Here is another article by Mark that reflects on how important it is to have a complete year-round program. To have the best results, a management plan is limited by it’s shortcomings. Mark has implemented plans all over the southeast with fantastic success and again, we appreciate him sharing some of his thoughts.
When I design a management plan for a landowner I always stress the importance of adhering to the entire program. If you take a bucket that is full of holes and try to fill it with water, it will only fill to the lowest hole in the bucket. That’s also true for a management plan. You can’t implement bits and pieces of a management plan and expect it to work. Food plots are the new craze in wildlife management these days. Food plots are one of the tools for improving the wildlife on your property, but they are not a complete plan. If you plant food plots, but do not improve the habitat, your success will be limited. To achieve overall success you have to fill in all those holes in the bucket.
One of the properties I worked on in South Carolina was intensively managed for quail and turkeys. The combination of prescribed burns, timber management and food plots had produced a picture perfect habitat for quail and turkeys. Although the property produced fair populations of wild quail and good turkey hunting, I wasn’t satisfied with the results. I decided to implement a predator removal program. In 30 days I personally removed 53 foxes, 11 bobcats and 4 coyotes. Turkey and quail numbers showed a positive response, but still were not what I felt they should be.
The data from annual quail chick and turkey poult surveys showed they were not seeing much nesting success. In fact, the number of adult turkey hens with poults in July and August was less than 50%. There was already excellent nesting and brood rearing habitat on the property so I felt nest predators were the problem.
We implemented a nest predator removal program using just 25 wire box traps. In six months we removed over 400 coons and possums. That’s right, I said over 400 coons and possums. This means every night there were more then 400 predators searching for every quail and turkey nest they could find. It’s hard to believe there was any nesting success at all. The following year we removed over 200 more nest predators. The third year we removed approximately 100. This number will probably remain constant and is due to an influx of predators from neighboring properties. Removing numbers like this may seem cost prohibitive for many landowners, but there are several tricks to the trade that make it one of the cheapest programs you can implement.
In the two years following our initial trapping program quail and turkey numbers increased dramatically. Quail were being seen in areas of the property where they were never seen before and turkeys were everywhere in large numbers. On one rainy day I saw 92 turkeys in a ten acre field! That same year hunters harvested 42 adult gobblers from the property and the annual harvest now averages between 30 and 40 adult gobblers.
If we had settled for the current level of management on the property the landowners would never have seen numbers like these. Instead, we filled in the holes in the management plan and that property now enjoys some of the best quail and turkey hunting in all of the southeast.
Find and fix the holes in your management plan and then you can fill your bucket to the top!
Mark Buxton
Southeastern Wildlife Habitat Services
P.O. Box 95
Ehrhardt, SC 29081
mbbuxton@yahoo.com