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.

All right, so kind of, you know, what we wanted to cover today is we've already recorded like an introductory level predation podcast, right?

Right.

And in that podcast, we talked about a couple of studies that did show some positive impacts of predator control on turkey populations but when we talked about it after the fact we didn't necessarily feel like we gave

you guys quite enough details yeah i think there there's a lot of stuff about those studies that

we want to talk about uh to clarify and and give better context on.

Also, we wanted to broaden it outside of talking about turkeys specifically to some of the broader literature base because there's some valuable stuff in that as well.

One thing that I kind of wanted to start with is I don't think we have done it enough

justification that the fact of the matter is there are a lot of people that are out there

that own property or managing turkey populations that are using predator trapping

as part of their toolbox and a lot of those people swear about it yeah like that you know they have a lot

of turkeys and they're attributing that at least in part and sometimes by and large to trapping

yes the nest predators and other predators of turkeys.

And I think we need to give a fair account of that,

that this is a practice that's being used pretty widely.

It's definitely widely talked about.

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