Ep. 432: Wild Turkey DNA

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to onex Hunt for their support of this podcast.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: I’m your host, Lake Pickle, and.

00:00:16
Speaker 1: On today’s episode, Man, the stars line up just right as y’all have heard me say before. I love Man, I love spring turkey hunting. Everything about it, the bird, the habitat. It’s magical top to bottom. And on this episode we’re going to dive into one of the newest, one of the most fascinating, and honestly one of the most uncharted areas of turkey research and biology. And without my planning to do so, it just so happens to line up so very perfectly with what we just learned about wild turkey conservation just a few episodes back with mister Benning Harry.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: Y’all see what I mean. Let’s dive in.

00:01:09
Speaker 1: This past Saturday was Youth Turkey Opener here in Mississippi, and I had an eager young turkey hunter lined up to take to the spring Woods, which meant in the days leading up I needed to find a turkey to hunt. Now, this part of the process is honestly one of my favorite parts of the whole game. The scouting, the very first pieces of the puzzle, the added bonus of being able to break day in the woods early, and if you’re lucky, you get to hear a tall timber Gabriel sound off from his heavenly perch. I’d slipped out to this place Monday morning, and I’d heard what I believed to be three to four gobbling turkeys together in one wad, along with a gaggle of hens. Now it is important to note that wads of turkeys like this are very normal. That’s early in the spring. With the opener coming up on Saturday, I wanted to slip out there one more time early Friday morning and see if I could put ears on these turkeys one more time, to see if they were still hanging out in the general area, and to get any more information I could.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: On where they wanted to be.

00:02:09
Speaker 1: So there I was watching the dim morning light start to pour over this fresh cutover and onto the timber on the other side where I expected the turkeys to be. As the daylight began to grow, songbirds began to sing, bard owls began to state their claim across the land. The woods were coming alive, and then in eruption took place turkeys gobbling, hen’s cackling, and a symphony that seemed unplanned and in perfect harmony, all at the same time. I sat there, leaned up against a tree from my side of the cutover, and just smiled. Right where I left them, I thought to myself.

00:02:43
Speaker 2: Went out of seemingly nowhere.

00:02:45
Speaker 1: A gobbler sounded off out of the same chunk of woods that I was sitting in. Now he was still around two hundred and two hundred and fifty yards away, but I still wasn’t expecting any turkeys to be roosted in the block of woods that I was in. Not that they could be. It was just that the other side had a big creek running through it, which is a textbook ingredient of places where turkeys love to roost, and also, like I stated earlier, this time of year, they tend to be all in a watt.

00:03:13
Speaker 2: He gobbled again.

00:03:14
Speaker 1: Which confirmed I had not miscoursed him, and he was indeed roosted away from the rest of the wad and in the same woods with me. There was nothing I could do but lean into my tree and see how this unfolded, which is where this video clip I’m about to share with you comes in. I wanted to capture some of the audio of all these turkeys gobbling. I was also unsure of what this turkey roosted close to me was gonna do, so I started recording video on my phone and put it in my bioe pouch. If you couldn’t tell from the volume of that gobble, this turkey was now much closer than two hundred and fifty yards. He was more like ninety two one hundred yards. This turkey had somehow gotten separated from the rest of the wad, and now he had flown out into the cutover and again, walking gobbling and strutting across back towards all the other gobbling turkeys in the woods on the other side.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: And the path he chose to take was angling right by me.

00:04:10
Speaker 1: And I’m just out there sitting against a tree in green pants and a T shirt. I did my best to blend into the tree I was leaned against, and I watched him make his way all across there and into the woods back with all his friends.

00:04:24
Speaker 3: Is the day before youth season in Mississippi, and I’m taking a young and out tomorrow. So I came out here to scout because I’d heard some turkeys roosted in this area, so I was expecting slash, hoping to get ears on them. I was not expecting the experience I ended up having made me wish today was the opening day of youth Man. That was about as killable of a turkey as you could ever ask for. You don’t typically find long beards by themselves on March sixth, but he was. What happened ended up happened once the wade of turkeys that I had had been hearing was roosted across here. You could hear them goblin and ye opening and carry it on the other side. Somehow this guy got separated and was goblin on his own, And when he finally came out into this open and he goblin and strutted, but he was on a mission to get to those other turkeys.

00:05:21
Speaker 1: That was way cool, man.

00:05:24
Speaker 2: I love spring. That was worth waking up for it. There.

00:05:30
Speaker 1: That next morning, my youth hunter and I were right back in there. We started setting up right near to where I had that crazy scouting incident in the morning before the morning started with the same chaotic chorus off yelping, cutting, and gobbling. However, this morning, all of the turkeys were roosted on the other side, no loan gobblers. I had a sneaking suspicion that this might be the case. However, I elected to play it safe in not risk crossing that log in to b recovered cutover in the dark and risk making two truckloads of noise. After hearing the turkeys fly down, they remained vocal enough that I could tell they drifted away from the edge of the cutover and deeper into the woods. It was at this time that I felt confident that we could cross the cutover and get into the same woods that they were in. We identified a spot that would give us the most covered across and also had a small ribbon of trees left on it. It wasn’t much for hiding us walking across there, but it was enough.

00:06:23
Speaker 2: It was going to have to be.

00:06:24
Speaker 1: I owed one time before we made our trek, and two turkeys answered me. Deep in the woods on the other side, it.

00:06:30
Speaker 2: Was time to move.

00:06:31
Speaker 1: We started walking as quickly and quietly as we could until we finally made.

00:06:35
Speaker 2: It to the other side.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: These woods were of different composition than the woods we had walked from. Although separated by nothing but a few hundred yards, these were lowlands that led into a big creek bottom, and the ground was covered in Chinese privet. If you’ve ever had any dealings with Chinese privet, then you probably had the same reaction when you heard me say it as I did when I saw it. Ugh. It’s a highly problematic invasive plant, and it’s a real problem in the southeastern United States. It’s a small, slender shrub that is dense with branches and small green leaves. Now, on one hand, it was going to give us some cover to move, but on the other hand, finding a spot to set up for success was going to be extremely difficult. But the turkeys were in there, so we didn’t.

00:07:20
Speaker 2: Really have a choice.

00:07:22
Speaker 1: We slipped through the maze of privet vines and thin trunk trees until we hit a noticeable change in the woods. The big creek was now in view and on both sides, for about thirty yards was a buffer strip of more open ground and larger oak trees. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best opportunity for a setup that I had seen so far. We sat down next to a large fallen oak tree, which provided us a great cover. I told my young hunter that we would sit here and call for a bit. Even if we didn’t get an answer, this area was worth spending some time in.

00:07:55
Speaker 2: We got settled in.

00:07:56
Speaker 1: And I pulled out my slate call. I let out two soft clubs ucks and a seven note yelp. I heard the sound of my calling ring down the creek. Seconds went by, and I do mean seconds, probably less than thirty of them, when the unmistakable noise of a turkey drum fell across my ears. I could feel the hair on my neck stand up and my heart beat increase. I remember thinking to myself, surely not. We just sat down. I decided it was not worth risking exciting my young hunter over a false alarm, and I wanted to double check and see if I heard it again. In the few seconds that had passed by since I heard it, I had already began to doubt whether or not it was real. A few more seconds went by and I heard it again. This time it was undeniable. I was just about to whisper to let my hunter know, when all of the sudden, a hen started yelping loudly, and it was quickly answered by two thundering gobbles. They were no more than fifty yards away. We just couldn’t see them due to the sea of privet. The hen started yelping louder. I answered her back. She yelped again. The longbeard’s gobbled again, and they were steadily getting closer. I whispered across to get ready and that we would see them at any second. The drumming became so loud that I felt like I could hear it in syllables. I was burning my eyes through the woods trying to catch a glimpse, when finally I caught movement.

00:09:14
Speaker 2: It was a hen.

00:09:15
Speaker 1: She was twenty five yards away, yelping and looking. Shortly after, I saw a second hen, and all the while I’m still hearing drumming. I thought for sure, at any second one of them would pop up. We waited for what seemed like an eternity, watching the hens, constantly hearing drumming, when all of a sudden, one of the hens picked up and flew right over our heads and landed on the other side of the creek, just thirty yards away, and went back to yelping. The second hen followed suit. Now we had hens directly to our right, yelping on the other side of the creek, and the gobblers drumming to our left. I thought that this was going to work out perfectly. Surely they will follow where the hens went, to my dismay. Shortly after, I finally got a glimpse of the longbeards. They were crossing and headed to the creek, except they didn’t take the same path as the hens. They were about forty five yards and behind privet. They crossed a small opening, but only gave us about one to two seconds before disappearing again.

00:10:16
Speaker 2: All fell quiet.

00:10:18
Speaker 1: I yelped softly, and I heard a drum. These turkeys had been in gun range for over ten minutes now without a solid shot opportunity, and we were trying to still pull it off before they inevitably crossed the creek to go to their hens and walked out of our lives. I waited a few moments, and I yelped again, and again they drummed, but I still couldn’t see them. More minutes went by, and I finally caught sight of one of them. They were now sixty five yards away and standing right on the creek edge. One strutted one more time while the other looked around. They both hopped and glided across the creek, gobbled, and.

00:10:51
Speaker 2: Went to their hens.

00:10:53
Speaker 1: An incredible hunt, a fun hunt, but man, I sure wanted to see that youth hunter that I was with shoot one of those gobblers. Thankfully, he was in good spirits, and we have full plans to pursue those birds again because thankfully they didn’t spook.

00:11:08
Speaker 2: So all is well.

00:11:11
Speaker 1: You may be asking yourself at this point, why is this guy sharing this story? Well, the reason’s really simple. I love turkey hunting.

00:11:19
Speaker 2: A whole lot.

00:11:20
Speaker 1: In fact, I think a lot of listeners to this podcast feed love turkey hunting a lot as well, and appreciate a good turkey story, even if it doesn’t end with one getting carried out over someone’s shoulder. But I do think a lot of the listeners to this podcast feed enjoy hearing about a topic that directly impacts the future of turkeys getting carried out over someone’s shoulder.

00:11:40
Speaker 2: Did that even make sense?

00:11:41
Speaker 1: I’ve been told sometimes I try to get too cute with my words and sentences and it just ends up being hard to follow.

00:11:46
Speaker 2: Basically, what I’m saying is.

00:11:48
Speaker 1: I think a lot of y’all care about the future of turkeys and turkey hunting, and so does the guest on today’s show, Doctor Mike Chamberlain, the infamous wild turkey doc. The man is straight up famous in the world of wild turkey science and research, and in this episode we’re talking about one of his newest and honestly one of his most fascinating endeavors. And quick disclaimer. When we scheduled this interview, I fully expected us to get some really cool and fascinating information. What I did not expect was how perfectly all this would line up with the Saving Wild Turkeys episode we recently did with mister Benny Herring.

00:12:23
Speaker 2: Y’all will see what I mean.

00:12:25
Speaker 1: Where did the idea come from to do the turkey DNA project that you’re doing now?

00:12:31
Speaker 4: Yes, so, basically I was collaborating with Phil of Reskie at University of Texas at El Paso on some turkey genetic irrespective of wild turkey DNA, We’re doing a lot of work with using eggshell membranes from hatched clutches to look at the sex of the polt, to look at relatedness within the clutches, identifying instances of where there’s multi paternity, where you have more than one time, that’s fertilizing clutches. And basically I had tapped into fills knowledge, and I was familiar with duck DNA, you know, the Sister or Brother project, and I knew kind of how they were doing that project, you know, citizen science driven using duck hunters. And I saw a social media post with an odd looking turkey in it, and there were all these statements in the social media post about it. It’s a domestic bird, it’s this, it’s that, like definitive statements.

00:13:25
Speaker 3: Sure.

00:13:26
Speaker 4: And I’ve always been interested in color phases of wild turkeys and I have long wanted to do a range wide genetic study since two thousand and two when the last one was done. This is something I’ve wanted to do, and I didn’t have the vehicle to do it. And it hit me on Super Bowl Sunday last year. I texted Phil and I said, let me ask you a question. I was like, if I got you a piece of tissue like you do for ducks, like a tongue or a piece of brast or whatever, could you tell me if it’s a wild bird or not. And he one hundred percent. I was like, do you have five minutes for a call? And that took two hours. We got on the phone and no alcohol was involved. We got on the phone and it came around to what if we did wild turkey DNA, like we’ve done duck DNA. Well, this was you know, this was February and turkey seasons right around the corner. So I had two options. I could try to put together a huge project right out of the box evaluating range wide genetics. But I feared if I did that, I’d fail, And so we decided to start with the odd plumage turkeys and we figured, okay, we can get enough funding together to maybe process seventy five samples. Let’s start a project call wild Turkey DNA, and let’s ask connors to send us samples if they kill a weird looking turkey, no kidding. The next day was Monday. I had a cooperative framework outlined. I called a friend who runs a private foundation to see if they would provide some funding. I reached out to NWTF leadership asked if they would provide some funding, do you agree to provide some funding? I gave some funding through the Wild Turkey Lab at the University of Georgia and within two weeks we had a logo and we had a project launched.

00:15:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it came.

00:15:29
Speaker 4: Together really quickly, and to be honest with you, man, I never expected it. We were overwhelmed with samples. We had to turn away hundreds of samples that hunters reached out to us, and we just didn’t have the resources to process all of the data. And it was very humbling to see the Turkey hunting community be that interested in this and it allowed me, frankly, it allowed us, I say me, It allowed us to capture some attention, generated some buzz, some publicity, and get our legs under us to launch this broader effort this year. And we you know, DU already had this the infrastructure in case they knew how to do this. We just had to model it similarly, and we had to we had to do some things differently for a while Turkey DNA, but being able to rely on DU’s expertise and history was super cool. And to be able to link NWTF with DU in a partnership that I thought was really charismatic and cool. And yeah, it’s exploded since then and this convention. I have been asked ten thousand questions about this project, and that is so cool to me that turkey hunters see value at it.

00:16:49
Speaker 1: I remember the first time hearing about a quote color phase turkey getting killed close to where I grew up. It was a smoke phase and it happened when I was in high school, and the news of that swept across Rankin County, Mississippi, like Piland covering a windshield in March. Many of you out there have probably had similar experiences. But have you ever thought to wonder what causes a turkey to exhibit these unorthodox colors? What does it mean? What are the implications? Is there a bigger story here? I think there might be.

00:17:19
Speaker 4: To be honest with you, some of the things that we observed before we ever started the project is ultimately where I wanted this to go, and I’ll explain. So, we were seeing and are seeing instances in some of our populations that were capturing birds and marking birds of very low genetic diversity.

00:17:38
Speaker 1: And when you get very low.

00:17:40
Speaker 4: Genetic diversity, the population is less resilient. You see higher inbreeding potential, and when you see higher inbreeding potential, there’s reproductive consequences to that when you start seeing low genetic diversity there, you would expect birds to be less productive. And as you know, throughout broad areas of the southeast and Midwest we’ve seen ongoing population declines for many years.

00:18:09
Speaker 1: Well now back up, most everybody knows that concern around Turkey population declines have been a big typic of discussion in recent years. But are we about to find out that this Turkey DNA project might provide some answers there. If so, this is an even bigger story than I thought.

00:18:30
Speaker 4: I get paid to turn stones. That’s what I get paid to do as a researcher. And the way I looked at this is if this is a stone I can turn that offers at least a even just a tiny partial explanation for some of the issues we’ve seen, then it’s worth turning the stone. And so as we’ve collected more data, we are continuing to see these perplexing signatures in some of our population.

00:19:00
Speaker 1: Because what I had to do when.

00:19:02
Speaker 4: We started getting these odd plumage bird samples, we don’t know what they are. We have to have comparatiss and right, so we have to have reference samples. So all the birds my trapping crews have caught all the birds that have been caught in Louisiana or Tennessee or Kentucky by colleagues Nebraska. I started reaching out to colleagues in the same space and saying, Hey, could I borrow your samples? You could I take one drop of blood from your vials that are frozen or you already analyzed yours. Can I use what you found because you’re using the same techniques we are. And I built a large reference set and that allowed us to start identifying, Okay, that’s a bird that looks odd, but it’s one hundred percent wild. And so now what we’re doing is we’re actually isolating the genes that control plumage color so that we can nail down how did this bird get to look like this particularly, And there’s there’s several routes. You can get an odd looking turkey. You can you can get a wild bird that’s one hundred percent wild that has certain traits, you know, certain gene sequences, combinations. You can have a wild bird that crosses with a domestic bird, or you could have a wild bird that either crosses with a heritage turkey, which is a turkey that’s created by breeding domestic tests to wild birds, or you could just have a heritage turkey that escapes somebody’s.

00:20:37
Speaker 1: Properties, somebody’s tractors, supply it gets shot by a hunter.

00:20:40
Speaker 4: And we’ve seen all of that. We’ve seen all of that and the results, and now we’re trying to understand what are the consequences of that. When you when you have these recessive or these odd traits in a population, particularly if they’re one hundred, if they’re fully wild birds, and they’re expressing these genes in this way through this odd plumage, what does that mean? Is it a problem? Is it linked to low diversity? Is it linked to inbreeding? And that’s where we’re now headed because and you’ll see this in the upcoming weeks, we are going to start sharing some results from birds that quite frankly, have been have stumped us.

00:21:21
Speaker 1: This is so fascinating to me, especially all the different routes in which a turkey can take to end up with an odd color phase.

00:21:28
Speaker 2: But what does it mean? If anything?

00:21:30
Speaker 1: I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface here and there’s a whole lot more to find out. And heads up, Remember how I’ve been saying that the stars lined up just right on this one. And this pairs up so well with our episode with mister Benny Herring and how we relocated turkeys. Well, we’re about to find out why.

00:21:47
Speaker 4: When social media exploded, that’s when you started seeing really weird looking turkeys pop up, and they were getting a lot of attention. And I would look at some of those and go, I’m not convinced that’s a wild turkey. And and I’ll and I’m not gonna let the cat out of the bag. But some of the birds that were submitted this year or last year, I one hundred percent said that is not a wild turkey. And Katie would send me the pictures and say, do we want a sample from this bird? Because that’s how it worked, and I would respond to her and go, yeah, we definitely want one. I even responded by emails several times said I pretty much know what that is, but let’s get a sample.

00:22:34
Speaker 1: I’ve been wrong about. Oh there’s something that you thought were not Wow, one hundred percent, and that stuff’s going to come out pretty soon. Wow one hundred percent.

00:22:42
Speaker 4: They were birds that were submitted that I thought there’s no way that’s a wild turkey. And they are fully wild, one hundred percent wild.

00:22:48
Speaker 1: That’s crazy, yep.

00:22:49
Speaker 4: And what we figured out is there’s multiple ways to get.

00:22:53
Speaker 1: A turkey to look the same.

00:22:56
Speaker 4: In other words, there’s multiple routes to get two birds that look the same that have a different background or origin. And so it’s because of the genes that were isolating that control plumage. And so I didn’t know any of that. I was ignorant to all of that. And to you know, quote phill of Rescue, we talk about this all the time. He’s like, turkey genetics are so much more complex than duct genetics that it really just kind of blows your mind. And part of that is traced back to our restoration activities. When we were translocating birds all over North America. We were introducing novel genetics into populations through our trap and transports activities. And what we were also doing, which is an important thing that you don’t often think about, is we were going in and capturing flocks and moving them. Right, That’s how it worked. You know, a state biologist or game ward and would fire rocket net over ten hens and three jakes. I’m just pulling that number out of the air, and that all those birds would be boxed and they would be driven to the next state or to ten counties away and released on your dad’s farm or whatever.

00:24:09
Speaker 1: Sure.

00:24:10
Speaker 4: Well, now what we know about wild turkeys is most of those birds in that flock were related to one another, and some of them were siblings. For instance, those three jakes were all brothers. Yeah, so if you had ten hens and six of them were related to one another, then you moved an inbred unit to create your population. And so instead of the population exploding and genetically the numbers may have exploded because you released them into a habitat that was vacant, predators weren’t keyed in on them.

00:24:47
Speaker 1: They went nuts.

00:24:48
Speaker 4: Population expanded really rapidly, but genetically the population was eroding very slowly.

00:24:55
Speaker 1: We were introducing novel genetics into populations through trap and train and sport activities, and we were going in and capturing flocks that we now know were related. This is highly relevant information. It’s fascinating information. And look, I want to throw out a quick disclaimer. I myself, doctor Chamberlain, and probably any wildlife biologists that you would talk to would tell you that we still celebrate the successful efforts of the earlier generations of conservationists to trap and relocate turkeys in this country. It is largely in part as to why we still have them around to enjoy and hunt. No one would ever take anything away from that. The point we’re trying to make here now is that we now know that many of those flocks that were moved were likely related, which meant we were setting these turkeys up for a future of low genetic diversity. But again, what does that really mean going forward? Let’s find out.

00:25:50
Speaker 4: This is just a hypothesis at this point. Yeah, but we are wondering whether that’s part of what we’ve seen across parts of the species range that the decline, as you know, the decline has been very slow, gradual, and we’re wondering if this is part, not all, but part of an explanation for that, is that these populations have been eroding from a genetic standpoint as a consequence of just kind of how we conducted business back then, versus say like if you look like out West, as you know, you go out West, and their turkeys came from all over the place, and we’re released in states like Idaho, in California and just literally it was a hodgepodge turkeys came from everywhere, versus in the East where the restoration focused on using the eastern subspecies like Mississippi.

00:26:51
Speaker 1: The restoration came from like three key places. Yes, yes, so that would lend to exactly what you’re talking about, potentially.

00:27:00
Speaker 4: Some fascinating Some states actually didn’t use birds from out of state.

00:27:05
Speaker 1: They only used birds from in state.

00:27:09
Speaker 4: New York and South Carolina are two examples where they just took birds. It’s called serial translocation. They just took birds from within their own state and kept going back to those same sources and moving them.

00:27:21
Speaker 1: Huh.

00:27:22
Speaker 4: And so is their potential that that is part of the issue that you basically moved the same maternal lines to everywhere. And now what’s happened through time as you kind of see this degradation if you will, and genetic diversity and potential, And is that some missing piece of the decline that we didn’t understand.

00:27:47
Speaker 1: You may have turned over a big stone.

00:27:50
Speaker 4: We’ll see. And I said that, you know, and I appreciate the compliment. I’m about the metaphor, but that’s the way I see it. I get up every day and I’m to turn stones as a researcher. That’s what I mean, that’s what I’m charged with doing. If you turn the same stone over every time and you don’t get the answer, you got to turn different stones. And so you know, I’ve been studying movement and behavior and habitat use and all these you know, gobbling activity and all these things, and I’m interested in all of that. But i still don’t have the answer that I wanted, and I’m not retiring until I get it.

00:28:27
Speaker 1: So good to know. I have so much respect for doctor Chamberlain and the tenacity he approaches his work in research with. I think turkeys and turkey hunters should be thrilled that we have folks like him around. But we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of this yet.

00:28:42
Speaker 4: Let’s keep going back to what I said earlier. When we started seeing these signatures in the genetic stat it’s like, man, that’s perplexing.

00:28:50
Speaker 1: I wonder if that’s just a thing on.

00:28:52
Speaker 4: This study site, right, Is it just this site in Georgia for instance, that we’re seeing this and we still already looking at our other population. It’s like, no, this is yeah, this is more widespread. So yeah, yeah, that’s that’s kind of where we are areas of low genetic diversity. Was there like any known ways that that could happen prior to this hypothesis that it could be like, because and how does that happen outside of that? Yeah, so, unlike say quail or grouse, turkeys are already kind of predisposed to having relatively lower genetic diversity within an area because of their social structure. You know, you’ve got a flock that has dominant individuals within it. We know this for sure that dominant individuals produced most of the poltse in a population, both hens and toms. We’ve seen and published this recently, very strong what’s called reproductive skew, meaning a fairly small segment of your times are producing a lot of the polts. We see that dominant hens who are nesting earlier are more successful and they produce more polts. And so you already have a bird that, because of its social structure and it’s dominance hierarchies, kind of lends itself to having a few individuals be a significant part of the productivity in the population. And if you you know, you see flocks, they they split up and they go back to the same areas every year to breed. Right, they have really strong fidelity to their breeding sites, and that kind of lends itself to this. As you know, as a turkey owner, you have pockets of turkeys. You don’t have turkeys everywhere, and so I think turkeys just kind of lend themselves naturally to having, you know, relatively lower genetic diversity. And what we’re what we may be seeing is that because we’re losing habitat and population have declined, that instead of having flocks adjacent to each other that periodically might mingle, you truly have in some situations isolated flocks that are not individuals, are not dispersing in or out. It’s the same group of turkeys on these five farms for the last.

00:31:20
Speaker 1: Decade, and you’re not having some random gobblers show up and breed with the hen that’s you know, brand new.

00:31:26
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that we the GPS data clearly shows that we don’t see male We don’t see jake’s going a long distance from the year they’re one year old to they’re two years old. They may literally move over to the next farm, they may go a mile down the road or whatever, and we don’t see juvenile hens. They they’re the disperser in turkeys, the young females are, but they’re not going like fifty miles or something. They’re they’re going to the adjacent home range or maybe a few miles down the road. And that’s part of the that’s part of the issue as well.

00:31:59
Speaker 1: So turkeys are actually vulnerable to having low genetic diversity. I can honestly say I have never thought of that before, But after hearing doctor Chamberlain explain it, I got to say, it makes sense. He’s asking some big and important questions, and personally, I’m awful glad he’s digging into this.

00:32:17
Speaker 4: Yeah, And if you think about it, when they split up out of their winter flocks, and let’s say you have you know, you have twenty hens that are in a winter flock, and they split up to go breed. You got four groups of five, let’s say, and they kind of blow up and go some come to your farm, some gonna go to my farm.

00:32:35
Speaker 1: Well, what we’ve.

00:32:35
Speaker 4: Found is within that group of say five hens, there’s usually only one juvenile hen, right, And in some cases that juvenile hen is related to one of the other hens in the group, probably her daughter, right, But in a lot of cases they’re not. And so if you think about it, through time. As our populations are producing fewer young turkeys, right, sure, reproduction is declining. The probability that you would have these breeding groups have no juveniles in them increases.

00:33:11
Speaker 1: They’re all adults.

00:33:13
Speaker 4: So you’ve got a group of five hens, and hen survival is about seventy percent per year. So let’s just say you get a few bad years of productivity and those five hens go from five to four to three, maybe even down to two. And now when they drag that tom to your farm, the reason there’s not two or three or four toms is because there’s only one or two hens that are going.

00:33:41
Speaker 1: To that breeding area.

00:33:44
Speaker 4: At what point does the group get small enough to where and there’s no juveniles in it, nobody knows to go to your farm. At some point does the fact that they just disappeared? Is it an artifact of because there’s been less production, there’s no institutional knowledge to come to your farm and suddenly they’re gone. And I think that is a plausible explanation for what I see on some places I’ve hunted. That sure, they went from we had a lot to we had a lot fewer, to where we had very few, to where we have none. And I can take you to properties right now that I haven’t had a turkey, a hen turkey in the spring, or a gobble in four or five years, whereas twenty years ago, I could take you to those farms we were going to hear some turkeys, and so many you talked to. We talked to dozens and dozens of people that have the same scenario.

00:34:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could take you to places like that that I know of. I’ve heard those same stories that. Man, I don’t know, they just kind of slowly trickled away. We don’t know what happened. You know, we’re still trying to burn. We’re still trying to do this.

00:34:56
Speaker 4: We’re doing the right things, right, Yeah, and I’m not seeing any effect.

00:35:00
Speaker 1: Yep.

00:35:02
Speaker 4: Interesting, And I just wander back to the turning every stone. Yeah, is anything genetically related? Has does that have anything to do with this? And if it has some partial explanation then it I want to know what that?

00:35:15
Speaker 1: What that is? What if any of these hypotheses are true? What if genetics do play a key role in some of these scenarios. Doctor Chamberlain is laying out fascinating stuff to think about. Say the least I want to ask doctor Chamberlain more about getting some of these oddballs samples in. You get you get sent one of these samples, you test it and it comes back that it is has some sort of domestic you know, non wild turkey. What are the what could the implications of that be?

00:35:50
Speaker 4: Okay, So what we’ve seen so far, and that’s a great question. What we’ve seen so far is there appear to me multiple scenarios that are getting those genetics into our flocks. We’re not seeing instances where there’s like the turkey you’d get at Costco, those genetics are not out there. It is situations where heritage turkeys are either being introduced, released, or escaping into wild flocks and breeding with those with wild birds and producing hybrid offspring. That’s one route. Some of the situations we’re seeing are they’re fully heritage birds that are being harvested by hunters that have that are not wired at all. They’re heritage birds. But now we’re trying to understand, Okay, does that matter at all? Does it matter that those that those genes have been introduced to our population and how prevalent is it?

00:36:52
Speaker 1: Because this year.

00:36:53
Speaker 4: We we got targeted samples. Right, if the hunter you know, the hunter shot a bird he thought it looked odd. Well, now what we’re seeing is these traits can lay dormant in turkeys for several generations, And so what if those genes are in other birds they’re just not expressed, But we won’t know that until we expand.

00:37:16
Speaker 1: Our sampling effort.

00:37:18
Speaker 4: You know, when you start looking for things, right, when you start testing for things, you know, the CWD example. When you start testing, sometimes you end up finding that something is more pervasive than you thought it was. And why I won’t go into that debate, but the bottom line is we’re wondering as we expand our sampling, do we have some pockets of this, you know, where these genes are more problematic and if so, does that even matter at all?

00:37:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn’t matter, like is it causing a problem? Yep.

00:37:51
Speaker 4: And on the flip side, we’ve already identified what appears to be scenarios where there are truly why one hundred percent wild turkeys that have very distinct plumage that is identical from bird to bird. They look the same, which makes complete sense because how many of us look at a hen turkey and think, oh, I can see the difference between her and her plumage and her plumage they all look the same. So there does appear to be scenarios where we have these these really odd looking birds that are one hundred percent wild, And then the question becomes, how did that happen? Is that an inbreeding issue? Literally, like, is it just a perfect storm? Is it the you know, the canary and the coal mine kind of thing, or is this a sign of something that we need to be more concerned with. And that’s where we’re headed, and we don’t know, we don’t have the answer yet. It’s going to take us. It’s going to take us some time. And I was talking to somebody, multiple people about this. If you look at the data that we’ve already collect across all of our study sites, there is very clear signatures in the Turkey genetics world. For instance, birds in the Great Lakes are genetically different than birds in the southeast south central United States. And so phil as he’s gone and clustered these birds based on similar genetic signatures, it’s very clear that there’s clustering at the landscape scale as you’d expect. You know, birds in the Northeast are a little different than birds in the upper Midwest. Oh yeah, they’re all a little different than the Southeast. But then when you zoom in on clusters of samples within a region, you’re also seeing very fine scale structuring. And what I mean by that is there’s a clump of individuals that are related. There’s a clump, there’s a clump, and in between those clumps is dead space. And what that implies is that that within a population there’s finer scale structuring, meaning there’s a lack of gene flow from flock to flock to flock. Back to what we talked about a few minutes ago, that maybe these flocks aren’t mixing the way that we think they would. You know, turkeys are mobile, they walk around, they walk.

00:40:21
Speaker 1: Anywhere they want.

00:40:22
Speaker 4: And while we do see, you know, extraordinary examples of hens that you know, move a long ways, like the hen we had and I posted on social media last year that went.

00:40:31
Speaker 1: I saw that eighty six miles and crazy.

00:40:35
Speaker 4: Went from Nebraska to Colorado and stayed there.

00:40:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, y’all tagged a duck on it.

00:40:40
Speaker 4: Yeah, but we don’t see that. That’s that’s very very strange. And so to the to your question is you know, maybe maybe this finer scale structuring is part of just their natural ecology, their natural behavior.

00:40:56
Speaker 1: That’s got that’s gonna be My question was like, do we know that’s a bad thing or did It’s is the question mark right now?

00:41:01
Speaker 4: It’s a question mark, and then it you know, the question becomes and we Phil and I were talking about this a little while ago. I think what we’re going to see is that we’re going to we’re going to find some places in certain states that the flag is thrown that there’s going to be some situations like we’ve already seen in some of our data right now, that there are some places in certain states where the inbreeding coefficient is high enough that you would be concerned it’s a problem that yes, that it’s hot. We’ve already seen this. We have some populations that I’ve been studying for years where the inbreeding, the levels of inbreeding are high enough that they are at levels where you would expect to see reproductive consequences where essentially every bird in the in the in these flocks are our cousins at least.

00:42:00
Speaker 1: That can’t be good.

00:42:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so we’re curious, is that just a thing in a few pockets or is it more pervasive and widespread, and until we expand the sampling, we don’t know, but we suspect what we’ll see is that, yeah, there are some pockets that maybe we need to be concerned about. And if so, you know, we give this the data to the tow state agencies and then they react to it. But then the question becomes, if we can do that and we end up seeing that, what do you do about it?

00:42:31
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, what do what would you even begin to do about it?

00:42:35
Speaker 4: Uh? The logical outcome would be that you introduced birds into those populations.

00:42:41
Speaker 1: Try to bring in some new genetics. Yep.

00:42:43
Speaker 4: I was. I was talking to the to a group yesterday about this. Is when restoration was proceeding. It was just let’s get turkeys and move turkeys.

00:42:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well they were trying to do domestic turkeys before that. Yeah yeah, yeah, it was like, what do we gotta do?

00:42:58
Speaker 4: Yeah? And so I think we’re you know, technologies advanced. Now we can see the signatures of the source populations in our current populations. We can predict with certainty how many individuals of each sex would need to be introduced into a population. Once we know effective population sizes, we can predict how many animals you need to move and what their genetics need to look like to increase genetic diversity, to get it above where you know, where we’re concerned about it. Yeah, So I think if we ever had to go back down that road, and not saying we will, but if we did, we have the tools now to be much more surgical.

00:43:45
Speaker 1: You could be like way precisely, very.

00:43:47
Speaker 4: Precise and surgical with it, which would be I think necessary in the world we live in because the days of restoration are gone. The world was a very different place. Moving animals across state lines was It wasn’t simple, but it required NWTF and state agencies to collaborate, and it required a lot of effort. And in many cases that’s not going to be practical right now with all the interstate transport issues and disease transmission issues. The science community is going to have to be much more surgical when we inform agencies. And I actually have the restoration records in my office on campus and it’s you know, state by state folders, and you open up some of the folders and there will literally be a letter of you know, of a handwritten letter or typed letter, dot matrix printer or something with a signature from somebody, for instance, James Earl Kennemer saying as prior agreement, i’vened, we’ve arranged to get forty pheasants and we’re going and in return you need to provent twelve hen turkeys or whatever. And so it was literally a you know, barter in trade system. And I love hit the history of the turkey, particularly science, and I go back and I don’t have time for this, and my life’s so busy, but I literally will take a break at work sometimes and just go in and pick a state, just open the folder and start flipping through until I see a letter, because I know the letter is going to be gold. It’s going to be a correspondence about who’s getting what and trading for what. And I just see that as so fascinating.

00:45:33
Speaker 1: Y’all know how much I love hearing about the old school conservation stories. I think it’s just so cool and it adds so much to the appreciation that we should all have for the hunting and wildlife that we get to enjoy today. So hearing doctor Chamberlain bring up some of that old stuff and actually be able to reference it, find inspiration in it, and then use it for some of the work he’s doing today, Well, that’s just too cool. I want to ask doctor Chamberlain a more broad question, what about the greater future of turkey hunting.

00:46:06
Speaker 4: Turkey hunters are, to a man or woman, regardless of their perspective, regardless of what gun they shoot, what amo they shoot what, they all want the same thing in their heart. They all want sustainable turkeys.

00:46:19
Speaker 1: They want to be able to.

00:46:20
Speaker 4: Hunt turkeys, and they want the kids to hunt turkeys. And if you told the average hunter, would you support something that is going to help sustain turkeys. If you find somebody that says no, that I don’t want to be around them, yeah, I mean that’s not who we are.

00:46:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, because to your point. And I think I made this illustration to somebody one day. I’m curious fore you’d agree with it or not. Someone we were talking about a similar thing and they said, they said, every turkey hunter wants, you know, more long beards at the end of their barrel. And I said, they they do. Don’t get me wrong, they do. I think overall more of them are interested to be able to go out and hear one in the morning. Yes, that out ways the gun the turkey at the end of the barrel.

00:47:02
Speaker 4: Yes, and research has shown that hearing a gobling turkey is the primary determinant of hunter satisfaction. If we know we’re in the game, that’s what matters. Yeah, you know, when you go out there and don’t hear something, it’s it’s a gut punch, it’s deflating. When if you know you’re going to hear a turkey, your step is a lot Crisper, I completely agree with you. I think if you particularly, I see this particularly with turkey hunters my age and older that have seen the days when you could hear twenty I can remember as a grad student hearing so many turkeys that I didn’t even know which direction to turn, Like I can remember I could take you to places in Mississippi Delta that in nineteen ninety three, I was paralyzed. I didn’t know what to do. They were everywhere, there were turkeys gobbling everywhere.

00:47:57
Speaker 1: And I’ve seen that.

00:47:59
Speaker 4: And then I saw the population crash, and I saw it get to where you couldn’t hear a turkey, and in states that I see it starting to recover, and I’m hopeful, I’m optimistic. I don’t ever want to go back.

00:48:15
Speaker 1: To where I’m not hearing them.

00:48:17
Speaker 4: So and I think old older turkey hunters that have seen those days the nineties, I think we all know we’ll never get back there. But if we can get back to a point where I’m going to hear goblin turkey, then we I think we’ve won the battle at that point.

00:48:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s the that’s the goal, man. Yeah. Then knowing they’re out there, hearing them, knowing they’re on the landscape, that’s that’s that’s.

00:48:43
Speaker 4: It for me as a turkey hunting community. We have to keep that in mind that our goal needs to be at least one goal needs to be that there needs to be a turkey hunter that replaces us because hunters in general, is this the audience of this podcast. No, we’re the minority everywhere and turkey hunters. If we’re not replacing ourselves at a minimum, who’s going to speak up and champion for this bird?

00:49:12
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:49:12
Speaker 4: Fifty years from now?

00:49:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know it’s funny, man. I didn’t think that I would be able to draw back to mister Benny’s interview so much talking to you. But it’s cool how it’s worked out.

00:49:21
Speaker 4: Just supposed to work out like that.

00:49:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, I think it’s it’s perfect. But I was asking mister Bennie, you know, because a lot of things you’re about today you talk, you hear about, you know, places you know, so many hunters and public land spots getting crowded and this, that and the other. And I asked him, I said, would you with the turkey relocation the restockings, or with the turkey restoration and restocking been nearly as successful in Mississippi if you didn’t have these hunters in private landowners I worked with you. You said no, Yeah, he said, they would have hung on on public land, because we were doing on public land as well, but to the degree where it’s at statewide right now, I said, it would have been impossible. And I brought up the overcrowded thing, and he said, as long as you have hunters interested in turkey on, there’s going to be turkeys around. And it’s as simple as that. Yeah, as simple as that. Yep. Yeah.

00:50:13
Speaker 4: We we just have to harness, you know, our love for the bird and try to seek ways to, you know, make sure our landscapes are functioning as well as they can hide, you know, whether it’s habitat management, managing our own activities. I mean, I agree with that. I think as long as there are people like us that have a true passion for the bird and chasing it, that we’ll have wild turkeys.

00:50:41
Speaker 1: Man, I tell you, I can’t sum it up any better than that. As long as we have people who have a true passion for the bird and hunting it and rest assured, turkeys will be around. And hey, maybe this wild Turkey DNA stuff will shine a light on some critical information.

00:50:56
Speaker 2: Who knows.

00:50:57
Speaker 1: I can confidently say we have the right man on the job. If you want to follow along with some of the cool work they’re doing or potentially sign up to be a part, be sure to check them out at wild TURKEYDNA dot com. That’s wild Turkey dna dot com. You can also follow along with them on Facebook, Instagram, and x just search wild Turkey DNA. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this country life. And I know I say it all the time, but it sure does mean a lot to all of us that all you find folks continue to tune in a week after week. If you like this episode, send it to a friend this week. Maybe one that’s jonesing for some new Spring Turkey content, and stick around because there’s a whole lot more on the way