Welcome to Wild Turkey Science, a podcast made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow.

I'm Dr. Marcus Lashley, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Florida.

And I'm Dr. Will Gulsby, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Florida. And I'm Dr. Will Gulsby, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management at Auburn University.

We're both lifelong hunters and devoted scientists who are passionate about hunting, managing, and researching wild turkeys.

In this podcast, we'll explore turkey research, speak to the experts in the field,

and address the difficult questions related to wild turkey ecology and management.

Our goal is to serve as your connection to wild turkey science.

So we're here today with Dr. Brett Collier.

He's a professor at Louisiana State University.

Does a lot of work specifically focused on wild turkeys, not only the eastern subspecies,

but has also done quite a bit of work with Rios as well.

Brett, thanks for coming on today.

Glad to be here today. Yeah, really happy to have you. And so, you know, the reason we wanted

to have you on, Brett, as we were talking about just a moment ago, is that there's been a lot of

discussion recently about density dependence and turkeys. And we've had some other guests that we've

talked to that have noted that at a statewide scale or even if you look at region wide scale, there are these patterns that emerge where it looks like, you know, during early restocking or shortly thereafter, these populations experienced a period of rapid growth. And then, you know, they're now a lot of them, at least, are stabilizing or decreasing to an extent.

Looks like somewhat of a typical density-dependent relationship.

And I know you were also a co-author on a paper several years ago with Mike Chamberlain and

Mike Byrne that talked a little bit about that topic.

Yes. Yes. Yes, yes.

So thinking back to kind of historic restoration, you know, we went from a situation where there weren't turkeys on the landscape.

They just weren't there.

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