daleh

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

Arrowmaster

I couldnt agree more with ya. Thats absoulty true.

arnus777

good point

zubba

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

bigangrychicken

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.

daleh

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.

huntnma

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...

daleh

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?

huntnma

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....

daleh

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.