EP 584: Wild Turkey Doc’s Insights

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where we’ve got a guest today. You all know Dr. Mike Chamberlain. We’re going to talk turkeys today. Mike, how the heck are you?
Mike Chamberlain: I’m doing good, man. How about yourself?

Camper Fly told me you’re somewhere down in Florida. How’s the turkey hunting going this year?

Ramsey Russell: I’m fine. Man, you dressed up. Camper Fly told me you’re somewhere down in Florida. How’s the turkey hunting going this year?
Mike Chamberlain: It’s been good. It’s been good. I’m actually assisting with a Wounded Warriors hunt in Florida for the next couple of days. So it’s pretty cool. It’s always a rewarding experience to be able to help out with these.
Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. Would that be, are you all chasing the Osceola turkeys?
Mike Chamberlain: These are, yeah, we’re below the demarcation line. So, yeah. The birds in this area, actually, some of them that you kill, they look like the prototypical Osceolas with the super dark wings and then others look much more like an Eastern. But we’re relatively far north for the subspecies.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Mike, it’s been a long time since I saw you walking the halls there at College of Forest Resources. We’re old men now. I hate to say.

Ramsey Russell: Like, a lifetime ago.

I got there in 1993 to work on my master’s degree and I graduated in 1995 with that and then I started in 1996 doing a PhD program and then I graduated in 1999 and left in 2000.

Mike Chamberlain: It was. When would that have been? What were you doing at Mississippi State University? I got there in 1993 to work on my master’s degree and I graduated in 1995 with that and then I started in 1996 doing a PhD program and then I graduated in 1999 and left in 2000.
Ramsey Russell: Leopold was your faculty advisor and your Prof. Were you working on your master’s in wild turkeys?
Mike Chamberlain: Yeah, I did. I worked down on Twin Oaks, down in the Delta. There was a project that started on that. I was the first graduate student that worked on that site. So that was my master’s project, which was trapping turkeys and studying turkeys on Twin Oaks, which ended up being largely on Delta National Forest because a lot of those birds moved to both sites. But then when I stayed on and did my PhD, I ended up at Tallahala. I was the last graduate student that worked on that big project at Tallahala.
Ramsey Russell: I did not know that. Did you think back in those days that you were going to commit yourself to a career in research? Is that when you came to Mississippi State? I mean, did you think that where you would end up all these years later?
Mike Chamberlain: No, I had no idea what I wanted to do, man. I just knew from talking with advisors at Virginia Tech where I did my undergrad, they were like, Mike, you really need to be thinking about graduate school just from a financial perspective and a job placement perspective, and you’re not going to make money in the field you’re going in anyway. And so that was the impetus. I really didn’t even know what research was. And when I got into graduate school and started doing the field research, I was hooked. And then when I got in the lab and started making sense of what I had collected in the field, that’s when I realized that research was what I was made to do.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that was a good day. Dr. Leopold was a great professor too. Looking back, as a young man, they were all just older professor types. But as I got older and still knew a lot of them, they were just good people like me, like you, that committed themselves to wildlife research.
Mike Chamberlain: Yeah. Bruce Leopold was such a personality. He was such a great guy. He tried to be a big, tough, gruff exterior, and he had that in him, that’s no question. But Bruce was a very kind-hearted, genuine man. And he had some soft spots that, if you got to know him, you found those soft spots. I hated when Bruce passed. We lost a really good human being and a great man.
Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. Mike, were you a turkey hunter when you came to Mississippi State?
Mike Chamberlain: Yeah. I grew up in Virginia, and at the time, fall hunting was really popular for turkeys. That’s how I cut my teeth, as fall hunting. And spring hunting really wasn’t a deal. People did it, but it wasn’t sexy like it is now. And I’d go spring hunting a few times a year, but when fall hunting opened in Virginia, it opened several weeks before deer season. So you were chomping at the bit to get out and get in the woods, and it offered you the opportunity to go enjoy a time of the year that, the smells are in the environment, the leaves are falling, fall’s in the air. It’s pretty. And as a young man, we were just itching to get outside. And so that’s kind of how I cut my teeth turkey hunting.
Ramsey Russell: How would you hunt turkeys in the fall? Were you just sitting in an acorn flat waiting on them to come through feeding or what?
Mike Chamberlain: We would actually, I did use dogs a couple of times on hunts that I was invited on. I never owned dogs that were capable of flushing birds. What we did is we would just walk, we would find areas where we thought turkeys would be, and we would just go from ridgetop to ridgetop, calling, listening. And if you could get an answer, we would actually just try to bust the flock up, spook the flock to where it was scattered. And then if you could get the birds to scatter and you could sit down where they scattered from and yelp and call, you could call them back to you. And that’s how we did it.

In your career, when did spring hunting take a turn and become the predominant thing?

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darned. In your career, when did spring hunting take a turn and become the predominant thing?
Mike Chamberlain: For me personally, it was when I got to graduate school and realized I met a game warden in the Mississippi Delta who was a fanatical turkey hunter. And I realized how green and inexperienced I was. And I also realized how passionate he was about spring hunting. And he kind of got me hooked on it. And that’s when I realized, from a kid that grew up in Virginia, moving to Mississippi was a very different experience for me. Particularly going to the Delta and being around turkey hunters who were so passionate about what they were doing. I had not experienced that before as a young man. And so being immersed in that culture in the Delta and interacting with turkey hunters and seeing how much they loved what they did was kind of intoxicating, for lack of a better word. And it really caused me to want to be part of that if you will.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. I’m going to lead off the interview with a story like this here. Social media and a lot of discussion around turkey hunting right now, in recent years, there’s been a lot of debate over hunting pressure. Now in my world, duck hunting, hunting pressure is what is weighing heavy on waterfowl hunting right now. But it seems like a lot of discussion in wild turkeys is that during the early, it pertains to the early hunting season. What do we know about hunting pressure, particularly in the spring and as it affects gobbler behavior and reproductive success?
Mike Chamberlain: Well, the first part is pretty easy to tackle. We’ve seen very clearly that hunting pressure is something that turkeys obviously sense. In response to hunting pressure, we’ve documented very clearly that you’re going to see decreases in gobbling activity. You’re going to see birds, some birds are going to move away from pressure. They’re going to identify parts of the landscape where they can experience reduced risk and they’re going to move to those places often very quickly after hunting starts. You will see that some birds, I’ll back up just a second. There’s no average bird, if you will. We see a continuum of behaviors in response to pressure. Some birds will hunker down, some birds will head for the hills, and some birds will do everything in between. So it just speaks to the individuality of the birds. It does appear that birds that are used to pressure, they have strategies to navigate around risk. So if you’ve got birds, particularly what we’ve seen on heavily hunted public lands, if a bird survives one hunting season, he has an arsenal of tricks up his sleeve. And if he survives several hunting seasons, he’s a difficult animal to hunt because he’s figured out a way to navigate around us.
Ramsey Russell: So they’re not just harder to hunt, they actually get smarter.

They change their behavior, there’s no question. And what we see from a gobbling perspective is two things.

Mike Chamberlain: They change their behavior, there’s no question. And what we see from a gobbling perspective is two things. One, this is on heavily hunted public areas, we don’t see the same trend in populations that are exposed to very light hunting. But as hunting pressure increases, what you see is that some vocal birds are just dying. Some birds that are gobbling a lot are being harvested in the season, which is when most harvest occurs. It doesn’t matter when you open the season, the first two weeks of the season is when most of your harvest occurs. So one, you’re having a lot of vocal birds die, but a lot of your other birds are gobbling less. And that’s very clear in the data. And we also see that on heavily pressured properties most of the gobbling is in the tree when they’re on the roost, and once they fly to the ground, the gobbling really tanks.
Ramsey Russell: Are they still responding to the calls but just doing so more quietly?
Mike Chamberlain: They’re just using different tactics. And one thing you see with turkeys in general, and it’s not just pressured birds, but it’s hard to know when a bird is responding to a call if he’s not coming to you. But what we see in our GPS data, and a lot of my work is capturing birds and putting GPS backpacks on them. And one clear thing you see in the data is that birds will often end up coming to a spot from which a hunter was calling hours after the hunter has left. And we’ve documented that a number of times as well.

Ramsey Russell: Kg. Son of a gun. Unlike a lot of listeners, I’m not a die-hard turkey hunter. I’ve hunted them, I’ve shot them. I spent way too much time in a duck blind to get mad at them. I was eating dinner with a good close friend of mine one time, an avid turkey hunter named Jim Cruz, I think every morning of the season gets up and goes after them. He said, I’m surprised you don’t turkey hunt. I said, Jim, I’m just not mad at them. He said that’s because you hadn’t hunted right. You hadn’t hunted the right turkey yet.
Mike Chamberlain: He is probably very right.
Ramsey Russell: My son got after a turkey the other day that outwitted him. The turkey just wouldn’t respond. Obviously kind of pressured, the turkey wouldn’t respond. And he went after another one and about an hour later came back and the turkey had responded, was sitting right there where he’d been calling an hour later. To which he texted me and said that turkey is going to pay. I think he got mad at that particular turkey. Anyway, Mike, how are turkey populations doing?
Mike Chamberlain: Really depends on where you are. We’ve documented, and when I say we, I’m talking about the collective turkey community documented, widespread declines in populations across much of the South and much of the Midwest. Some of those populations are continuing to decline, whereas others appear to have declined to the point where they’re now starting to improve a little bit. And some populations have not declined as precipitously as others. My point is, if you look across all of the southeastern states and the midwestern states, the rate of decline is not uniform across space. It varies from state to state, which you would expect given how complex our landscapes are and how different conditions are from one part of the southeast to the other. But in some places, turkeys appear to be doing quite well. As you go into some of the areas out west, you see populations that are quite stable. But in general, particularly if you split the United States in half right down the center of the country, west of the Mississippi River from about Nebraska all the way to the eastern seaboard, many of the populations in that chunk of real estate have declined at some rate.
Ramsey Russell: Habitat or hunting pressure?
Mike Chamberlain: I don’t think any logical person would argue that habitat isn’t the primary factor driving turkey populations. And when I say habitat, I kind of confound habitat and predation all in the same vein, because if you look at our landscapes now, they don’t look anything like what they looked like 30 years ago. We’ve lost dramatic acreages of hardwood forest and replaced them with other land uses, which is a problem for turkeys because their wintering habitat relies on hardwoods. They rely on gaining weight during winter to go into the spring reproductive season as fat as they can be. Winter is a really important period for turkeys. And if you’re losing hardwoods, then you’re losing acorns, and that’s a problem. If you drive around and look out the window of your plane or your vehicle, you’ll see that we’ve fragmented our habitat. We’ve put roads, power lines, rights of way. We’ve lost habitat to urbanization and development. That is a problem. And what a lot of that does is create habitats that are better for predators than for wild turkeys. Species such as raccoons, rat snakes, and birds of prey hunt effectively on edges and in fragmented areas, and that creates an increased predation risk. So I look at habitat and predation in the same lens. Obviously, other things affect turkeys. They’re unique in the game bird world in that they’re hunted during their breeding season. We are hunting turkeys in the spring while they are actively breeding and trying to reproduce. And I would just say if you’re a duck hunter, imagine a scenario where you go to the Dakotas and hunt mallards in May. That’s the scenario wild turkeys experience. So I would say it would be foolish to think that harvest is irrelevant. We know it’s not irrelevant, but if it’s carefully managed then it’s sustainable.
Ramsey Russell: Well, that brings up a very good point. That’s kind of where I was aiming in that first line of questioning about hunting pressure — seasonal timing, things of that nature. Because I’ve heard it argued that hunting earlier gives hunters the best experience because the gobblers are most vocal. And that brings up a question, how do you balance the desire to kill turkeys with the long-term population health? Because we are hunting them right in the middle of their breeding season.
Mike Chamberlain: Yeah. And that’s a complicated question that agencies face. They’re trying to balance hunter satisfaction with sustainability and they’re charged with managing a game species. They’re trying to manage and conserve a public resource. And that leaves them in situations where they’re trying to balance the opening of the season with harvest rates. What I mean by that is the agencies look at it, and this is kind of the reality of it, they’re trying to look at the timing of harvest and the rate of harvest. So when are birds being removed and at what rate, what percentage of males are being taken? That’s what they’re trying to factor through. A harvest rate very early in the season is not the same as that identical harvest rate late in the season. If you think about it, it should make sense. Biologically, a very high harvest rate early can be problematic because that can disrupt breeding activities. At that point you don’t know that percentage of adult males is truly expendable. But when you go to the late part of the breeding season and breeding is completed and hens are incubating nests, then it’s safe to assume that that harvest rate would function differently than it would if it occurred six weeks earlier. So that’s what state agencies are trying to balance. As far as gobbling activity early, yeah, I hear that too. If you look at data from across the South, we actually see peaks in gobbling activity in the absence of hunting, which is the true litmus test. We’re doing research on sites that are not hunted. If you look at gobbling activity in the Deep South, it actually peaks in early April across much of the Deep South. That coincides with the onset of egg-laying activity. And as you know in the waterfowl world, males can sense, they can detect when females are laying, whether it’s mallards in a courtship flight or wild turkeys. They can perceive that. And competition is fierce at that point because they know time is running out and they also know that if they can copulate with that female during the laying period, then they’re likely to be represented in her clutch. So it makes sense that in the absence of hunting and disturbance, gobbling would peak around early April. And that’s what we see across the Deep South. The problem is when you look at gobbling activity in the presence of hunting, unless hunting is very light, the gobbling doesn’t reach its peak because it starts being suppressed by the removal of vocal males and the pressure that causes the other males to not gobble as much. So gobbling is increasing, increasing, increasing, it may be a week and a half away from the true peak, hunting starts, it levels off and then declines slowly because it never got to its peak. That’s one reason of many that we’re studying populations that are not exposed to hunting because we’re trying to understand how these birds function normally, how they should function in the absence of anything we’re doing to disrupt their processes.
Ramsey Russell: It’s been a long time since you were influenced by a game warden in the Mississippi Delta and really got into the turkey hunting culture. How has turkey hunting changed since you shifted.

Mike Chamberlain: Oh gosh, man, what a different world. I think all you need to do is go to the NWTF convention in February and look around in the exhibit hall to see what has changed. I can remember in 1993, there was no social media. Turkey hunters didn’t communicate with each other unless they spoke in person or saw each other at the gas station. Camouflage patterns were very limited. I can remember at the time buying my first Mossy Oak pullover and thinking how cool it was that this pattern looked so different than everything else I’d worn. I can remember the first decoy that I bought, one of those fold-up ugly, hideous ones that you would stick in the back of your vest. I can remember the first turkey vest that I bought, and I can remember shooting an 870, which I just retired last year, and knowing that I had to get the bird to 30 yards. If I didn’t get him to 30 yards, there was no way I would shoot. Now I look at social media and I see the firearms that we’re shooting. I can look across the room here and see this outfit, this gun with a red dot on it, the choke, the ammunition that I’m shooting, the clothes that I’m wearing, the mapping features on my phone, and all of the things that have transpired over the last 30 years in the turkey hunting world. It’s quite remarkable. I can remember when the first robo duck came out, and I remember thinking, what’s this thing going to do? Then putting it out and seeing how birds responded to it. It’s just so different. I have to wonder, where are we headed? Where’s the turkey hunting culture going to go? I don’t have an answer for that. But when you take people that are as passionate and fanatical about what they do as turkey hunters, and you put them in a culture where they have access to these tools and technologies, and they’re so passionate about the bird and how to hunt it.it results in what you’re seeing now, which is this industry around hunting this bird. It’s hard to believe, given what I remember seeing in 1993.

Ramsey Russell: What’s been the biological impact?
Mike Chamberlain: We don’t honestly know, man, that’s a huge question.
Ramsey Russell: That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?
Mike Chamberlain: Yeah, we know that at the end of the day, it’s the rate of harvest that matters when combined with timing. I get asked this all the time. Do decoys change harvest? We don’t know. You would think that would be something fairly simple to understand, but it’s not. One reason is because we lie if you ask turkey hunters questions a lot. It’s hard to understand. At the end of the day, if these things that we’re using, if they don’t change the timing and the rate of kill, then maybe they don’t matter. Some people would listen and go, you got to be kidding me, Mike. My own experience tells me that there’s no question we’re shooting birds at greater distances. There are states collecting data showing that crippling losses could be up to 25% of birds. These are surveys where hunters are asked, did you shoot at a turkey and not recover it? You shoot at a bird with TSS at 40 yards or 50 yards, you’re not missing it unless you’re hitting it. That’s the way I look at it. If you’re shooting birds at great distances, which I see, that causes me frustration and disappointment. If you’re shooting birds at really long distances with these loads, I suspect it’s rare that a bird’s actually missed clean. We don’t know if that’s having an effect. If you look at the harvest rate data across the states collecting it in the South, it’s pretty much the same in every state. It’s about 30%. We’re taking about 30% of our Toms each spring. At the end of the day, if the timing isn’t being changed by these tools andall the technologies that we have, then maybe it doesn’t matter. We lack the data to be able to answer it. It’s a tough question, one I get a lot, one I really want an answer to. As a hunter, I see with my own eyes situations where I think, had it not been for that, that bird would not have died today. Or had it not been for my ability to look on my phone and realize there’s a drain I can hide in to get closer to that bird, I may not have killed him. My own experiences tell me that we need to do a better job at understanding these questions.

Ramsey Russell: It seems like in a lot of hunting, not just turkeys, but waterfowl hunting or big game hunting, at some point innovation begins to diminish the challenge and change the ethics, which then begins to shift the cultural values. Something I see a lot of that, I did not see mentioned until it became popularized in social media was reaping.
Mike Chamberlain: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: We got a mutual friend we all went to school with. I ended up working with him after Mississippi State for 16 years in the federal government. He just retired last month. I can remember 16, 17, 18 years ago, him showing me he carried a jake turkey fan in his vest. It wasn’t something he deployed every time, but when a turkey hung up in the middle of a pasture, they’d crawl up to the barbed wire fence, hold that fan up, wave a little, call, and get ready. An old Indian trick 20 years ago. But then it became popularized in social media. A lot of controversy came over the practice of reaping.

Mike Chamberlain: Oh, for sure. That is a polarizing topic because there are people in the turkey hunting world that love it and use it, and there are many that loathe it and hate it.
Ramsey Russell: That could be said for a mojo decoy. Same could be said for a three and a half inch magnum. Same could be said at some level about stick and string archery versus compound bows or crossbows.
Mike Chamberlain: Yeah. The whole reaping and fanning thing, from an agency perspective, is often focused on safety. I have two friends that have been shot while doing that practice. One was very seriously injured, the other was a little luckier, but is carrying around a load of TSS in his body that will remain there the rest of his life. From a safety perspective, that is a dangerous activity because you’re mimicking. All turkey hunters can value this, when you see that fan come up, when you see a bird approaching and you see that fan, it is very recognizable. You see their head a lot of times as they’re approaching, and many times the first thing I see is that fan go up. When you’re mimicking that, you’re taking a risk, because particularly if you don’t know who you’re hunting around. Interestingly enough, the two friends that I know that have been shot were shot by people they were hunting with that they knew. If you just don’t know what someone’s going to be thinking. Turkey hunting is very visceral, very interactive. If you’re a turkey hunter and you’re listening this, if your heart doesn’t pound out of your chest when a bird’s coming to you, then something’s wrong with you in my opinion. I get so excited, my ears ring, I can hear my heartbeat pounding in my eardrums, my heart rate is off the charts. I shoot a bird and I get the shakes like I just killed a 170-inch buck, and it happens every time. That’s one of the most addictive things about it. So the whole fan thing, when you take a fan and put it up, you’re taking a risk. That is a polarizing topic on social media. If you want to get people mad, just bring that topic up.

Ramsey Russell: One of the southeastern states just prohibited the use of it. I know you don’t speak for them, but do you think that was a safety issue or ethical issue? It was safety.
Mike Chamberlain: Yes. South Carolina recently banned it. They had banned the practice on public lands previously. I can’t speak for state agencies, but the conversation I most often hear from an agency perspective is, it’s not about a ton of birds being killed because people are using this practice. It’s that this is an inherently dangerous activity. People are being injured or worse, and so we need to change.

I’m somebody that’s been working with duck hunters for the past 25 years. I perceive that shift.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of hunters measure a season’s success by the number of birds taken. Duck hunters are no different. What’s your take on how we could shift the cultural conversation towards more sustainable harvest or long-term stewardship? I’m somebody that’s been working with duck hunters for the past 25 years. I perceive that shift. A lot of folks that are calling us now are more interested in a quality hunt than a quantity hunt.

Mike Chamberlain: I’m saying the same thing. Honestly, I think part of it is many of the young people that I talk to at conventions and when I’m presenting and doing things in the public eye, a lot of the younger people, when I say younger, I mean in their 20s, early 30s, those young men and women came up in a turkey hunting world where turkeys were not everywhere like they were when I started cutting my teeth. The notion that they could go hear 15 birds standing in one spot is incomprehensible to them. I can distinctly remember days in the 1990s where I didn’t know which direction to go because there were so many birds gobbling around me. I became paralyzed. When I talk with a lot of young people now, the idea of us being wise stewards of this resource, the idea that we’re going to be conservative in our harvest, that we’re going to manage our lands as well as we can for this bird that we are going to do our part, that’s just kind of their fabric. A lot of the young people that I meet, that’s the way they’re thinking because they’ve come up in a turkey hunting world where if they go hear a bird, it was a successful day. And God willing, if they kill a bird, their season is matched. Right? I mean, their season is done. And I remember not being that person. I remember the days when if I went to a state and I had three tags, I was killing three birds. Part of changing that is just evolving as a hunter and a human being. But I’m encouraged that a lot of the younger people that I talk to are already far ahead from a stewardship perspective at their age than I was.

Ramsey Russell: Are we killing too many turkeys, Mike? In parts of the world, are we killing too many? Now you said previously, some hunters lie, and that reminds me of the old joke. I don’t know if it’s a joke or not, but that’s old Boy, first few weeks of season, how many turkeys you killed? You killed two. Ask them three days before the season is how many turkeys you killed. Killed two. Ask them a day after season how many you killed. Killed three.

Mike Chamberlain: Right

Ramsey Russell: I was listening to a couple of game wardens talk about a big turkey bust they made down in south Mississippi. They said point blank, just because you aren’t hunting your property doesn’t mean somebody isn’t. Somebody’s hunting those turkeys. If a turkey’s gobbling, somebody’s hunting that turkey whether you’re at work or not. So I just wonder, like this past weekend I had a friend down from Michigan, they got a one turkey limit. Turkeys are dumb as a brick and they’re like barnyard chickens, they’re everywhere. They’re abundant. And down the state as compared to Mississippi with a three-bird limit and a rabid turkey hunting culture. I don’t know. Are they killed too many?

Mike Chamberlain: Yeah, that’s a tough question because it largely depends on what you’re making. If you’re producing, if you’ve got high productivity, then you can kill more birds. If your productivity is low, then at some point harvest is going to catch up to you. I would say, are we killing too many turkeys as a turkey hunting community? No, it’s that turkey hunters are not the problem. The problem is that we’re not making turkeys like we should be. In a situation where we’re not producing birds, then harvest becomes more of a consideration than if you are producing a lot of turkeys. You know this conversation in the waterfowl world as well. Your question is, what prompts state agencies to go, we need to make a change to our spring season. We need to change what we’re doing because we’re not producing as many birds. So how can we harvest the same number of birds? That’s why you see some states make changes because they’re trying to reduce harvest a little bit to carry over more birds from one year to the next. That’s why agencies make some of those tweaks. Not all agencies do that. You live in Mississippi. Mississippi hasn’t changed regulations in many years. Whereas you go right across the state line in Louisiana or Arkansas or Alabama or Tennessee, those states have made changes. A lot of people ask, why don’t all the states make changes? The reality is that state agencies are operating within their state boundaries. They’re not charged with managing wildlife in other states. They’re charged with managing wildlife in their own state. That causes these differences you see across state lines. I get it. You look at the regulations book across states and you’re like, wow, this is kind of a hodgepodge in a lot of ways.

Ramsey Russell: You hear a lot of times that nest success and poult survival are the critical population bottlenecks. Does that hold true or has recent research shifted your thinking in that regard?

Mike Chamberlain: No, that’s largely still true. All things being equal, if you are hatching a lot of nests and those poults are surviving at a high rate, then those factors are going to be important drivers for turkey populations. What you’ve seen across much of the south is not that. Nest success has been quite low, well under 30%, and poult survival or brood survival is well under 50%, in many studies well under 40%. When you start sticking those two data points together, you’re looking at single-digit percentages of nests producing a poult that survives. If you take nest success and bump it up from say 20 to 30% and then bump up brood survival from 30 to 40%, you start making incremental increases in those two metrics. Given how large of a clutch size turkeys have, which they average about 10 to 11, you can produce a lot of birds in a good year. That’s what turkey managers are hoping for. You’ve heard this, the good hatch. George Hurst at Mississippi State used to say that if you had a good hatch every four years, then for turkeys you’d make it work. You’d have a big bumper hatch, the next year you would have a lot of two-year-olds in your population. Two years later you’d have a bunch of two-year-olds, then you’d have some three-year-olds and some four-year-olds and then you’d rinse and repeat that process. So about every four years, if you got a good hatch, then the population and the hunting quality would sustain itself. I never thought carefully about what George was saying because I was a young green student at the time. But in retrospect I understand where his mind was. If you could get a good hatch every few years, things look good. The problem we’ve seen across much of the south is we went for a number of years with no really good hatches. We went for a number of years in many states with the same thing year after year.

Ramsey Russell: What was happening to cause that?

Mike Chamberlain: For instance, one thing we see with turkeys in a bad year, let’s say you have a poor acorn crop. You have hens that come out of winter down on body weight because there was a mast failure. That means nest initiation rates, the percentage of hens that would attempt to nest, is low. Then if you are having 25% nest success, but you don’t have that many nests on the landscape anyway, these numbers snowball. Then let’s say you catch at peak hatching a rainy cold period for three or four days and you see brood survival decline because of that. Then all of a sudden you have a really bad year. A really bad year in the turkey world is a real problem because until a turkey is two years old, they don’t really exist from a reproductive standpoint. Jakes are not contributing to reproduction in any meaningful sense. Jennies, which would be your juvenile hens, are not nesting at near the rates as adult hens, nor are they as successful as adult hens. You really need those turkeys to live to be two years. If you have a really bad year and you don’t make many birds and then you lose a third of your hens to predation each year, which is what we see, about 30% of our hens are being killed by predators every year, then a really bad year sets you back a lot. What we’ve seen across the south over the last few decades is more bad years than good years. If you think about it in that way, it’s kind of logical that we’ve seen what we’ve seen, which is a very slow decline. The declines weren’t obvious if you just looked from 2005, 2010, 2015. If you just looked at the data from one year to the next, you didn’t see anything. But when you looked across 20 years, the declines in reproduction were obvious. They were slow and steady. That’s kind of how it snuck up on us, to be honest with you.

Ramsey Russell: Are there any active management strategies that could meaningfully impact poult survival? Predator control? Habitat changes?

Mike Chamberlain: Habitat is the big one for me when I travel, except one of the few exceptions. Of all the places I go every year, which is the property I’m sitting on right now, brood habitat is the most limiting thing I see from a turkey reproductive standpoint. I see plenty of nesting habitat in many places that I go. Turkeys will nest in a wide array of places and they’ll be successful in a wide array of places. But brood habitat is very specific and it needs to be early successional, it needs to be disturbed, low growing, lots of bugs, succulent vegetation, and those places are at a premium in most of my travels. A lot of that is an artifact of a lack of land management, a lack of disturbance. I’ve spent a lot of time on the prairies as a duck hunter in a previous life. If you go to the prairies in the summer and you see these ephemeral wetlands that are chock-a-block full of insects, they’ve got emergent vegetation, they’re beautiful. Broods are on them, brood sizes are large. Those are key. Well, in the turkey world, you take those same components, lush vegetation, invertebrate communities, lots, you just translate it from an aquatic environment to a terrestrial environment. That’s all you’re doing with turkey poults, just like ducklings.

Ramsey Russell: What’s the biggest limitation on private land management? Why is good turkey habitat so limited? Because like they taught us at Mississippi State University, good pine timber management is good for turkeys. Prescribed burning, good cuts, low basal area. It seems like in a pine-dominated landscape, like a lot of Mississippi right now, it’d be in great shape for turkeys.

Mike Chamberlain: It’s largely two things. It’s largely a lack of enough management. To sustain brood habitat, you really need disturbance fairly frequently. Once you get vegetation that’s waist high, for instance, in a pine-dominated forest, that’s not brood habitat. It needs to be where you can lay on your stomach and see through the vegetation in front of you, that’s brood habitat. I tell people, if you want to evaluate any place on your property or any other property from a brood perspective, the first thing you need to do is lay down on your stomach. If you can see in front of you, then so can a poult. Then you want to roll over on your back and look around you. If you can look left, right, and see something you could hide under, a shrub, a clump of grass, something that if an aerial predator swoops in, or if your mom says “hide, stop,” you could hide under, that’s your second box. Then if you hop up on one knee, that’s the way the brood hen perceives her environment. If you can see down into the vegetation and through the vegetation to move to where she can detect danger, that’s the three boxes you have to have to have high-quality brood habitat. If you go and look at many properties, we look at it from, you know, I’m 6’2″, so I look at property up here. That’s not how to view turkey habitat. You need to get it on their level. I would ask people, if you go to a property you thought was really good turkey habitat and you view it in that way, your perspective will change, I guarantee it. It looks fundamentally different from their perspective than ours. And poults in particular, they’re small and they have to have open ground. They have to have succulent vegetation they can move through. That’s key for those first couple of weeks of life, which is when most mortalities occur.

Ramsey Russell: In this part of the world I live in, you’ve got intensive pine management down at the bottoms, streamside management zones that they don’t cut hardwoods. So you satisfy maybe that part of a turkey. It sounds to me like what you’re saying is we need to burn it more frequently. Prescribed burn, how often? To use your idea of laying down on my stomach, then on my back, I’m thinking run a burn every year or three at the most.

Mike Chamberlain: What we see in most productive soils in the South, not all, but most, the year of the fire and the year after the fire, that’s the two years that broods will use it. Once it gets to a two-year rough, most broods are not using that anymore. We also see that the juxtaposition of those hardwoods you mentioned is very important. Pine stands that are managed with fire are much more likely to be used by broods if they’re beside wood duck. The reason for that is simple. Hardwoods are cooler during the summer and broods cannot thermoregulate like adults. What we’ve found in our research is areas that broods spend a lot of time at during the middle of the day are typically in hardwoods. Those areas are cooler from a temperature perspective than other areas. They are going to seek out these hardwood habitats. So to your point, yes, burning is important, but planning your burns to be juxtaposed to those hardwood stands is also critical.

Ramsey Russell: Do you all struggle in the turkey hunting management world with the biopolitics of it all, Mike? Is it science-based or emotionally driven? What do you see driving turkey management at a landscape level?

Mike Chamberlain: It largely depends on where you frame that, who you’re framing the question to. From a state agency perspective, I think everybody understands that biology doesn’t always win at an agency level. Politics are involved in everything we do, particularly at a state agency level. From a private landowner perspective, one thing I see is a lack of awareness. A lack of “I didn’t even know that I could do that or should be doing that.” And I wasn’t aware that there were cost-share programs to help pay for that if I implemented it. That’s one real value I see of social media and the things that we’re doing, you can stimulate somebody to start asking questions about, “Okay, how could I do better on my property?” There are so many resources out there now that are quality resources. Of course, there’s garbage out there as well, just like there always has been. But there’s a lot of information out there now and a lot of people that are trained to help private landowners. If you’re one of those and you’re listening, and if you’re not exactly sure how to go forward, there are people that can help you and resources out there to help you.

Ramsey Russell: Point some of the listeners in the right direction. Who would be some of the people they could reach out to, some of the state and federal agencies?

Mike Chamberlain: If you’re interested in implementing prescribed fire, if you own habitats you think can be managed with fire, reach out to your state forestry commission or Natural Resources Conservation Service. Both of those agencies have technical assistance and expertise. What I see with many people I interact with is a lot of landowners are scared of fire. They are nervous about how to implement it, where, when. Getting technical expertise will make you realize it’s not a daunting task. It’s just not. It’s something that’s very simple. Many agencies have cost-share programs that can help private landowners front some of the costs for some of these activities. If you are interested in restoring habitats, for instance, the other day I spoke with a landowner whose wife is really big into aesthetics. She wants to see pretty vegetative communities. When I started talking with him and then she overheard the conversation, I said, “Hey, maybe we put some warm-season grass plantings and convert some of these fescue fields that you basically inherited from the previous owner. You’re not running cattle anymore. Let’s get this fescue out of here and convert some of these to native warm-season grasses and poult habitats. Incorporate some of these wildflowers that are attractive, that are going to be attractive to insects. If you’re attracting insects, you’re attracting turkeys in the summer. Let’s put some of these adjacent to some of your hardwoods, your stands that I know turkeys are already going to be in.” The light bulb went off and it’s like, “Oh, that sounds great.” I’m like, “Well, there are cost-share programs to help you do that. Let me give you a name. You contact this person in this local county and he will be able to help you.” There you go. There’s the stimulus to make a change to a property that had been, I would consider marginal at best for 30-some years. Now you have a family that’s moving forward with an improvement that is not just ecologically sound, it’s aesthetically pleasing, and it’s cheap because of the cost-share.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the common myths about wild turkeys or turkey hunting that you wish every hunter understood better?

Mike Chamberlain: Gosh, I don’t have time.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, habitat is a great example.

Mike Chamberlain: I think one of the biggest myths that, I run across is this notion that turkeys are, people say, “They’re just wicked intelligent.” No, they’re not. They are simply trained by their environment. Turkeys don’t have an intelligence level like you and I have. They are very good at navigating us. One of the things I encourage turkey hunters to do is try to understand the biology of the birds that you’re hunting. Read about their behavior, read about why they’re doing the things they’re doing. Understand how big their home ranges are, for instance, if you understand how big a bird’s home range is in the area you live or the forest types you live in, that gives you an idea of how much area you need to be thinking about covering. If you understand a little about the biology of the bird, then you should understand when gobbling activity is going to ramp up in your part of the world. That’s the type of thing I encourage hunters to think through. Knowing more is always better.

Ramsey Russell: If there was one thing you could get every turkey hunter in America to do differently tomorrow, what would it be?

Mike Chamberlain: Slow down. Yeah, slow down. Slow down in your hunting. Be more methodical, be more thoughtful. I remember the days when if I didn’t hear a bird in 15 minutes, I would go on to the next spot. And I get that mentality. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that a lot of times you can be more successful if you slow down. Dale Earnhardt said this one time, sometimes you got to slow down and go fast. And that is very true in turkey hunting. If you will just slow down sometimes and let the hunt come to you. If you have the time, if you’ll slow down, sometimes things will work out quite well for you that otherwise they wouldn’t have. And the other thing I would just say is, and I told my kids this years ago. If you got two hours, use it. If you can be outside for two hours in the turkey woods, do it. If you got two hours and 15 minutes, that’s even better. If you got two hours and a half, that’s even better. Every opportunity you can take to get out there and be in this bird’s environment with them is going to be time well spent.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a good note to end on, Mike. It really, truly is. I met you at Mississippi State University many years ago. You’ve come a long way since. Where are you now and what keeps you busy?

I’m a researcher at the University of Georgia. I run the Wild Turkey Lab, which is my lab there.

Mike Chamberlain: I’m a researcher at the University of Georgia. I run the Wild Turkey Lab, which is my lab there. As you know, I’m active on social media. I’ve got field research all over the United States now. I collaborate with people in a bunch of different states, and I do a lot of work. What I’m doing right now is just communicating with people and talking about the science and putting content out that I hope will resonate with turkey hunters, and that will be valuable to land managers and people that care about turkeys. My objective is to tell people what the science says, but also keep people thinking about turkeys 12 months a year instead of just during the spring.  And I think if we as a community did that, we’re going to leave this resource in a better place than we found it.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much. Tell people how they can connect with you on Instagram. I can’t believe there’s a turkey hunter in America that’s not already following you. But just in case they aren’t, how can people connect with you?

Mike Chamberlain: If you’re on Instagram or X, at Wild Turkey Doc. Wild Turkey Doc, all one word. You’ll find me there. On Facebook, if you just type in my name, you’ll find my account. If you’re interested in any of the work I’ve done, you can go to wildturkeylab.com and that is a clearinghouse of every social media post I’ve ever made, podcasts that I’ve done, articles that we’ve written with layman-type summaries of, this is what we did, this is what we found, and this is why you should care. So you don’t have to wade through these scientific articles. They’re available there if you want, but you don’t have to. So those two resources are available. And speaking about the lab website, we’ve got a lot of things we’re doing this spring on Wild Turkey Lab. So if you go there, you’re going to see a lot of cool stuff in the upcoming weeks.

Ramsey Russell: We’ll talk about that, Mike. Because in the same way that turkey hunting has changed since the mid-1990s, a lot of the direction of turkey research is changing and evolving. What are some of the most pressing projects and topics and issues you’re looking into right now?

Mike Chamberlain: Oh, gosh, man. I’ve got my hands in a bunch of different pots. I would say, not me personally, but the collective turkey research world. One thing that I see that didn’t exist in the mid-1990s is just collaboration. You’re seeing huge collaborative research projects involving multiple universities, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of birds captured. You’re seeing true cooperation amongst researchers, and you’re seeing those researchers tackle really tough questions because they’ve got large data sets to do it with. That would be my answer. What’s changed from a research perspective is moving away from siloing yourself to studying just in your state. You don’t see a lot of that anymore. What you see is groups of researchers. And that, to me, speaks to the relevance of the bird and the complexity of the questions that are facing it.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Mike. Thank you very much for coming on today. And folks, thank you all for letting this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. See you next time.