If you live
a rural life, you spend enough time outdoors to know how many turkeys there are
in your area. It is pretty simple
to figure, because wild turkey group together in January to feed and roost;
hens, poults, and mature gobblers.
They all
come together and are easy to observe because as the acorns get scarce they
feed in open ground. I have seen
in various river bottoms in the Ozarks, as many as seventy or eighty turkeys
congregated together and from that, with binoculars, you can sort of calculate
the number of old gobblers, jakes, hens and year old hens in a huge flock.
It varies,
but usually in a flock of seventy or eighty winter turkeys you will see from
eight to twelve long-bearded gobblers and about twenty jakes. There will be about fifteen or twenty mature
hens and the rest are young hens.
That’s kind of a norm. If you see that number in a flock, you can figure
that you ought to have a good breeding season and a good summer hatch.
You get
worried if there are only a half dozen gobblers in a group that size. But what worries me most is seeing only
30 turkeys where there were 70 or 80 in a winter flock two or three years ago,
and I have seen a lot of that this winter. It is even more worrisome when 50 percent or more of one
small winter flock is adult turkeys.
What I
gather from what I have seen this winter is that in many areas of the Ozarks,
flocks are not of a normal make-up…. too few, and more adults than young. But even with that ratio, if we have a
good hatch this spring in those areas, there will be little problem with turkey
numbers over-all. What is
really a problem is if there is a poor hatch like that two or three years in a
row.
With all
birds that nest on the ground, there is a problem each spring when there is too
much rain, but in the area of southern Missouri and north Arkansas, the high
number of coons and skunks and possums can be a problem not only for wild
turkeys but for quail, meadowlarks, woodcock, even whippoorwills. They find and
eat eggs, lots of them!
And then
there is the armadillo. Just a
couple of days ago I walked through a wooded bottomland next to the river and
counted four of them foraging around in the woods. If you want to see how great diversity is, look at what it
has done to nature, with starlings and snake-head fish and armadillos, just to
name a small few of what is invading the natural world around us, and so
adversely affecting native creatures.
This
winter, if you like to shoot, and like to hunt, spend a few hours out in the
woods around you hunting and shooting armadillos and you will help make the
area you live in a better place for native wildlife. They are so stupid they
aren’t very wild. Kill as many of them as you can and leave them lay. Never,
ever handle an armadillo, as they are carriers of leprosy and have infected a
good number of people in southeastern states with that awful disease. It takes an army of hunters to affect
their number, so join up. Never let
one live when you see it.
As for the
turkeys, what I have seen is a regional thing. There are friends of mine talking about seeing better
numbers where they live. If any
biologist tries to give numbers at any time of the year that cover half of a
state, he is lacks knowledge of the species. One
of my best friends was a turkey biologist for thirty years in another state,
and the two of us had a good laugh when a Conservation Department media
specialist got on a local television station out of Springfield Missouri in
mid-summer and announced that their experts felt there had been a one percent
increase in the wild turkey hatch that year across the Ozarks.
That would mean that in their infinite
wisdom, biologists had determined that for every one hundred poults in the
early summer the year before there were now one hundred and one. How silly it is to say something like
that.
You never
really know what wild turkey numbers are in your area until this time of year,
when the weather gets rough and small flocks gather to gather and are very
active in order to find the food they have to have to survive. Then use what I do, look at the group
and try to figure those percentages. It will vary quite a bit from county to county, but
from what I have seen in three or four counties, things are not as good as they
should be.
On land I
own and other areas I hunt, we really seem to have a problem with wild turkey
numbers this winter. As much as I
like spring rains, I dread a spring deluge at the wrong time, because that can
almost completely destroy a big hatch of young turkeys. Obviously that was a
problem last spring.
What is
being said right now about the deer disease known as chronic wasting is
absolutely ridiculous, because some game and fish departments are afraid they
will lose so much money in deer tag revenue if they word things wrong. Many who eat deer meat are absolutely
convinced that humans cannot get chronic wasting disease.
Technically,
you cannot, because what is known as CWD in deer is called by a different name
when it kills a human being. But I
promise you, despite what you have heard, hunters and others have died because
they ingested the prions which cause the same disease, by different names, in
deer, elk, sheep, goats and cattle.
In all these creatures, it is given a different name and in humans it is
called Kruetzfeldt-Jakobs disease. How many have died from it is just a guess,
because doctors I have talked with say that it is something not often tested
for and many times, misdiagnosed as something else.
In my
upcoming spring magazine I have tried to compile what medical people and
scientists have been learning about this disease, and you can read all about
it, in several pages of fact and theory coming from the study of this disease,
from the best-qualified medical people, which is nothing like what the MDC is
telling us.
Believe me,
if you have eaten untested deer meat like that given out in any state’s ‘share
the harvest’ program, you are taking a risk. How much of a risk no one can say. I urge you to read in the
spring issue of The Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor magazine, some other views of those
who have looked at this disease without bias.
I recently
learned that in the northern tier of Arkansas counties bordering Missouri,
examination of road-killed deer in 2017 showed more than 100 CWD infected
deer. Isn’t it strange that the
Missouri Conservation Department just finds a handful of deer in neighboring
counties with that disease?
Apparently the awful disease just stops at the Arkansas-Missouri line.
To contact
me, call our office… 417-777-5227,
or email lightninridge47@gmail.com. The address to
mail is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613
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