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Thread: FMNF

  1. #1
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    Default FMNF

    This year was the first year in a while I did not have private access and I hunted the Forest a good bit; learning the ropes. Thinking about Florence brewing out there got me curious about Hugo's affect on the purest strain of Easterns. I had forgotten about this article and would have loved to have known either of these two men. I

    This articles is by Bo Peterson with Post & Courier.

    MCCLELLANVILLE — A generation ago, you were lucky to see a wild turkey. The birds were all but wiped out, and the few wary survivors kept deep in the woods. Today it’s not unusual to find small flocks along a busy roadside, plucking away at insects.

    That’s the wily work of Duff and Buggy Bill, the two men who saved the wild turkey.

    Wild turkey hunting season has opened on private land in South Carolina and will soon open on public land. More than 100,000 of the birds are out there, inhabiting every one of the 46 counties in the state. The population is now leveling off, and it might be that it’s fully restored.


    The elegant gobblers have retaken the land and people’s imagination. Birds from South Carolina have been transported to adjoining states and as far as Texas to help repopulate there. The recovery is considered a conservation milestone comparable to the bald eagle.

    The turkey was all but wiped out from overhunting in the 1940s when Herman “Duff” Holbrook trapped a few hundred in the primeval swamps near McClellanville and put them behind a hog wire fence to breed and reintroduce. He and William “Bill” Baldwin threaded their way through a thorn thicket of obstacles to make it happen.

    Gayer Dominick wanted the biggest of everything, that’s how a stablehand described what happened to Baldwin’s fledgling effort to bring the wild turkey to Bulls Island, said his son, McClellanville author Billy Baldwin.

    “The biggest cow, the biggest sheep, the biggest turkey. He had this thing about having the biggest of everything,” Billy Baldwin said.

    Dominick was a New York banker and broker who kept a vacation home on Bulls Island, the largest barrier island in the remote Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. An outdoorsman and hunter, he had been given a clutch of native wild turkey eggs from the swampland near McClellanville, and Baldwin set about establishing a flock.

    Bill Baldwin, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist working in the refuge. “Buggy Bill” was a born naturalist who won his nickname crawling in with insects or snakes to do educational programs.

    Baldwin raised and released more than 100 birds. Then Dominick heard about the biggest turkey in the world.

    He had his workers buy the thing and bring it over to the island, a turkey so large that a photo was made of it next to a mule it had killed. But it was a domestic turkey, and before long interbreeding had diluted the native stock. Meanwhile, the flock fell inexplicably to about one-third the number.

    Baldwin and others had to remove the stock to try again, and found it so infested with ticks that one hen had 290 engorged ticks in its neck. All the livestock was removed from the island and a prescribed burn program launched to kill off the ticks.

    Duff Holbrook, too, was a born naturalist. He developed maybe the keenest sense of wild turkey in the country after he was hired by the S.C. Department of Natural Resources in 1950 to work with U.S. Fish and Wildlife on a joint project to restore hunted-out turkey and deer to the South Carolina mountains and Piedmont.

    “He was an incredible woodsman, the only man known to call a (wild) turkey close enough to be caught by hand,” Billy Baldwin said. The astonishing feat won him a reprimand from superiors.

    Holbrook and Bill Baldwin were cut from the same cloth, canny in the wild, hunters who realized there was more to it than just game.

    The Francis Marion wetlands bottom, primeval and barely penetrable, was the only known place left in the state where the turkeys had a viable population — a strain as pure or purer than anywhere else in the world. One of the first prickly problems was how to catch them.

    “The turkeys were so spooky Duff could never get a mature gobbler,” Billy Baldwin said.

    Holbrook and Baldwin invented a cannon-netting method, a gun that would fire out netting like you would cast it for shrimp, without much success. The net cord, they realized, was just too heavy to fling fast or far enough. So between them, they worked out a lighter twine.

    Within two or three years, Holbrook had a sustainable population behind the hog wire. Within a decade, he had moved hundreds of them to enough locations in the state that the recovery was underway. Bill Baldwin would say later, “From the Midlands up, if you see a wild turkey, Duff put it there.”

    The turkeys and their saviors, though, weren’t out of the woods.

    As Billy Baldwin heard it, a prominent state senator decided to come hunting Holbrook’s turkeys with a few of his friends. Holbrook told him that wasn’t going to happen and the next thing he knew he was working for the U.S. Forest Service out of Kentucky, coordinating timber and wildlife management across the Southeastern states.

    Holbrook returned to the Lowcountry in 1983 to head up White Oak Forestry. White Oak is an affiliate of Evening Post Industries, the owner of The Post and Courier. He died last year.

    Baldwin did groundbreaking work with loggerhead turtles, but quit the wildlife service after he was told to do a study on Bulls Island showing that DDT — the insecticide later shown to destroy bald eagle eggs — didn’t harm songbirds, even though the file included a notation that it did impact their reproduction, Billy Baldwin said. He went to work for Medway Plantation.

    Until the turn of this century, the turkeys thrived to the point where dozens at a time could be found in a single spring cornfield. But the population now appears to be in slow decline, said Charles Ruth, a DNR wildlife biologist who runs the deer and turkey program.

    “We don’t really have a good grasp of it yet and it is occurring in much of the Southeast. It may just be the new normal,” Ruth said. Coyotes have joined a long list of turkey predators, and there’s loss of habitat. But something else is going on. Overall productivity just isn’t what it once was, he said.
    DILLIGAF

  2. #2
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hogg View Post
    This year was the first year in a while I did not have private access and I hunted the Forest a good bit; learning the ropes. Thinking about Florence brewing out there got me curious about Hugo's affect on the purest strain of Easterns. I had forgotten about this article and would have loved to have known either of these two men. I

    This articles is by Bo Peterson with Post & Courier.

    MCCLELLANVILLE — A generation ago, you were lucky to see a wild turkey. The birds were all but wiped out, and the few wary survivors kept deep in the woods. Today it’s not unusual to find small flocks along a busy roadside, plucking away at insects.

    That’s the wily work of Duff and Buggy Bill, the two men who saved the wild turkey.

    Wild turkey hunting season has opened on private land in South Carolina and will soon open on public land. More than 100,000 of the birds are out there, inhabiting every one of the 46 counties in the state. The population is now leveling off, and it might be that it’s fully restored.


    The elegant gobblers have retaken the land and people’s imagination. Birds from South Carolina have been transported to adjoining states and as far as Texas to help repopulate there. The recovery is considered a conservation milestone comparable to the bald eagle.

    The turkey was all but wiped out from overhunting in the 1940s when Herman “Duff” Holbrook trapped a few hundred in the primeval swamps near McClellanville and put them behind a hog wire fence to breed and reintroduce. He and William “Bill” Baldwin threaded their way through a thorn thicket of obstacles to make it happen.

    Gayer Dominick wanted the biggest of everything, that’s how a stablehand described what happened to Baldwin’s fledgling effort to bring the wild turkey to Bulls Island, said his son, McClellanville author Billy Baldwin.

    “The biggest cow, the biggest sheep, the biggest turkey. He had this thing about having the biggest of everything,” Billy Baldwin said.

    Dominick was a New York banker and broker who kept a vacation home on Bulls Island, the largest barrier island in the remote Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. An outdoorsman and hunter, he had been given a clutch of native wild turkey eggs from the swampland near McClellanville, and Baldwin set about establishing a flock.

    Bill Baldwin, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist working in the refuge. “Buggy Bill” was a born naturalist who won his nickname crawling in with insects or snakes to do educational programs.

    Baldwin raised and released more than 100 birds. Then Dominick heard about the biggest turkey in the world.

    He had his workers buy the thing and bring it over to the island, a turkey so large that a photo was made of it next to a mule it had killed. But it was a domestic turkey, and before long interbreeding had diluted the native stock. Meanwhile, the flock fell inexplicably to about one-third the number.

    Baldwin and others had to remove the stock to try again, and found it so infested with ticks that one hen had 290 engorged ticks in its neck. All the livestock was removed from the island and a prescribed burn program launched to kill off the ticks.

    Duff Holbrook, too, was a born naturalist. He developed maybe the keenest sense of wild turkey in the country after he was hired by the S.C. Department of Natural Resources in 1950 to work with U.S. Fish and Wildlife on a joint project to restore hunted-out turkey and deer to the South Carolina mountains and Piedmont.

    “He was an incredible woodsman, the only man known to call a (wild) turkey close enough to be caught by hand,” Billy Baldwin said. The astonishing feat won him a reprimand from superiors.

    Holbrook and Bill Baldwin were cut from the same cloth, canny in the wild, hunters who realized there was more to it than just game.

    The Francis Marion wetlands bottom, primeval and barely penetrable, was the only known place left in the state where the turkeys had a viable population — a strain as pure or purer than anywhere else in the world. One of the first prickly problems was how to catch them.

    “The turkeys were so spooky Duff could never get a mature gobbler,” Billy Baldwin said.

    Holbrook and Baldwin invented a cannon-netting method, a gun that would fire out netting like you would cast it for shrimp, without much success. The net cord, they realized, was just too heavy to fling fast or far enough. So between them, they worked out a lighter twine.

    Within two or three years, Holbrook had a sustainable population behind the hog wire. Within a decade, he had moved hundreds of them to enough locations in the state that the recovery was underway. Bill Baldwin would say later, “From the Midlands up, if you see a wild turkey, Duff put it there.”

    The turkeys and their saviors, though, weren’t out of the woods.

    As Billy Baldwin heard it, a prominent state senator decided to come hunting Holbrook’s turkeys with a few of his friends. Holbrook told him that wasn’t going to happen and the next thing he knew he was working for the U.S. Forest Service out of Kentucky, coordinating timber and wildlife management across the Southeastern states.

    Holbrook returned to the Lowcountry in 1983 to head up White Oak Forestry. White Oak is an affiliate of Evening Post Industries, the owner of The Post and Courier. He died last year.

    Baldwin did groundbreaking work with loggerhead turtles, but quit the wildlife service after he was told to do a study on Bulls Island showing that DDT — the insecticide later shown to destroy bald eagle eggs — didn’t harm songbirds, even though the file included a notation that it did impact their reproduction, Billy Baldwin said. He went to work for Medway Plantation.

    Until the turn of this century, the turkeys thrived to the point where dozens at a time could be found in a single spring cornfield. But the population now appears to be in slow decline, said Charles Ruth, a DNR wildlife biologist who runs the deer and turkey program.

    “We don’t really have a good grasp of it yet and it is occurring in much of the Southeast. It may just be the new normal,” Ruth said. Coyotes have joined a long list of turkey predators, and there’s loss of habitat. But something else is going on. Overall productivity just isn’t what it once was, he said.
    Good read. Thanks
    Quote Originally Posted by Chessbay View Post
    Literally translated to, "I smell like Scotch and Kodiak".
    "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees"- Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson

  3. #3
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    Great read! Reading about fellas like Duff and Baldwin kinda makes me sad. Men like that running our Natural Resources is a thing of the past. Even if a young man that has the ability to be like those guys comes along he is overlooked by the powers that be and instead they higher an over educated hippie who would have no idea how to even come up with an ingenious thing like a rocket net. And in my opinion that is a huge problem with our Natural Resources today.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
    Conservation means the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of men. -Gifford Pinchot

    The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it. -Thomas Jefferson


    The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.

  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by Quackhead22 View Post
    Great read! Reading about fellas like Duff and Baldwin kinda makes me sad. Men like that running our Natural Resources is a thing of the past. Even if a young man that has the ability to be like those guys comes along he is overlooked by the powers that be and instead they higher an over educated hippie who would have no idea how to even come up with an ingenious thing like a rocket net. And in my opinion that is a huge problem with our Natural Resources today.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
    Spot on. Need folks like you at the helm!
    Quote Originally Posted by Chessbay View Post
    Literally translated to, "I smell like Scotch and Kodiak".
    "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees"- Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson

  5. #5
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    Spot on.

    Reliably heard of a new class of wardens were sworn in and ZERO grew up hunting and fishing.
    DILLIGAF

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hogg View Post
    Spot on.

    Reliably heard of a new class of wardens were sworn in and ZERO grew up hunting and fishing.
    I know for a fact one of them hunts and fishes
    Them that don't know him won't like him, and them that do sometimes won't know how to take him

    He ain't wrong, he's just different, and his pride won't let him do things to make you think he's right

    They don't put Championship rings on smooth hands

  7. #7
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    The lack of hunting and fishing game wardens does not bother me, personally. One can be a good enforcer of the law and not be a hunter, or a fisherman, but still understand and enforce the law, and most importantly, have a respect for the wildlife and the land. Just my .02.

    What I think Quack was alluding to was that the management of these public lands would improve if you had someone at the helm that truly understood what needed to happen and knows how to implement it, regardless of their education level. Lots of very, very, very knowledgable people out there who's application would not even get looked at because it does not have that (B.S.) behind it.
    Quote Originally Posted by Chessbay View Post
    Literally translated to, "I smell like Scotch and Kodiak".
    "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees"- Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by smitch320 View Post
    The lack of hunting and fishing game wardens does not bother me, personally. One can be a good enforcer of the law and not be a hunter, or a fisherman, but still understand and enforce the law, and most importantly, have a respect for the wildlife and the land. Just my .02.

    What I think Quack was alluding to was that the management of these public lands would improve if you had someone at the helm that truly understood what needed to happen and knows how to implement it, regardless of their education level. Lots of very, very, very knowledgable people out there who's application would not even get looked at because it does not have that (B.S.) behind it.
    Exactly! I can think of guys in the Georgetown area that are on the way out that literally sweat pluff mud or breath fire smoke and barely have a high school education. Guys who are true woodsmen and/or marsh men.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
    Conservation means the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of men. -Gifford Pinchot

    The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it. -Thomas Jefferson


    The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by Quackhead22 View Post
    Exactly! I can think of guys in the Georgetown area that are on the way out that literally sweat pluff mud or breath fire smoke and barely have a high school education. Guys who are true woodsmen and/or marsh men.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
    Precisely. Those are the types of people we need in these positions.
    Quote Originally Posted by Chessbay View Post
    Literally translated to, "I smell like Scotch and Kodiak".
    "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees"- Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson

  10. #10
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    Glad to hear that Trkyklr.

    You don't ignore the men who figured it out before they retired. But that seems to be the case.
    DILLIGAF

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    Spot on Quackhead. Its a trickle up of the deep state.

    Ironic that now these same pure strain turkeys are worse than ignored as the USFS fire regime growth has become the objective of labor, time and funding regardless of timing or intensity as to wildlife needs. 18 was better as to proper fire , lets hope that holds.

    As to Hugo, it crushed the mast bearing species. Food plots were instated and aggressively planted to help counter act the loss of mast bearing trees and the nutrition they offer to wild game. Ironically over the last five years the soft mast bearing trees such as Dogwood, Black Cherry, Persimmon, Crab apple and so forth are virtually non existent from the same firing regime. Hard mast has suffered greatly as well while the food plots also look terrible in most cases. DNR has stepped up its game ( hats off to Vaughn) but the USFS is still failing miserable.

    To note the nature conservancy still pushes for only natural plantings and is also pushing more fire.

    Personally I want to see timber harvest and food plotting re emphasized but the deep state is fully engaged.
    Genesis 9;2

  12. #12
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    Spot on Quackhead. Its a trickle up of the deep state. The conservative boy raised hunting and farming is certainly not encouraged to join the club especially as to the USFS.

    Ironic that now these same pure strain turkeys are worse than ignored as the USFS fire regime growth has become the objective of labor, time and funding regardless of timing or intensity as to wildlife needs. 18 was better as to proper fire , lets hope that holds.

    As to Hugo, it crushed the mast bearing species. Food plots were instated and aggressively planted to help counter act the loss of mast bearing trees and the nutrition they offer to wild game. Ironically over the last five years the soft mast bearing trees such as Dogwood, Black Cherry, Persimmon, Crab apple and so forth are virtually non existent from the same firing regime. Hard mast has suffered greatly as well while the food plots also look terrible in most cases. DNR has stepped up its game ( hats off to Vaughn) but the USFS is still failing miserable.

    To note the nature conservancy still pushes for only natural plantings and is also pushing more fire.

    Personally I want to see timber harvest and food plotting re emphasized but the deep state is fully engaged.
    Genesis 9;2

  13. #13
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    I knew Duff very well as he lived very close to me and have hunted with him. He was a pioneer in the turkey restoration project in the 50's. He had an old slideshow he would show you at his house that was at a minimum of 3 hours just on turkeys. The turkey he called up and caught with his hands was a Goulds in Arizona. He was a real turkey hunter before turkey hunting was the new cool thing to do. He passed several years ago and his funeral was standing room only. He was a hell of a man.

  14. #14
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    Maybe burning the woods when hens are nesting could jave something to do with the decline
    Psalm 23

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    ^ In our National Forests across the SE most definitely. We now have groups in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas all reporting the same firing regimes that we see on our SC National Forests to include the same large scale, high intensity and short return interval prescribed fire during the nesting season. These as here are mostly set with helicopter.

    To be fair however, the entire SE decline can't be laid upon prescribed fire during the nesting season as there are private lands that don't burn in such manner and some that don't use fire period that have also lost population density.

    In my humble opinion, it's a storm of issues to include predation combined with Neonic pesticides and their proven effects on reproductive and immune system strength in birds that ingest insects killed from such or plants that have been sprayed with such. Now introduce domestic stock diseases from poultry farming via spreading their excrement on farm lands plus a decrease in correct blocks of overall habitat from development add in that heavy predator load and you have an issue that spans across the SE on private lands as well. Of course heavy rainfall and cool temperatures combined can be one of the biggest hits to reproduction and we have certainly seen an increase in rainfall over the past several springs.

    The glaring thorn in the side of our National Forest turkeys and certainly those from the FMNF is that short return high intensity large scale fire during the nesting definitely should be looked at but is laughed off by those biologist funded by fire dollars. The regional biologist for the USFS recently joined in a fire investigation which CWS pushed for and received. His feed back was that the FMNF forest doesn't have a fire problem it has a tree density problem. So basically he said keep on doing what your doing ( thermal thinning) Of course he isn't a hunter, doesn't know the forest personally and could care less about anything other than woodpeckers, bluestem, dropwort and chaffseed.
    Last edited by Strick9; 09-09-2018 at 09:24 PM.
    Genesis 9;2

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    Quote Originally Posted by trkykilr View Post
    I know for a fact one of them hunts and fishes
    I know two that came thru the academy this year and both hunt and fish and are on this site.
    One was just here at the house and is recently assigned to the Orangeburg area. Good kid from good family.

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