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 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.

This is going to be a fun conversation.

So we're here today with Dr. Dwayne Elmore, who is the director of Upland-Gain-Burd research at Tall Timbers.

Did I get that right, Dway?

Yeah, I was close to that.

I knew I was going to mess it up in some way, shape, or form but um we're actually in person here at tall timbers um came down for the

georgia florida turkey invitational um excited about the dinner just going to be associated

with that tonight to kind of keep things off um but d Duane has done a tremendous amount of work

with a wide variety of Oakland game bird species.

And Duane, we're glad to have you here.

And really what we wanted to focus this conversation on today

is there's a lot of discussion going on

about the reproductive ecology and the reproductive

behaviors of wild turkeys and whether we should or shouldn't factor that into our

spring hunting season frameworks. And so kind of what we wanted to do today is disentangle that by

talking about the the wide array and diversity of reproductive strategies

that are used by various upland species and then you know use that to parley into talking about

how turkeys fit along that spectrum and and how that might, you know, management of the species.

...