Habitat for Turkeys
 

Lots of us hunt Turkey and Deer and are spending this time of year preparring food plots.
One of the best things we can do is leave grass areas alone.
The Bush Hog kills more turkeys than we do i a season.
They need Brooding areas and so do the deer.
Put the Tractor up and kill a few Coyotes with your time.
What A Difference it will make for the years to come

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

I couldnt agree more with ya. Thats absoulty true.

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

good point

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

Very good point. Amazing the effect coyotes have on other herds.

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

and try to kill as many fire ants as possible. that is a huge problem here in the south. the quail have been decimated in our area.

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

Fire Ants are a BIG PROBLEM that no one wants to address. I think it is because of severity of the problem. Fire ants have taken over everthing from Texas down to Florida and upwell into the Carolinas.
Abad argument for the problem is DDT. It has been held responsible from everything including the decline of Wild Quail to Hawks and every game species inbetween.
I don't know what the correct answer for fire ants is but i am very sure that they claim justas many lives of all species of animals from fur to feather that the south has.
Something has to be done, before our life time is up if we don't do something.
FireAnts will be all the way up into Canada.

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

i agree to a point....my coworker was mowing one of the firelines the other day and ran over a nest, breaking most of the eggs, he set the remaining ones next to the nest, but something got them that night, he did go and check on it the next morning.....he was devastated....so right now it's road work for me....i try to stay away from mowing, but with 36,000 it's hard , we have a dry season and we have have to get it done or it wont be done in places for another year...mainly the marsh, but theres fawns out there as well, all sorts of babies...i was cutting the marsh last year(removing myrtle trees)and i saw this lil itty bitty thing dart out of the palm i just passed, it was a newborn fawn....it was only by the grace of God i didnt kill it....i try to get all of the firelines done before the nesting starts, so most of those are good to go,it's the ones like my where my co worker was that didnt get done because they were too wet, but now that they are dry, they have to be done before we lose our chance...we were hoping the nesting was about done, we know that theres still nests out there, but the not as many as there was earlier in the season...but.....yep here comes the but, lol.....with burning, we have a saying,we may lose a few to help them all...we know that we'll lose some critters and believe me, we burn in a way that they have escape routes, but the lil ones and slower/weaker ones might be lost, but to improve their habitat and protect them fromwildfires, we have too....if we didnt and wildfire comes through, they're toast, so the preventative maintance so to speak has to be done....try to get it done early is all you can do really, but protecting your property and all of it's critters has to be a priority...

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

huntnma,
Some question about your habitat. How many acres is your place? how much wooded, left out,and ag? when time of the year have you been burning and how much? what species is hunted there?

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

was that pic of a wildfire or a night burn ?
i honestly don't know the exact percentages off hand...the oneWMA consists of nearly 31,000 acres. The WMa is a mosaic of cabbage palm/oak hammocks, slash pine uplands, cypress swamps, and freshwater marshes which run along 19 miles of the river, so there's alot of marsh....but theres still plenty of the rest.The other area is around 6,100 acres consistingof amosaic of open pastures(leased for cattle), river marsh, hardwood, and cabbage palm hammocks(not alot of hardwood/hammocks, but there is some)......
we burn depending on what is due in the rotation....some zones are every 2 years, some are every 3-4 yrs.,some zones we burn in the growing season, some we don't...it just depends...under the old management,we used to do alot of aerial burns, so we could complete all of the zones, but they really did some damage in areas,it was always a rush to getem done, which was the wrong way of thinking...so under the new management we've changed our thinking and the way we burn, we're thinking more of the wildlife now, all wildlife...smaller zones will be created so we canburn them by hand and not helicopter.... we're also doing alot of mechanical removal/restoration now as well....
deer, hogs and turkey are mainly hunted...coyotes are legal to take during all of the hunts.
hope i answered your questions...if not let me know, lol....

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

The pic was taken in early March on a controled burn in our 20 yr pines that was thinned for chip and saw during the summer last year.
I try to burn everything before hatches and turkey season. March Here maybe earlier in your neck of the woods.
Some of the burning practices i do is to burn only half of the boarders on the ag fields. I am in the cp-33 program and have switch grass and other natural grasses growing. About a 40 ft boarder on all fields ditch banks and roads. some are wider than that depending on the type of habitat.
in the woods i try to burn as much as posible near the pines that are less than 8 yrs old (they have allot of grass still in them) in the large stands of pines i burn half on a yearly rotation to encourage new grass/weed growth and leave cover in the trees that are not burned at the same time. around the river we have allot of swamp land and of corse it will not burn.we spray arsenal in parts to keep things under control
we really don't have a problem with wild fires here. every so often a fire will start due to a cigerete out the window on a main road. we typicallydisc beside the road to keep it from going into the woods. going back over it a few times during the summer to fall.
on all of our disc fire breaks we replant them in millet, milo or sorgum.
can't do nothing with the fire-plow breaks they are like a big ditch.

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

I am not firmiliar with the cp-33 program...enlighten me please :)
now i am going to vent, lol...we've done a couple of timber harvests(thinning of the pines) and the old bio. we had said that the timber company wouldnt take it if it was burned, so we spent a month climbing over /through saw palmettos painting trees.....i wonder why we couldnt of burned first, it would of made life alot easier and safer, lol....i fell several times, i mean SEVERAL hundred times, lol......but i'm like a weeble wobble, i fall,but i get right back up, lol....tumbleweed is one of my nicknames, lol...the next time we took the tree cutter and made some roads through it to make it easier to get to everything, but burning would of been great.
you know , up until this year we used a big ol disc to do the fireline butthey make a mess and are hard to drive/walk on......so i took the tractor and a blade,shaped them like the roads so the water didnt sit in the middle of em, then when the grasses grew , i took a roto-tiller and did my lines with that...talk about sweet....doesnt chew the soil up like the disc....the only fall back is you can't throw the dirt towards the inside of the line, but if you have a nice slant on the road/line ,you dont have to worry about it screwing up the shape...with the disc, you could shape them to some degree....but it wasnt worth the mess....we've done some planting of millet and rye, but not on any of the firelines....the rye as mainly for the road itself, it was real sandy and we were always having to close it, so it was cheaper to plant rye than buy some shell....2 miles of rye or shell, that was easy choice seeing our budget, lol...i believe we're going to plant millet there next....
we try to burn the marsh every other year, we tried every year , it just didnt burn well....we get out on the airboats and away we go.....talk about fun....we have a terra torch and a home made airgun that shoots ballsfor the easy stuff, then for the hard to reach areas, he drops us off, lol...the first time i was dropped off, i was completing my end of it,i turned the corner and this huge gator jumps into the water, i take 2 more steps and a ball of snakes seperated and snakes went everywhere, i was torn, do i go towards the snakes and gator or stay there until the fire got to me and i would have no say but to go forward, lol, bout that time, the airboat showed up, thank God, i really dont mind the gators, but them snakes suck, lol....
on mom's day of this year , we ended up having 4 lightening strikes fires and another on the other side of the river...only one was an issue for us though, took out 200 plus acres....looks beautiful now...forestry broughtin the dozers, tore it all up, but then they came in and repaired it as much as possible.....never did a night burn, i mean , i have ended up being there until midnight at time or two,and when we had the wild fires last year, i was out late, but we never intenionally did a burn at night....i think it would be awesome....folks just dont realize how important burning is...the wildfire last year was insane....we spent weeks battling that bad boy and the bad thing about it is the area it had burned, most of it already burneda fe w monthsbefore, but the intensity of the fire just took it all out....it even burned a cedar area that would never burn, destroyed it, historically it burned every 80 yrs. , or so i am told....i was the lucky one, i was theonly one there when a helicopter came down right over me and created enough winds to make it jump the road, then it jumped the river, all hell broke loose i tell ya.....heres a couple of pics...this is right after the news helicopter left.....

this is it about an hour later, maybe 2.....


and this was the end result......devastation.

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

The CP-33 program was designed to bring back habitat for upland birds. It benifits other species as well. especially rabbits. Turkeys benifit from it as well as deer.
The program was based on the facts that before modern farming practices. we had lots of game because there was always a grass and weed edge on all fields, ditches,and fence rows
the program designed for farming and pasture land puts a boarder around the fields and pays the land owner/ farmer to leave it out.
Contracts for this program varry. ours is a 10 year deal paying 100 per acre as an inital sign up and then 30 peracre the 2-10 years. also signed up for the wip program cost sharing planting native and warm season grasses in the boarders.
we aslo have some crp in which a ag field or pasture is taken out of farming or can not be grazed. you can plant it in pines or mow/burn/disc when they tell you, you can.
the only draw back with this program is planting pines. the pines are regulated by theprogram. they determine when and how you can thin for pulp wood/chip and saw. by the time the trees are mature for the final cut your contract is over 30 yrs.
this program is very economical for the land owner. paying up to 150 per acre intial sign up and then 20-35 per acre per year for 30 yrs. the pine trees also yield about 100 per acre of the coarse of the 30 yrs.

With the rising cost of land and taxes. we are loosing allot of farm land to developers. Farmers/land owners need to take advantage of every opertunity to get the most $ per acre they can.
State and Federal programs can help with this a bunch. Especialy, when combined with a good management program of trees, agriculture, and of coarse using the land during thefall and winter forrecreational use(Hunting)

RE: Habitat for Turkeys
 

i have heard about this, but never in detail....it sounds like an awesome thing, but the planted pines, but thats ok too.... the landowners and the critters benefit, you couldn't ask for a better thing ....i wish more landowners would look to this program or one like it.....thanks for telling me about it.