean, this area of the

(18:25):
world is commonly touted as the fire capital of the world because we light so much with bright fire.
Right. So, I think about how drastic would this difference be in a place like Central Alabama
that doesn't have, I mean, still has a good bit of fire, but the whole landscape is not altered

(18:46):
by fire the same way that Northern Florida is. Yeah. That's a good point. Well, 250-yard radius,
that's a pretty big area. I mean, a lot of people are managing their stands at that scale.
You know what I mean? Like your whole fire unit. I don't know what the area of that is.

(19:08):
And we had a whole bunch of people rating our podcast after we talked about that recently.
I think it's funny that we have multiple ratings that they took that opportunity to correct your
math. I like how you conveniently bring up my math errors and not yours. And the reason that I have

(19:34):
more than you is because you're afraid to calculate things in your head on the air.
I agree. Well, we need to be precise.
We do. But, you know, it's one of those things, if you record anybody enough,
they're going to make mistakes. So I'll own up to it. We are ecologists, not mathematicians.

(19:55):
That's true. But I will freely admit that I was wrong in saying that it was 15 miles to the center
of a 30-square-mile block. It was one of those things that you're saying it in the moment,
and it felt right before it started coming out of your mouth. But as soon as it did,
you're like, this does not feel right, but it's too late now.

(20:19):
Well, I didn't even notice. So anyway, you can go calculate what that area is if you want to know.
But anyway, that's a fairly big area. And to reduce the detection, I mean, with a two-year
interval down below 10% across the board, to me, that is pretty striking.

(20:46):
Yeah. So if you were looking at the efficacy of a trapping program
to achieve that, you would be, I think, really satisfied.
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
But you've not only reduced through your effort and through maybe the input costs that you had
to pay for burning if you don't do it yourself, you've been potentially as effective as a trapping

(21:12):
program while concurrently improving habitat quality for turkey.
That's exactly where I was going to go with it. Not only did you probably achieve a similar or
better outcome, one that we would be happy about, but you also increased the vegetation quality to
meet all the other demands for nesting and brooding. Particularly brooding, because there's

(21:36):
a million ways to die as a bolt. You know, the thermal environment, insect abundance, like we
could just line all kinds of things up, all sorts of reasons to die, including avian predators and
snakes and things, you know, that that vegetation structure is probably helping with. But anyway,

(21:58):
they looked at what they called the neighborhood scale as well. And I found that's pretty striking
too, because the 250 yard or 200 meter radius, like that's a pretty big size, but the neighborhood
scale is a 750 meter or so, whatever that equates to in area. That's a pretty big space.

(22:19):
And we're talking about...
You know, I bet that's got to, that's got to be that problem, man. You just told me
out of my math mistakes and now I'm, now I'm hesitant.
Yeah.
Well, I'm just thinking back to, we did that episode on feeding and we found that that success

(22:40):
was affected within, what was it out to like 300, 400 meters? That equates to like 50 acres.
Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Well, yeah, I didn't do the math like I should have beforehand,

(23:01):
but anyway, at the neighborhood scale, I mean, we can all agree 750 meters. I mean, we are way
outside of hearing range of a gobble, you know, like we're three or four times the length of what
you could hear one gobble from. That's a huge scale. So with, at that scale, if you're on a

(23:27):
two-year return interval, now this is, these were, these grids are in uplands. So we're on two-year
scale. The detection probability across the board is still less than 20% at that scale.
Wow.
Like that's huge.
Yeah.
When I saw this, you know, I just read it recently. In fact, I talked about this on

(23:55):
one of the upcoming episodes. I don't think it's launched yet, but it will be soon of Gamekeepers.
And actually on, on that episode, they recorded it at the convention. And to my understanding,
they had multiple researchers come on to talk about something specific and they're kind of

(24:15):
got an amalgam of those topics together in this episode. That's what I understand for Bobby.
Yeah.
I don't know what they'll look like when they fully cut it, but I know Brett Collier was on
right before me talking about pigs as it related to nesting success from a lot of their studies,
which has tons of nests all across the Southeast. So you guys could go listen to that. I'm sure it's

(24:41):
really interesting. In fact, I know some of it is because I was sitting there while he was
going through it, uh, waiting in line to be the next one. But anyway, because he, you know,
one of the species that we're detecting in this was feral hogs. So the hogs went from 70% to less
than 10% when you don't burn to when you're burning on a two-year interval as well at the

(25:06):
patch scale. And they were included at that neighborhood scale. So, you know, I mean,
to me, this boon at all paper that we're just covered, I mean,
I'm pretty confident that if we reduce the occurrence of predators by that much, regardless

(25:29):
of whatever else is going on, we're probably going to decrease predation risk on turkeys at
the survival of adult, the nest success and the pulp rearing stage. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like,
yeah, I think an also an important point to make here is I know that there's currently

(25:54):
still some conversation in the turkey world about, you know, how actively hens choose their nest
site or whether they choose their nest site to try, you know, to maximize the probability that
it won't be discovered by a predator and things like that. But so even if they're not, even if

(26:15):
hens are not good at choosing sites that hide their nests for predators better, just the simple
fact is burning is still beneficial. Yeah. Like even if burning is not necessarily creating better
nesting conditions, which I would argue that we have a lot of data to say that it does, but some
don't believe that. Well, there's benefit searches. Yeah. Well, I have some information on this.

(26:43):
Chamberlain's group has published a really some a couple of good resources I'm going to tie in here.
Okay. Well, let's move on to the next one. So this one is Jones et al 2004. The title is
Prescribed Fire and Raccoon Use of Longleaf Pine Forest. Implications for Managing Nest Predation.

(27:09):
I don't know. So that study that I just covered, the Boone et al, I did not mention
there between the five study areas, they were in general sampling between January and July.
So it was in generally, it was generally lined up with the nesting and brooding season.

(27:30):
And when all the hen mortality occurs pretty much because it's associated with those two
life stages generally. But they did have one site that was only January and February,
four of the five included March and three of the five included March and April in the sampling. So

(27:51):
you know, there were little difference in sampling efforts as it relates to the actual
vital rate that we're making inferences about. But in general, they do overlap with nesting and
brooding. But this Jones et al paper, they were, they actually radio tagged raccoons in this study

(28:12):
and they were specifically interested in how the behavior of the raccoon was affected by
prescribed burns during ground nesting bird season. So think March, April, May, June,
or and maybe even July, because I think they're doing it in quail country. They probably

(28:33):
were thinking about quail nesting as well. So in this study, they wanted to measure the effects
of fire occurrence. So this wasn't about frequency. It was just about whether or not fire had occurred
in the last year based on when they were sampling in a given stand. And they radio tagged a whole

(28:54):
bunch of raccoons, 30 in the first year of the study, 27 in the second year of the study,
and used that, you know, the relocations of the animal to basically look at habitat use as it
was affected by fire occurrence within the previous calendar year. So overall, I'll just

(29:22):
go ahead and summarize this one because I think we've still got some ground to cover here and I
don't want this to be all day. They had between the two years, close to 2,600 relocations over
the 57 raccoons or so. And overall, fire decreased the probability of use by raccoons. So fire has

(29:46):
occurred within the past year. The probability of raccoons using that stand based on these radio
tagged individuals was decreased by 62 percent. And in one of the years, it was 80 percent.
I didn't expect it to be that strong. I mean, I would have really, you know, expected it to

(30:13):
be closer to something like 15, 20 percent. And I still would have thought that was,
you know, significant and worth pursuing from a turkey management perspective, yeah.
Yeah. No, it was pretty substantial. And I know Chamberlain, when I guess it was when
he was in graduate school, he did something like this in Mississippi and published it. And I haven't

(30:38):
looked at that paper in a while, but I can remember him saying something like it's basically a burned
area as a hole in their home range when it's been burned. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. And, you know,
I had a student, Don Chance, that was looking at this stuff and we saw a similar thing when we were

(30:59):
looking at burning and thinning and stuff. So pretty strong effect. Raccoons are getting relegated to
the bottom ones. And this next study I'm going to cover, I think, speaks to that directly because
they've measured distance to hardwoods, which in these pine systems is basically a drain.

(31:20):
Yeah. So but yeah, I mean, still, again, pretty striking different kind of data collections,
but it doesn't matter if you're using the camera grids to look at the community level or if you're
tagging individual species like raccoons, you know, pretty similar results there. They're

(31:41):
definitely avoiding it. Yeah. So this this last paper focused on predators, I think,
is also really interesting. I actually have covered this with the authors on Fire University before.
I don't remember what episode it was, but it was something about how prescribed fire affects

(32:04):
the relative abundance of predators, the title, something like that. Right. Right. So you can hear
the the authors talk about it in detail if folks want to go listen to that episode. But to summarize
it here, they measure a whole bunch of things that were affecting the predator abundances

(32:26):
across the landscape. So this was George et al. 2020 Fire and Land Cover Drive Abundances,
Predator Abundances in a Pyrrhic Landscape. So that's the title. And we'll link all of these,
but it also makes it easy for Charlotte to find them whenever I read that off. So
there you go, Charlotte. So this is clipped straight out of their paper.

(32:55):
Coyote and Bobcat increased in relative abundance with decreasing pyrodiversity.
All right. So now I've talked about I'm talking about this from various aspects. We talked about
frequency in that first paper. Then the time since fire occurred in the second paper. And now we're

(33:18):
talking about diversifying your fire regime so that you have active fire in different places.
But it's, you know, it's varying. So you might, you know, we recommend all kinds of ways to do
that all the time from having variation in your fire return interval to making sure that you're
not burning stands adjacent to one another at the same time. You know, there's lots of ways to do

(33:41):
this, but they tried to measure that in this. But those two, the Coyote and Bobcat, obviously
big time hen predators increased in relative abundance as you decreased pyrodiversity.
But also the same was true for the number of unique time since fire values. So basically,

(34:08):
if you think about it this way, if you take an area and you make sure that you're not burning
the ones in that area at the same time. So you have, you know, they're all in the fire return
interval, but you have stands adjacent to one another. Let's say if you're three-year fire
return interval, you make sure your block of stands are representing zero, one, and two years

(34:31):
since fire at any given time. And they kind of rotate through that. That's kind of what they're
measuring here. So they also, they used camera trapping in this study as well. This was also
in North Florida and it was open pine, you know, frequent fire landscape for the most part.

(34:53):
So the raccoon relative abundance increased with distance from recent burns.
So the farther you get, it wasn't even just don't, they don't use the recent burn,
they, their probability of use increased as you get farther from it.

(35:15):
Which is kind of interesting.
Another thing that they wrote was that coyote and bobcat relative abundance
increased as you got closer to hardwoods. So that's where I think it speaks to what we said
earlier. The distance to the heart, to hardwoods is an important player here. And overall for each

(35:41):
of the predators, the most important things seem to be pretty consistently some combination of
distance to hardwood, pyrodiversity, fire return interval, and distance to recent burns.
Yeah.
So definitely playing a huge role in how abundant and how frequently predators use these stands.

(36:10):
Yeah. So there's really two things.
I don't know if you can hear me, but hold your thought because you're breaking up.
Hey, you got me?
Hey, you got me?
Yeah.
Jinx.
Sorry about that, Verizon. Verizon, this must be anti-Turkey because I was just having a

(36:32):
revelation when we cut out. But yeah, there were two things that stood out to me. You know,
one may seem a little bit nuanced. You know, some hunters and land managers might think,
I don't care why hens nest where they do, I just want to be more successful.
But nine times out of 10, if you ask me, you know, why does birding potentially affect

(36:54):
nesting success? I would say that it's because of the enhanced, you know, hiding cover for the
hens in their nests, right? Yeah. Yeah. I generally think about it that way.
But these data make me wonder, well, maybe that is true, but maybe it's also true that
they're selecting to nest in these bird areas because predator abundance is lower there.

(37:18):
I think that is an equal likelihood. You know, I think one thing about that is it isn't necessarily
that all predators are less abundant, like some of the aerial predators, for example,
they might be more common in that landscape. Yeah, I would agree with that.

(37:40):
I generally think you're right that it's probably decreasing predation risk, at least from the
mammal predator community. But we also exclusively focus on that guild when we're trapping,
so, you know, there's that to think about. Well, the other thing is that guild is very

(38:03):
important, too, because they, you know, they represent the greatest risk to the hen.
Right. Not just your eggs, but her. Yes. Right. The snakes aren't going in and eating the hen,
right? So them coming in and stealing a few eggs is relatively inconsequential compared to

(38:26):
a coyote eating the hen. Right. But the other thing that stood out to me,
relative to especially like the coyote results that you just reported, was that that absolutely
jives with some of the work that I did for my Ph.D., or right after my Ph.D., rather,
relative to the role that habitat plays in influencing fawn predation. And what we generally

(38:54):
found is that fawn predation was generally lowest for the fawns that had the greatest
cover type diversity within their home range. Yeah. And that sounds very similar to what you
just described with the burn patch diversity. Yes, I agree. I mean, pyrodiversity basically
means that you're generating a diversity of vegetation conditions within a given space,

(39:20):
with fire. Right. So I do think that they're parallel.
But bigger picture... Go ahead. Well, I have a couple of other papers of interest because I
wanted to see, does it actually translate to a change in the vital rate? Like, do we have the

(39:41):
data on that? Yeah, for turkeys. So in short, we don't. We have the data, but it's not done in a
way that we can confirm. We don't have very much comparing nesting success with and without fire,

(40:07):
like in an experiment that was designed specifically to do that at the population levels.
But there are a bunch of studies that are relevant. Chamberlain's group I mentioned earlier
has a really good couple of, well, probably several papers, but only a couple that are

(40:29):
looking at nesting. But he led a paper with James Martin and Gregory Wan, which I think was
a student or postdoc at the time. But it was a review of how prescribed fire affects wild turkeys
in the southeast. So we'll link that. I'll probably do something on this eventually,

(40:49):
maybe in concert with this episode, even, you know, like a research update thing. But it was
published in 2017, and it goes through a bunch of the literature we have. But one of their other
papers spoke directly to this, and that was Nathan Yeldell, which was a student previously in Mike

(41:14):
Chamberlain's lab, and it was published in 2017 as well. So they wrote, at the local scale, turkeys
nested in areas with higher percent ground cover vegetation. So that's what they were selecting.
At the landscape scale, turkeys nested closer to roads and farther from edges

(41:37):
of two plant communities. Turkeys selected to nest in forest stands burned two years prior.
Specifically, they nested in places that were burned two years ago exactly.
Nest survival, let's see, they didn't find a relationship with that, but...

(42:01):
Oh, here we go. Turkey nests in stands burned greater than or equal to three years prior,
had lower survival than nests in stands burned the current year. That's the only relationship.
Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, they had another statement. Let me look and see if I can find it again.

(42:24):
Turkeys in our study area had a longer reproductive season and higher nesting
and re-nesting rates relative to other populations in the southeastern United States.
That's the sentence I was trying to find. So this study, they acknowledged when they
compared it to other studies across the southeast that their nesting and re-nesting rates were higher

(42:49):
than what others were reporting. Okay. And it was in a very fire-maintained landscape.
Yeah, I mean the title of the paper is Nest Site Selection and Nest Survival
of Eastern Wild Turkeys in a Pirate Landscape. Right. So we covered when we... You guys could

(43:15):
go back and listen to the episode with Chris Moorman that we had. We covered the study that
I was a part of. I wasn't the grad student leading it at the time, but I helped with some of the
capture and data collection and published some other stuff related to that work. But in that

(43:35):
study, the nesting success was very high as well, and that was another landscape that was mostly
open pine with frequent fire through your return interval.
So I think there's probably room to go out and find that data where we could put together a

(44:01):
whole bunch of studies and do a meta-analysis to get it, but just anecdotally from several studies
that we have, I think it's pretty consistent that when turkeys are in a landscape with
high sunlight penetration and frequent fire, the vital rates tend to be high,

(44:23):
or nesting success at least. I don't know that we have that data on any other life stage.
Well, yeah, and I think what's really interesting about this, and to kind of bring it all together,
and this is something that we have said on the show before, but now we're offering
confirmatory evidence of, is that potentially the landscape of the southeast, which over time

(44:50):
burns at a smaller scale less frequently than it used to be, it's becoming more conducive or
habitable, right, by predators, while at the same time turkey habitat quality is declining because
fire not only provides better nesting cover, it's potentially reduced predator abundance from these

(45:13):
studies that we've just gone over, but it also increases the percent cover throughout the
landscape of plants that are beneficial with turkeys from a foraging and a cover perspective.
Yes, so to which I would respond, what do you expect to happen?
Yeah, well, exactly, but in spite of that, it's not that uncommon to still talk to folks

(45:36):
that are skeptical about that recommendation.
I know, and to, you know, you just laid it out really clearly with the landscape,
we have less fire on the landscape, we have less of these open stands with frequent fire
that are promoting all that structure, not only is that decreasing habitat quality for turkeys

(45:58):
during nesting and brooding, which are the critical time periods for obviously nesting
and brooding, but also hen survival, which are usually lost because of predation,
but the commensurate changes in vegetation also lead to predators not being relegated

(46:22):
to the bottomland areas and expanding up into those areas so that they're detected
much more frequently, like it, you know, and then what is, how do you solve that?
Like, that's the thing that I get to, like to me, that doesn't scream that we need to
scream that we need to increase trapping, that is a habitat problem, clearly.

(46:46):
Now, can habitat and trapping be used in concert to be more effective?
Absolutely.
But that's why I kind of always shade on that side because what we're seeing on the landscape
is very clearly a habitat issue that leads to this perfect storm that we should expect

(47:09):
to decrease all of the phytal rates principally by an increased loss to predation.
Right.
And forgive me if I don't jump to the conclusion that we should
immediately trap to fix that when it's a habitat problem that caused it.
Right.
So I think trapping is a valuable tool, but that's, you know, we're really getting to the

(47:37):
nuts and bolts of the argument there.
I don't think that increased predator abundance is the cause of this issue.
However, increased predator abundance might be a consequence of the habitat problem.
Yeah.
Well, I'll get on my soapbox a little bit here, I guess, which I know you like it when I do that.

(48:02):
Well, I've just stepped off of it, so here you go.
Well, there's one more.
I noticed that you were on yours for a minute.
That's what inspired me, I think.
We can have an episode where we don't talk about feeding at least a little bit, right?
We did.
We did almost.
Well, go ahead.
I don't want to steal your thunder because you almost got me back up on the soapbox.

(48:24):
Well, I appreciate that because it probably is that exactly what I'm about to say,
which is that, you know, by reducing the scale and frequency of fire across the landscape,
we're making habitat conditions worse for turkeys, better for predators, and then you're
layering feeding and baiting on top of that, and you're supplementing those predator populations

(48:46):
that have moved into areas that shouldn't even be habitable by them in the first place.
That is absolutely almost certainty.
I mean, the other way I was going to put it a little differently,
feeding probably negates all of this stuff to some degree as well.

(49:09):
Like if you go and feed in the middle of a burned area,
the raccoons are probably going to use it at much higher rates than, you know,
you don't get the same habitat effects out of it because of that supplement, I would guess.
I don't have data to speak to that, but, you know, that's kind of a different way of saying

(49:30):
a similar thing. I don't know what would drive, you know, raccoons to not use areas that don't
really receive much fire, or, I mean, to use areas that don't receive much fire and not use areas to
do, but I would presume that it has to do with some kind of change in resource availability within
that area when it's burned. So, I'm thinking about this from a perspective of a land manager,

(49:58):
right? And so, let's say I'm using prescribed fire as a tool to improve habitat conditions
for turkeys, and at the same time, you know, we've got better nesting cover, we've got better,
you know, foraging availability for not only the hen, but then also her eventual brood once they
hatch, and then we've also potentially reduced predator use of that area by burning it,

(50:20):
just talked about today. Presumably, that decrease in predator use is associated to a resource
limitation that occurs after birth. Maybe it's something, I don't really know what it is,
maybe it's just food availability, but then when we reintroduce feed or bait back up into those
areas that have been burned, we're thus re-incentivizing the predator to return to that

(50:45):
area and at least partially undermining some of our work. I think that's exactly what you're doing.
So, here we are back.
Folks, you can tell, you know, Marcus has me trained really well to try to relate everything

(51:08):
back to feeding. Yeah, well, I don't, I just think it is a center, front and center issue,
like it's hard to stay away from it now. It is. So, but, I mean, the overall take-home point is
we have several studies that clearly demonstrate

(51:33):
open forest conditions with fire cause a significant decline in the preference for
an area by predators and a decrease, therefore, in their occurrence.

(51:55):
For, you know, in terms of how much they would detect turkeys, whether they're walking around
or nesting or whatever, pretty much across the board for mammalian predators.
Right. Which to me screams that habitat is an anti-predator strategy that's really effective.

(52:21):
Right. And it also accomplishes all the other things for turkeys by enhancing their success,
by providing insects and cover and, you know, from the elements and all those things too.
And the study, many of the studies from across the Southeast seem to indicate that when we measure a

(52:42):
vital rate like nesting in those burned landscapes, they tend to be higher than when we measure those
same things in landscapes that are not. Yeah. So, you know, I'm pretty sure, I can't remember the
exact vital rate number that Chris Mormon gave, but that was, what was it? Episode 19. If folks

(53:03):
want to go back and listen to it, you can scroll back down. It's called burning during nesting,
which is another contentious issue, right? So you may need to use some of that burn window
to get this done on your property. And in that landscape, we had one nest, I think,
that interacted with fire. It was 3% overall of the ones we were tracking. Yeah. You know,

(53:26):
and the nesting success in that study was really high. Right. Yeah. That's another aspect of this
that we really haven't even gotten into, but I talked just a minute ago how it might be
counterintuitive that, you know, hens are not just selecting to nest in areas that hide them well,

(53:49):
but also those may be areas that have lower predator abundance.
And then the one third point that I was going to add on to that is that, you know,
hens choose to do what they do, or wildlife in general. And when I say choose, please realize
that I'm not, I'm not saying that this is something that they're sitting there debating
the pros and cons of in their mind. This is something that is probably deeply hardwired

(54:12):
into their system because, you know, they're the recipients of genetics of a long lineage.
Exactly. They're the results of a successful lineage of hens that chose to nest in areas
that maximize their fitness, right? Their success passing their genes on to subsequent generations.

(54:35):
And so they might be choosing to nest there, not only because better
concealment cover for them, not only because predator abundance is lower there,
but, you know, also a potential third point is that we see way fewer, because you just mentioned
burning during the nesting season, right? We see way fewer nests that are actually consumed by fire
than you would expect due to random chance, even when these units that have nests in them are

(55:01):
burned. So maybe hens are not only just selecting for areas that have lower predator abundance,
but maybe they're also selecting for areas that have, you know, within a, even within a fire
maintained landscape, they're selecting a nest and vegetation that might have a lower likelihood
of catching fire, even if the unit is burned. That is, I think that is happening. I mean,

(55:26):
I have some anecdotes from Fort Bragg where this, the Kilberg et al study was done, where I did my
graduate work. And also know we have several listeners for there. So shout out to you guys
that are at Bragg. You know, we had multiple instances where a hen had nested in a stand

(55:47):
that then got burned and the nest was not lost to burning. And I did just look at this paper,
and we'll append this and then go listen to Chris Mormon. I think that episode on burning during
nesting, because that's such a contentious issue, man, he really kind of put that to bed. But for
exactly what you're saying, like, even in these landscapes where we're doing a lot of burning

(56:11):
and even focusing burning, and it's even at large scales, we still, we don't influence hardly any
nests. And I'm sorry, but I'd rather sacrifice, I mean, it's never this much, but even if it was 10%,
if that decreased predation on nests by 50%, that would be a really good trade off.

(56:37):
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't know if that's what the effect sizes are. But what I do
know is when we look at these studies, like Chris Mormon's, you know, the one that he led with Eric
Kilburg as the lead author, like the nesting success was very high, even though a large

(57:00):
portion of the burning was during nesting. So I just read in the discussion, predation was still
the primary cause, but it was only 53% of the losses were due to predation this time,
which is lower than usual.
Yeah, it is lower than usual for sure.

(57:22):
Yeah, and I think I saw somewhere where it did say there was only one nest lost.
Yep, here we go. The one nest destroyed by fire in our study failed in June,
near the end of nesting season, and the female did not re-nest as a result.
Yeah. I mean, that was probably a doomed nest anyway if she was nesting in June.

(57:45):
Yeah. In this study, 20% of the study area was burned annually during the wild turkey nesting
season. Like that's, you know, 20% of the available area is being burned in that study area
only within the bounds of when we would expect nesting to be happening. And we've got one out

(58:09):
of all the nests.
Right. Yeah, you know, so one other point that I wanted to make about this too,
because I feel like there is a little bit of confusion out there about it, where some folks
think that, you know, maybe hens aren't actively selecting where they nest based off of some of

(58:32):
the data that has been collected. But the thing that I think is important for us to keep in mind
is there are all sorts of reasons that hens probably choose to nest in a specific location
and concealment cover for predators is only one of those possible considerations, right?
Yeah, that's a good point.
There's all these things related to potential, you know, avoiding getting your nest burned up

(58:54):
and choosing an area that has lower predator abundance that we have not been factoring into
nest site selection analyses. And maybe we should start doing that for those reasons.
Yeah, I think there are some folks that are doing some similar things where they're looking,
they're getting an index of predator abundance, for example. So there's some work going on,

(59:17):
and we will be covering it, I'm sure, as soon as it's available. But you're right.
But the other thing I was thinking about, I mean, I've looked at a whole bunch of nesting studies,
and we've covered a bunch of them, and there's been nest site selection
anytime fire is present on the landscape or early succession, you know, that shrubby early

(59:40):
succession like Craig Nim showed us in that video. We can post that, Charlotte linked that video
again if folks want to look at that. It's a great visual of what hens selected in the Tennessee
study, and they showed a whole bunch of different situations.
Yeah, they actually went to the nest site.

(01:00:01):
Yeah, they went to the actual nest sites to show you a visual of what that looked like.
But I mean, that was the strongest nest site selection in that study I've ever seen.
The same thing, you know, the Kilburg study, strong nest site selection. They were putting
the majority of their nest in a very low proportion of the landscape in terms of

(01:00:22):
vegetation availability, you know. The Yeldell paper that I just mentioned a few minutes ago,
they were selecting burned areas. So I wonder if we don't see strong nest site selection
in circumstances where there's not access to stands that are being managed for good nesting cover.

(01:00:48):
Oh yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, so maybe, well, I mean, at the risk of overstating this,
maybe fire is such an important consideration in the hen selection process that when she's
on a landscape that's not burned, it's hard to even detect any kind of selection.
Yeah, I mean, you know, if she has very distinct cues that are promoted by fire

(01:01:13):
that invoke the strong nest site selection response, well, when she's in the absence
of those cues, maybe she doesn't have a strong indicator of what to choose. I don't know. I
think that's definitely something to explore. But my point is, to me, there's, I mean, there's more
than a dozen studies at least that show really strong nest site selection for things right

(01:01:41):
around the nest and at a larger spatial scale too. Yeah, I mean, generally, you know, if any
site has a significant amount of prescribed fire going on, they're going to show that
hens like to nest in areas that were burned two or three years prior. Yeah.
Yep. That was a good one, man.

(01:02:03):
I know, didn't it? I like when they get us both up on our high horse for a minute.
Well, that was, you know, it's just like, how can you not help but get excited
when information like that comes out that you can tie into other things that we've already
been talking about being important. And it just like weaves this entire story together and gives

(01:02:27):
you a little bit of insight into the bigger picture instead of just the individual puzzle pieces.
Yeah. Well, and that, you know, the thing is that the folks that wrote that paper,
I guess the lead author now is in the turkey world because he's a postdoc now working on turkeys. But
before that, none of those people really focused on turkeys for that first study I covered.

(01:02:53):
Yeah. You know, they were just looking at how fire affects mammals.
Right. So I also like it, I guess, when we get some expertise that's not necessarily in
the turkey controversy, we'll call it, you know, trying to figure out what's going on with turkeys

(01:03:14):
and then they produce something like this. And it's like, man, that has powerful implications
for turkeys. They're not even in the discussion and they're still producing information that I
think is pretty critical to this whole discussion about turkeys. Right. Yeah. I mean, that is an
exciting thing too to just think about how many answers that we already have that are out there

(01:03:38):
in the published literature if we just take the time to find it. Or a lot of times what it takes
to get to this point is have a conversation that sparks the idea that leads to you finding it.
You know, that's what happened with you. Yep. That's exactly it. Yeah. This, you know, I am

(01:04:00):
generally tracking to the best of my ability anything that has turkeys related in the paper.
Like, I'm tracking them as they come out. Right. Anything about prescribed fire.
And then I usually track stuff related to deer and quail as well. So those topics often overlap

(01:04:25):
a lot, but not always. But this one because I was tracking fire and I just, you know, I try to at
least read the abstract on every paper that comes up. I have a, I set up a Google Scholar Alert
with keywords based on these different things. Right. And essentially what that does is the
Google Scholar Alert sends me an alert every time something is published that has the keywords in it

(01:04:51):
and it does it weekly. Right. So I just got this one recently from my keywords related to prescribed
fire and I did not get it in the turkey related keywords. But, you know, I'm doing that and now
I'm looking at things like this and say, oh, that, you know, that's related to turkeys. So

(01:05:12):
I'm trying to bring it in whenever I can. And you're right, it's, you know, there's so many
people doing really awesome work out there. And if we just are looking, we can bring it in to gain
from that for the turkey conversation. Right. Well, I think, you know, we have,

(01:05:37):
I think we've strengthened this point. I think we have. Solid habitat management
is an anti-predator management strategy. No doubt. I mean, I think it's hard to argue
against that. Yeah. And I mean, you think about, you think about

(01:06:02):
implementing prescribed fire based off of the evidence that we've discussed today
at the landscape scale. And by that, I mean, you know, like let's get more fire back into the
landscape. Let's burn more frequently where we already do and it's not being burned adequately.

(01:06:23):
Right. And if what all that could potentially add up to over time is not only are you potentially
helping move the predators, so to speak, out of our areas for wanting to nest or prefer to nest.
But long term, you're almost decreasing the carrying capacity of the area to support those

(01:06:49):
predators. You know, we haven't even talked about that. Like, everything we discussed so far today
was just a behavioral exclusion, right, from those areas. But you would expect if those conditions
continue over time, and just as we talked about in the Florida Panhandle, which is a very pyrogenic
landscape, you may have lower overall predator abundance there because there's not as much

(01:07:16):
area that is suitable for their occupancy. Right. Well, you either, well, actually it could be
either or both. You're either through behavioral avoidance decreasing the effective density
or you're actually just decreasing density. And either way, that's good for turkeys.

(01:07:45):
But what I would hope is that it would be both in the sense that, you know, maybe you're cutting
the population of those nest predators down by taking areas that were formerly usable to them
off the map. And then at the same time, they don't want to go into the areas where you're getting
nest. I really hope that that's the way it works. And it's hard not to imagine that it isn't,

(01:08:09):
because I see all these properties that implement these practices that have strong turkey population.
Yes. Hey, I just had a gem of an idea when you were going through that.
Okay. You know, we're talking about, well, with the raccoon example, it was a beautiful example.
We decreased in that study from Canada, they decreased raccoon abundance through trapping

(01:08:35):
by 90%, right? And then those 10% responded through compensatory reproduction. That is
a density effect. So in these fire-maintained landscapes, even if you're causing behavioral
avoidance of the uplands so that you're increasing density in the lowlands, that should suppress,

(01:08:58):
through density-mediated factors, reproduction of that predator community. So you should be
accomplishing both based on the principles of how these populations are working. Because you're
concentrating the animals down into a smaller amount of space, increasing the effective density,
there should be a commensurate decrease in productivity because of that.

(01:09:20):
Right. Good point.
It's good stuff. Maybe getting a little too science-y,
but essentially what we're saying- It's in the name. It's in the name.
Yeah. What we're saying is that if you're burning a lot of the area and causing the predators to

(01:09:42):
avoid that, then they are by default concentrated in a smaller amount of the area that's not burned
and therefore should have higher competition for the more limited resources and therefore
reproduce less. Now, I don't have that data, but that's how populations generally work with
density-mediated things like reproduction. Right.

(01:10:07):
Do you mind if I go out on a limb for a second? I think last time you asked me that, I said,
what species of limb? So is this a flimsy limb or a strong limb? Yeah, go ahead.
I'll say it, then I'll let you be the judge.
Go for it. I'm starting to think

(01:10:29):
that fire is good for turkeys. I don't think you went out on a limb,
I think you went out on a big old goal. I'm starting to think that fire might
be good for turkeys, Marcus. I mean, well, I think
you and I have both been screaming this from the rafters for, I mean, our whole career.

(01:10:57):
Yeah, and to me today's episode should resonate with a lot of the people that haven't quite yet
been convinced. Right.
So, folks out there, I know you've got, either you are that person or you've got

(01:11:23):
buddies and friends and family who are thinking this is all about predators.
And if you have those people, share this episode with them.
Right. Because
the habitat folks, like we usually get lumped in with, are promoting

(01:11:45):
decreasing predators through habitat. It's the same thing. It's just this approach
would also improve all of the other things that are associated with the turkey bottle race.
Yeah, and if this is something that you're really interested in or the person that you tell

(01:12:08):
wants more information on, I can't remember what the exact episode it was, Marcus,
but maybe it was like two to three weeks ago. We also did an episode and we made the point that
a high rate of nest loss to predators, especially, could be indicative of both a habitat issue and a

(01:12:30):
predation issue, because they would manifest themselves the same way. Right. And this episode,
I feel like, makes that more clear. It's that you're going to have higher incidence of predation
in areas where habitat quality, especially as it pertains to burning for today's discussion,
if habitat quality is poor because you're not burning, you're going to have higher rates of

(01:12:53):
nest loss because predators are going to be using those areas. But that's not,
and trapping wouldn't necessarily solve that, because if you don't reintroduce fire,
it's just going to keep happening again and again. Yeah, so it's a symptom of the problem in that
case, and you're treating the symptom instead of the cause. I think that was episode 64 where we

(01:13:14):
really laid out that argument, but it could have been 63 and 64, we were talking about those very
things. So yeah, good stuff, man. I hope this one goes viral, because if we can get people to

(01:13:35):
widespread understand this and adopt these things, we're potentially talking about substantial
increases on turkey productivity across the landscape. Yeah. Well, I love turkeys so much,
obviously, or I would be a part of this when I chose my career path. But the other thing that

(01:14:00):
excites me about this too is that this is, we've just made the best case, I think, that we ever
have since we launched this show for hunting for turkeys. And we know that there's so many other,
both game and non-game species out there across the landscape that are going to benefit from this
as well. Yes. So I just look at it as this wins all the way around. I agree. I mean, basically,

(01:14:24):
go look at the species of conservation concern in uplands in the eastern United States,
and all of them just about are fire-influenced or fire-dependent. Right.
Positively. Very good. So, yep, I agree. That was good, man. I enjoyed it. Yeah. I hope the

(01:14:50):
audio quality didn't detract from folks. I guess if so, we can rerecord it. I'm sure
we'll be all in the middle of this discussion in many episodes to come as well.
Absolutely. All right. I know you got to get going. You probably need to get gas by now.

(01:15:12):
So, thanks for calling in. I'm getting close, for sure. But, yeah, I mean, it's Turkey Tour 24,
right? Not the Turkey Tour, but Cibolzacum, yep, not Cibolzacum that, pertaining to hunting. And
we're hopefully going to do a little bit of that this spring, too. Well, our turkey tour is really

(01:15:35):
about making turkeys, because we're going to do... It is about making turkeys. But,
yeah, if there's one thing that I'm okay with being on the road so much and away from the family
so much more, it's this. Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, I'll let you go. And thanks, everybody out
there for listening. Really appreciate all the support. It's been just exceptional. Thanks for

(01:16:00):
everybody that was at the convention, stopped by to say hello. I can't thank you enough for
all the support and really motivating us to keep up the grind. Thank y'all.
Wild Turkey Science is part of the Natural Resources University Podcast Network

(01:16:23):
and is made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow, a grassroots organization dedicated to the wild
turkey. To learn more about TFT, check out turkeysfortomorrow.org.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Habitat management IS predator management | #139