You are welcome to come and get 1 or all of our turkeys.

Was just talked to Jason at a Wildlife Management Conference and mentioned the Montgomery county release site and he said the reason those birds aren't moving is because the area they're living limits they're ability to travel any great distance. That like the other 3 releases in 2007/08 were experimental and the travel aspect wasn't looked at at the time for that particular co-op site.

The birds from the first experimental site in Anderson county are doing quite well and have expanded quite a bit. From reports they have traveled pretty good distances north and south of the original release sites, and have maintained a healthy population within the site range. They trapped birds to attach radio collars on yesterday and managed to trap around 15 birds ...5 hens and 10 toms. I was told that they made some calls there along the Neches river and the whole river bottom lit up with gobbles. Makes me excited just hearing about it...

According to Jason the eastern populations in certain areas along the Neches are nearly as thick as established flocks of rios in rio grande country. They are making their way up and down that river from that initial Super stocking. This method seems to be showing very positive results thus far...especially in certain areas of Anderson county.

If this is in response to what I was talking about previously then it's not the release I'm talking about. I'm talking about Nac Co birds turned out in SA Co. They have a lot of room to expand with where they got dropped off. Lots of NF, lots of COE, large private 5000ac tract in the middle of all that.

Okay...I was telling what you were saying about one of the release sites and I thought you were talking about Montgomery county, but that's what he said about one of the southeast site...I assume it was Montgomery though. Not sure what's going on in Nac county, but most of the sites are supposed to be doing pretty good...especially Anderson county. He said he got pretty excited when the river bottom blew up with gobbles in an area they were trapping in a few days ago. Plus the number of mature long beards they had coming into bait stations...

I should've been more specific on location with a Kingwood location showing. Nac Co population is fine in the SE corner, that's an old established group, they're just not expanding East or North across a highway.

Oh ok...gotcha! Perhaps those are the boundaries he was referring to, but I know that he said one of those flocks were thriving but just limited in they're ability to travel. One of the requirement for a release is 10,000 acres of continuous habitat that's not broken or divided by a major structure such as a highway, so I assume that would be a major barrier for traveling turkeys since they tend to shy away from too much activity.

Beard restriction BR (over 13") will probably need to be inforced

To the East is a FM road paralleling a river and it's rare that you see them cross the FM rd. To the North is hwy 21 which is just 2 lane through that stretch. The lease they were released on a long time ago was 13K acres and there's just a whole lot of nothing out there even on the adjacent properties. I'm managing a place that borders that lease and caught 2 birds walking the main road going back to the lease they came from once, but oddly enough there are more quail on that place on the SMZs than turkey visitors. Where some of those birds were caught and relocated to gives them a ton of room to spread out with Sam Rayburn as boundary. A bunch of them are roosting on an old "pay to launch" building/bait shop that's been shut down for years. Those have a problem because they're very visible being out on the FM ROW like that.

A buddy that I got on the Nac Co lease killed a dbl bearded with 19" of beard so it's doable...