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 Goolsby, 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. Oiling up the machine, I'm ready, you know. Marathon time. Marathon time. Yeah, so we've got a big block set aside today to record and we're going to try to knock some out. So, you know, after that episode last week, I guess we both had a little bit of guilt, you know, recording like every Thursday for an episode that Charlotte has to produce for Monday. Yeah. Well, we're just keeping her on her toes, you know. I'm sure she'll appreciate that. Yeah. Is that something you learn in a professional development seminar? What? To keep your... Keep your voice on her toes. Yeah. All right. I've never been to one, so I don't know. So, I never would have guessed. Come on now. So what are we talking about today? Well, I thought you came with the information. Oh, I was supposed to? I was supposed to prepare? No, you know, we're getting a lot of questions and thanks everybody that commented. Yeah, we got a... We got quite a few messages. Yeah, we got a bunch in a variety of different platforms and ways. Yeah, through emails and DMs and comments and everything, you know, in various places. And it seems like a lot of folks are kind of switching focus, like we talked about, to food plots, and there is some strong interest from our listenership to hear, you know, more about how they might change their food plotting to benefit turkeys. Yeah. So, and we challenged you, I think, on the air. Well, to be fair, we went after Craig first. Yeah. So, we were trying to get Craig to come on to do a couple, and we can't work that out just yet. So, you did a deep dive on the food plot topic. Yes, I did a deep dive. And what resource do you think I used on that? Well, I'm sure that Harper's book was one of the major ones. I've got to give credit where it's due because, I mean, what better resource, right? It's a phenomenal book. It really is. Yeah. I mean, I just don't know where else to turn for a deep dive on food plots. You know, I read some online articles too, like NDA in particular has done a really good job of producing articles on food plot species profiles for a long time, so they've got some really good information from knowledgeable individuals too. And I pulled some information from there, but this is also, I feel like, one of those topics that if you try to cover every species and every planting, it just becomes too cumbersome, you know? Yeah. It'd be overwhelming. So, I really just kind of tried to kind of stick to the basics on it. It's not going to be comprehensive, but I think, you know, we can give you ideas for plantings that will accomplish nearly all of your turkey-related objectives. Yeah. That's good. I think, so are you thinking that we should go into food plot preparation and then even seed blends and planting rates? Well, I didn't specifically, you know, make notes on like seedbed prep and all that kind of stuff, but I figured it was something that you and I would probably, you know, just cover at least the high points on before we started out. Yeah. I'm happy to do that. So, test your soil. Let's start there. Test your dirt. Yeah. Yeah. That one, in my experience, that is rarely done by the average food plotter. Yeah. I think it's becoming more common because, I mean, everywhere you turn where people are doing some sort of content about food plots, which is pretty common. I mean, we've got a lot of industry players and... Yeah. There's way more focus on that than native habitat management. Yeah. So, like, there's a ton of resources out there and a lot of them are really good information. So, more people are testing now, you think? Yeah. I've kind of gotten that perception, or maybe it's because when I'm going and working with landowners, especially more recently, a lot of them have already been pretty advanced. Yeah. And I'm getting the perception that people are starting to take that more seriously. Yeah. I mean, it is really a low-cost, low-investment thing, and there's potentially a huge reward by making sure that you amend the soils appropriately to suit the plants that you're interested in. Yeah. You want them to grow well if you're going to plant them. Yeah. And also, you know, how many people are just throwing out 300 pounds of triple 10 or, you know, whatever? Right. You know, it varies some, but it's usually 300 or 400 pounds of triple 10 or triple 10 or something like that. I'll raise my hand and say that I've done it. Oh, yeah. Like, I've put down both lime and fertilizer without soil test results before. Yeah. And I have too. There's opportunity there to save some money potentially, especially when fertilizer costs are real high, and nitrogen, you know, can be quite expensive sometimes. Absolutely. The most convincing thing for me, and I think a lot of other people will find it helpful as well, is just Google an image search, right, and say, like, fertilized versus unfertilized food plot. And, you know, there should be plenty of images online. You can't find one, I can send you one, but a picture is worth a thousand words in this case. Like, when you see, and you think about it, like, if you don't lime and fertilize, you've still spent a significant amount of time and money to plant that. So, if you're going to do it, you might as well do it right, because it sucks to spend that much time and money planting and then just have a poor crop. Yeah. I mean, then it's just wasted, right? So, you know, if you have a budget that you're trying to hold to, it'd probably be better to reduce acreage and do the acres correctly than, you know, than to overstretch. Another thing, one of my former students worked with me and Bronson Strickland on a project related to food plots, and we did some cool diet selection stuff. Jacob Dykes, during his master's, he's now an extension specialist at Texas A&M, so he's gotten a Ph.D. and is in a similar role as I am. He did some really cool stuff with food plots where we looked at a variety of species and diet selection, and that's what people probably heard about. We have some videos on YouTube, and we've talked about it on Deere University before. But we did another experiment, I don't know if we've done any outreach content on it, but it's directly relevant to what we're saying here, because he took the same plant species and then manipulated the soil amendments. And what we were trying to accomplish is basically manipulating the quality of the plants and the biomass, and then trying to measure deer diet selection in response to it. Yeah, see if Brow's preference changed. Right. But we were able to, and we were doing that very specifically for the purpose of testing a hypothesis related to phosphorus. And that's exactly what we found in that research paper that we published. That study, we showed pretty convincingly that diet selection for that species was really well predicted by the phosphorus content of the plant, which was being affected by the soil amendments. Wow. That's really cool. Yeah. But, you know, the take-home message of all that science, if we break it down to how it matters for somebody that wants to plant a food plot, Deere preferred the amended plots. Sid, did y'all look, I know you looked at preference. Did you look to see if any of the other nutritional components of the forages changed? Yeah. Like any of the macro or micronutrients? We did look at a few, and actually, no, I say a few, I think that he did a panel of 13 macro and micronutrients in that study. Phosphorus was the main one that responded? That was driving the response, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And that's also the, you know, it was really, not comparable, complementary, this is the word I was looking for, it was really complementary to his other study because we were trying to figure out what was driving diet selection, and we found this really clear relationship, which we called the nutrient balance hypothesis, I think is what we framed it as. But basically, it's this idea that Deere could exceed nutrient levels, like intake of some nutrients where they become toxic, trying to maximize the intake of other nutrients that might be in limitation. And because of that, they sort of had this upper and lower threshold that they're trying to stay between. So they're selecting, that's one reason why you need a diversity of plants, because they have to have the opportunity to select plants with different levels of nutrients. So what are the eating that can reach toxic levels, is it like secondary plant compounds? No, they actually are pretty good at neutralizing those, and apparently, they also have really important functions, like they have a really, some of them are playing a key role, at least based on some work with other herbivores, in the feedback mechanism, like the nutritional feedback that is telling them what to eat. Some of those compounds are playing an important role in that, and various other roles as well, and we just don't know that much about it, I think. Yeah, I mean, I know that there's maybe some hypotheses related to it being like, some of those secondary compounds being anti-parasitic and things like that. Yeah, there's various things like that that probably are real. Well, that's a fascinating conversation for another day. Yeah, we could go on and on about it, but based on the literature with cattle and some other, there may be a few other agricultural ungulates that are of importance, that there's work like this going on, but we started the project with the hypothesis that sulfur would be the nutrient that could reach toxicity, and that is what the data showed, that deer clearly were avoiding that nutrient, and that was the most important thing in selection was to avoid that first, and then they were secondarily maximizing phosphorus, and my work in North Carolina showed that. I've seen a lot of your phosphorus data, and I mean, I even use some of those slides in my presentations and those figures, especially the one that shows where you're burning during summer increases that leaf phosphorus concentration to support lactating does. Yeah, and it's actually, at least on average in that plant community, it was limiting, so the average plant doesn't contain enough, which forces them to be really selective. I talked about that various times as well in multiple venues, but that's kind of what his data showed as well, that they're trying to maximize phosphorus, but they can't just go eat phosphorus because they'll exceed toxicity in something else. Yeah, because they're getting all these other things along with it. Yeah, so you can kind of imagine how complex that gets, and that's been really fascinating to me, but the whole point is the manipulation of the fertilizer, or amendments, we've manipulated lime as well, the manipulation of the amendments, we were trying to take the same plant species and manipulate how much of various nutrients it had to show that that is the mechanism causing selection, and I think he showed that pretty convincingly. We can link the paper if people want to go look at it. It's a really simple experimental design, and it was specifically to address that hypothesis, but the take-home message is the amendments mattered. Yeah. Now, that's interesting to me because, and I know we're kind of on an aside here, and we've been talking about deer probably for longer than we ever have on this podcast, but I have to know, and I think probably a lot of our listeners will be interested in this too, but I've been under the impression for the past several years that if you took, let's just say, two ragweed leaves that are the same age, but they're grown in soils with different fertility, that they would have the same general macronutrient profile. Is that not true? Well, let's just specify and say crude protein, would they have the same, like similar crude protein levels? So we actually have a study, I'm an author on it, Craig Harper is the lead author on it, and it's in review currently. This is the one I'm thinking of. Yes, and that is true. We did not find a relationship, and I don't want to say much more than that because it's in review literally right now. So we will do a bunch of outreach around this topic through various venues because I think it'll be really relevant. But in general, yeah, there wasn't a strong relationship. But what you're saying though with the leaf phosphorus is that preference may change due to the effects that it has on the other aspects of the chemistry of the plant. Yeah, well, to be honest with you, they're a little bit conflicting. So I think some of the things that are happening is what you're saying. The nutrient content is affecting how much the plant invests in lignin to support itself, how quickly it's growing, and how much biomass. I think if you took the twig tip or the plant growing, the youngest tissue on the plant and compared them between the two food plots, one that's fertilized and one that isn't, I suspect they will be nearly identical in terms of the quality of that growing tip. But you might have half of the plant that's growing tip in the one that you fertilize. I think that's more likely. We did see that the biomass was substantially different. But in the plant species we used, we were not able to separate the plant into new growing tips and older plant tissue. Like in the study that you were referencing, that's how we determined that. We separated all of the sampling into new growing tissue and older tissue because we know that plays a really important role in the quality of the plant. And then we had the same species across basically the entire spectrum of soil productivity. And if you look at just the twig tips, they're the same. But in the more mature leaves, I mean, first of all, the greatest benefit of fertilizer is that it's going to increase your leaf biomass, the consumable forage. That's the production as well. That's where they align, that study that you were referencing that's in review, like a ragweed plant might be the same quality if you took a twig or, I keep saying twig tip, but the tip of the growing plant, right, the young tissue, that quality doesn't change across soil productivity, across the entire gradient. But when I actually collected the samples from the sand dunes at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, yes, literally they're growing in sand, well, the plant can't achieve more than about six inches in height. And then you go measure it over in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley or, you know, especially up in the northern part of that, and, you know, the plants will get six or seven foot tall. Like the biomass production of the same species is substantially different, and that's what's driving it. Right. So soil fertility matters, folks. I think we talked about that a little bit longer than we maybe had anticipated, but it definitely does. We'll just go ahead and stop this episode here. Well, and part of that was my fault because I started, you know, leading you down these different rabbit trails. The only thing I was trying to do was just point out that the amendment does matter to your deer. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that, you know, we're following, I think Bronson and some of his crew are following up on some of this work to look at insect production, and there's probably work on that, but I didn't know I needed to do a deep dive on that and bring it here. So, you know, maybe we can come back to that. Something you just said prompted a question in my mind. Was it Bronson? I'm going to put you on the spot with this question, and it's very unfair, but I'm going to do it anyway. Well, depending on how unfair it is, we could just cut it out. We could always cut it out. I think our audience knows that we don't do that. We just let it ride. While we're talking about all the dietary preference and selection by deer, it makes me wonder, like, you know, so much of what goes into that is the palatability of the plant. So, like how it physically feels in the mouth, of course, like deer aren't one to eat a bunch of thorns, right? Yep. And then it also depends on the chemical composition of the plant. That's going to affect the taste too, like things like tannin make it very bitter, right? That's a secondary plant compound. Can turkeys taste? Yes. Not nearly to the same extent. They can taste? As far as I understand it, yeah. Because they don't have a well-developed sense of smell? I wouldn't be real sure about that either. Well, I'm not sure about it either, wasn't it, was it Lovett that was, or was it somebody else that was, that questioned that? There've been a few people. There may have been, actually I think Tom Kelly has a chapter in one, I don't remember which book it is, but one of his books where he talks about reasons that he has some suspicions that they can smell. I don't know if you remember, but we talked about this in the prenual episode too. We did. That's right. Yeah. So, and I have a new post-doc and she's like, you know, well, very talented, but she has gotten super interested in this prenual idea and started reviewing the literature and trying to, we're developing some ideas about it to work on with turkeys because we have the funding in place to do this. And I think it's completely unexplored and really fascinating, but based on things that she's digging, birds are using their sense of smell more than I would have ever thought. Really? Yeah. Interesting. So, I can't say much more about that, but all I can say is we're going to have some things coming that will probably blow people's mind because right now, I can't, it's hard for me to believe. Well, that'll be exciting. All right. So, food plots. Yeah. Back to food plots. I don't know if they'll smell the bugs in there. We know they're visual. But I can't rule it out. We know turkeys can see good, right? Don't we know that? Yes. Okay. All right. So, now we can go from there. All right. So- They probably will see the bugs in there. I think one of the first things that we need to talk about is what are you trying to accomplish by planning a food plot? No, that is a great place to start. And for some reason, we talked about soil amendments first. We did. We did. So, just thinking through, this is the list I came up with. Feel free to add or comment on any of it. But when I think about- What about heckle? Yeah. You can heckle me too. That's fine. But I think about grain, right? So, high energy grain, high in carbohydrates, high in fats. And with that, I think about the objective of planting a grain would be to maintain, well, it'll hold turkeys on the property, so it'll accomplish that objective, right? And then in addition to that, it could potentially improve body condition through wintertime, leading to better body condition in spring, which as we've talked about many times before, could translate into a hen being better at incubating, better at maternal care, all those sorts of things. So, perhaps it translates into improved vital rates. Maybe. Maybe. I would think that would be a really interesting line of inquiry. Right. But I would think that if you were planting a grain for turkeys to consume during the wintertime, that would be what you were trying to accomplish. Yeah. Hold turkeys on the property and try to keep them in good body condition through winter. Yeah. Let's back up for a minute and just talk about what are the general things that people are trying to accomplish. Sometimes people plant a fall food plot to concentrate deer for viewing and, hey, I'm with you. I love doing the same thing. I love growing food and watching animals respond to it and have sat on a mini food plot. More recently, I think, well, not more recently, people also plant stuff to attract and concentrate turkeys during hunting season as well. Sure. I would say more recently, and this is still decades in the making, people have started planting them more with the objectives of supplementing the species, and that's super common with deer. In my experience, less common for turkeys. Yeah. For example, people plant chufa a lot for attracting turkeys, but probably not getting a lot out of it other than attracting them. Yeah. I mean, chufa also could help protect against a bad acorn year from a nutrition perspective, but how many people do you think are planting, when they plant their chufa, they think, oh, the turkeys will be ... Their objective is not that. It is attraction usually. Well, and then we have to think about scale, like how much would you need to plant before you'd actually be providing a reasonable buffer. Right. So there are various considerations, but I was just thinking, let's walk through different objectives. Mm-hmm. So we have the attraction principally is driving the majority of food plot planting, and then a lot of folks have started using them to supplement nutrition for their given species. I'd still say that is dominated by folks interested in deer, at least in our part of the world. But that's picking up steam with turkeys. And when I'm thinking about supplementing, I'm not thinking about it in the same way for turkeys. I'm thinking about supplementing structurally that ultimately leads to more food, but we're not necessarily planting a plant that they're trying to eat for supplementation. Yeah. I mean, I think that's kind of one of the reasons that I started with grain and I was going to move on from there to seeds, because those are the two crops that I do feel like people plant with the intention of not just holding turkeys, but actually trying to feed turkeys. Yeah. Through the wintertime. I'm with you on that. But going back to that, I mean, in talking about the objectives that you brought up, I would not plant a grain, like a cool or a warm season grain that grows throughout the summer and then the grain is consumed in fall and winter, to try to increase turkey abundance on my property, unless I had already addressed the reproductive cover types. Right? Absolutely. And that's one thing that- Who cares if more of them nest and hatch their nests if all the poles die? That's right. So I just wanted to stop and make the point here that there's absolutely nothing wrong with planting for nutrition or attraction, but keep in mind that the limiting factor in most places is still going to be brooding habitat. So I would focus on that first in your food plots and if that's not been addressed elsewhere on your property. I agree with that. You know, I think it would be relevant also for us to kind of get on a little bit of a sidebar for a minute. But one of the things that I love about food plots is really similar to one thing we talked about in the last episode. Yeah. People like growing stuff and it's fun and it gets you out there and engaged on your property, invested, and you get to see the wildlife respond to it. And even if you're not maximizing all of these outcomes, there's a lot of value intrinsically to the practice for people and that gets them involved in their management on their property and is also often a gateway to expanding to other practices. So I think, you know, that's something to think about here. You know, part of this is just like, you know, that people enjoy it. So that usually isn't brought up as part of the objective. But I think it's an important part of it because it gets people to spend a lot of time on their land and gain from that. Yeah, it is valuable from that perspective. And I think I'm oftentimes guilty of not thinking it as much as I should in that way. And instead thinking, you know, why are you planting that, stupid? You should be planting it. But something is better than nothing if it's getting them out there, you know? Right. So, you know, I hear this from biologists and various part, you know, wildlife biologists and various parts of our discipline. People often have a negative view of food plots and I see it all the time that food plots are not habitat management, which is true. Yeah. But we also should think about some of the benefits that are coming from it. It's increasing viewing opportunities and getting people to engage and, you know, develop more, you know, a closer relationship with the land. Yeah. So there's a lot of value in that. The other thing that I think is valuable about food plots is there's some sometimes in many landscapes are the only early succession that's available. Yeah. Which I think that's where we should come bring in some objectives and what do you want and need to accomplish? Yeah. And how can you adjust? As a case in point to that, there was a paper that I helped publish and several years ago, the data were originally collected by a fellow graduate student at the University of Georgia at that time. It was Will Ricks and he did a project up in New York and Pennsylvania. And basically what he found, long story short, is that food plots were providing some of the only habitat for early successional avian species in that landscape because it was so limited otherwise, because the whole landscape is like mature closed canopy hardwood forest. Yeah. Where he was working. And in some places it is very difficult to change that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, they do serve a value in that regard and I think you're right that we need to remind ourselves as biologists not to be, you know, too high and mighty about it because I think that they do serve a lot of benefits in getting people connected to the land and connected to wildlife. Yeah. I mean, I have some pretty cool memories even with my own daughter going out and her being so fascinated with mixing seeds and fertilizers and getting on the tractor and getting out there. And then not long after that, she got to see wildlife respond to that and she was excited about it. You know, she's like three or four years old. I'm the same way. Like I have pictures of me with both of my kids at different points in time, you know, on the tractor with me planting a food plot. So there's definitely been plenty of, you know, good family, quality family time centered around that too. Yeah. I mean, I think you nailed it. You nailed it. It's like a gateway drug though. And I think my hope would be that as like a new landowner, maybe they start out with food plots, but then they realize, oh, well, I really only get to plant spring and fall. What am I going to do the rest of the year? I mean, they have some, maybe they're spraying the plot and tending it and whatever, but hopefully as they start looking for other things, we'll get into, you know, forest management. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, even early on, and this was something that the first person that really made an impact on me thinking about it was Craig Harper during my master's program. But, you know, the first question usually from anybody to any of us is what do I need to plant? Yeah. You know, that if you're maybe not as much in the turkey space, but it's definitely in it too. Yeah. It's definitely the first thing in the deer space. And, uh, I remember one time I was some, like I had given a presentation or something, I was with Craig and, uh, like that was all, only thing I got asked about. And, uh, you know, it was sort of like, did they not hear all the good other information that I was sharing? Cause I was talking about my master's project, which was about thinning and burning treatments in hardwoods. And it, you know, I don't want to say it was lamenting, but I was just like, man, I didn't hear anything else. And then he was like, he made a point to tell me, he's like, listen, this is going to be where most people start. And if you dismiss that or blow it off, you're going to miss the opportunity to get them that other information. They're not going to hear you otherwise. Yeah. And it, you know, just sort of resonated with me. And then now I've been saying that to, to students for, for years and years, like having a really strong knowledge of food plots, it is your way in to gain that rapport with landowners. And I think being knowledgeable about it and be able to address those questions, I have seen it firsthand. I don't even know how many times where that's where we started and then it turned into, you know, some more what we would as biologists call more holistic practices, you know, management practices. Yeah. I mean, all the other stuff that we do, if you think about it, it's a lot more nuanced and difficult to, to understand and know about. I mean, you know, with, with food plots, you go out and you buy a seed that you know is a, that will grow a plant that a deer or a turkey will eat, right. Versus going out and trying to learn plants that are already out there occurring. You don't, you don't know what seed was planted there. I mean, you know, those native species, it's much difficult, more difficult to learn those.