Hello and welcome to Kentucky Afield.

I'm your host, Chad Miles.

Join us as we journey the Commonwealth in search of outdoor adventure.

This week, we're going to head out and check on the turkey poult survival rate here in Kentucky.

Then we're going to hit the field with a Game Warden as he does a dove field check.

But first we're going to jump in a jet boat and hit the Cumberland River in search of trout.

Well, today I'm out doing one of my absolute all time favorite summertime activities, and that is floating the Cumberland River.

I'm out here with Micah Smith.

Micah, this is something you spend a lot of time doing, isn't it?

Yeah.

This is, this is actually my fourth day in a row out here.

I love being out here on this river, middle of summer.

You know, the temperatures are hot, but the water's cold.

And the fish bite all the time down here.

What type of species do you tend to catch?

You can catch it all down here.

I mean, you're talking four different species of trout.

Small mouth, large mouth, Kentucky bass, striper, white bass, walleye, saugeye, sauger, sturgeon, paddlefish.

You know, it just the list goes on and on.

There are endless possibilities down here.

You never know what you're going to get into.

Water conditions are ideal when?

Tell me the ideal water conditions.

I like to get down here and fish when the water's as low as it can be.

No generators or if possible, one generator is really good.

Today we're actually fishing with the sluice gate on.

That's actually really good.

The water stays cold, and the fish just stay active all the time down here.

Trout predominantly.

What we're going to be looking for today.

You can catch trout on fly rods, but you can also use spinning or any other type of tackle you'd like to use as well.

Or as far as rods.

Right.

Yeah.

You can catch trout a lot of different ways down here.

You can come down here and catch trout on nightcrawlers, power bait, rooster tails.

And then what we're doing today, which is these marabou jigs.

And I've really enjoyed using down here for them.

Trout are pretty hard fighting fish.

People who haven't trout fished don't realize that you get a 20 inch trout on a light or an ultra light rod wow you're in for it.

Oh yeah.

We'll head on down fish some little bit better stuff.

Oh.

There's one.

Looks like it's a rainbow.

It's a rainbow.

Hopefully we can find some big ones.

Well, you know what, though?

That was, a good start.

Yeah.

Good start.

Oh, you got one.

That's a little better fish.

Nice.

It's just a little guy, probably a ten inch rainbow.

And he█s off.

Here we go.

Oh, yeah.

Looky there.

What a beautiful fish.

We got a brown trout here.

First one of those of the day.

Look how pretty.

And they want this bait right on the bottom.

And it just spiraled down there, and he popped it.

What percentage of browns to rainbows do you catch?

I would say if I catch 20 fish, I would say 15 of them are rainbows.

25%.

That's our first one today.

Nice one.

Oh, there's one.

Got him?

Yep.

There you go.

Pretty rainbow.

That might be the biggest rainbow of the day so far.

Who do you think you got there?

13 or 14?

Yeah.

13 or 14 inch fish probably.

How old do you think a fish like that is down here?

I'd say this fish was put in here... Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Right now I'd say let's put it there right now.

Oh.

What do you think though?

2 or 3 year old fish?

Yeah.

Maybe.

I think I might go with something a darker color.

I don't know why I'm changing really.

I just caught a fish.

Here we go.

Hooked up.

I saw him eat it.

Oh, yeah.

There we go.

Nice one.

I saw him come up there and just inhale that bait.

But that time I waited till I felt him before I set the hook.

Yeah.

That's probably what you think?

16, 17 inches?

Yep.

That's a nice fish right there.

Nice hard fighting fish.

We're putting it right back in the water.

Yeah catch and release.

He's going to go right away and he's gone.

There he is.

Oh, that█s a great fish.

Wow, that's a great fish let me get the net here.

That there would maybe snap that 4 pound line.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's such a great fish.

There you go.

Nice job, Micah.

He came up and chased after it.

I just let my jig fall back down, and I couldn't see the jig anymore.

And I, you know, gave it a twitch and he was there.

So that's a really nice fish.

There you go.

Sight fishing trout on the Cumberland River.

Sight fishing.

Looks like he's got a little battle mark there.

Maybe from a from a blue heron.

Yeah, probably so.

He's in good shape.

We'll let him go.

You know, Micah, earlier you made a comment that really rings true.

And that is every time I've been through here fly fishing, you're either pulling a fly, kind of dead drifting a fly, or you're streamer fishing.

And this is kind of similar to streamer fishing with a spinning rod.

Yeah, it's same kind of concept.

I mean, you're catching these fish, these active fish that want to come up and chase bait.

That's kind of what we're targeting.

It works pretty well.

This here is the kind of spot we've been catching fish.

Like these little areas where there's some dark spots.

They've been kind of hiding down in there.

They get behind these rocks and they hide.

There's definitely certain sections where it seems like they hold more fish.

You know, the shallower sections with the faster moving water seem to be pretty popular spots for them.

Oh, yeah.

I dont want to horse it too much.

There you go.

Yeah.

Good little.

Oh, yeah.

Aerial show there.

Nice one.

Got it.

Oh, there you go.

They like laying there in those trees.

Just like bass, don't they?

Yep.

They like the cover.

That fish came by and swiped and missed.

I picked it up.

He swiped and missed again.

Dropped it back down.

Lunchtime.

Got it.

Yeah.

Oh look at this.

We're doubled up.

Doubled up.

Sweet.

Oh, it doesn't get any better than this.

You want a net or you good?

I think I'm good.

I think I'm good.

Looky there.

Nice one.

Catching them two at a time.

Two different patterns too, to these fish.

That fish that you have, it doesn't seem like it has as many spots as mine has.

Oh, wow.

Two really fun fish to catch and two very healthy trout.

There they go.

It won't be long.

We'll be sitting in a deer stand.

Deer season be here in September.

Feels a mile away in 90 degree heat doesn█t it?

Yeah.

So there's a pretty historic site there on the Cumberland River.

Yeah, that's a really neat feature there.

The rock house.

A lot of people drive down here.

Just to check it out.

But it's pretty neat seeing it from the river.

Oh, yeah.

Oh.

There you go.

Nice one.

Oh, that's a great fish.

Nice one.

Wow, I do think that might be the biggest fish for the day so far.

Yeah, that's a good one.

He's going back in.

Here we go.

Oh nice one Chad.

Man I'll tell you what.

There's a million ways to catch a trout.

But today, with a spinning rod which almost every angler has a spinning rod and a little 3/32 ounce jig, this is a technique and a method that any bass fisherman, any panfish fisherman could come replicate and do this.

Absolutely.

And man, has it been a blast.

All right, buddy, I'm letting you go.

I'm letting you go.

To get a good estimate of how many turkeys we have here in the state of Kentucky, you have to have an idea on how many turkey poults survive each year.

And for that, you need to hit the field for some research.

So we're going to do a brood check on one of my hens.

Her poults should be 23 days old, which means they or we expect them to be roosting in a tree or low limb.

But yeah, we're going to see if she has some poults.

I am hooked on turkeys like so much of the rest of the world.

I went on a turkey hunt and that's really the beginning and end of the story.

I was hooked.

I loved it and then had an opportunity to do a research project with turkeys.

I was a research technician for wild turkeys in Missouri, and then in Tennessee, had an opportunity to do my master's degree at the University of Georgia with wild turkeys.

That eventually led me here for my PhD.

So this project specifically is looking at reproductive vital rates of wild turkeys.

So that includes survival, nesting, brood rearing and habitat selection.

So year to date, we have trapped 246 wild turkeys.

We put out 246 GPS transmitters.

And so far we've collected 1.39 million GPS data points.

This is a directional antenna.

This is what we use to do most of our tracking.

And we were tracking the GPS collar of our wild turkey.

These GPS collars are radio transmitters.

And what that allows us to do is use a live beacon to track the physical location of the bird.

We use all of that information to look at survival of the hen, survival of the nest, survival of the brood.

And that's the kind of data that we will use to inform the state, give them some information about their population here in Western Kentucky.

There's a strip of trees, we█re expecting her to be roosted in there.

And so what we'll do is we're going to try to find an angle to see her on the limb this morning.

And what we're looking for is the poults.

We█re going to have this forward looking infrared to help us with that.

We'll be able to see her heat signature.

In theory, it's really foggy and humid out today, so it might not look super great.

We're going to stay as far away from her as we can.

This is going to help us do that.

So there's two hens in this tree here and one in the tree next to her.

She can see us.

She knows we are here already.

We're checking to see if she has poults.

If she does they█re underneath her right now.

One just switched trees.

All right.

That was a poult.

There█s at least one.

We got two birds right on top of each other.

They are starting to move around a lot.

Looks like they█re trying to get themselves situated.

There goes one.

There's a poult and a hen in the tree, and a poult that's somewhere in the shrub to the right.

There's a poult just to the right of the hen.

I█ve got at least three poults.

Yeah.

Okay, four poults.

Oh, there she goes.

Whoa!

One, two, three, four poults.

Poults are still in the tree.

Our hen flew down.

There█s seven I think.

Oh they‘re flying down.

That█s nice to see.

I█m going to let them settle down before we get up to move.

Her nest was right in front of us.

I don't know if you can see those saplings that are between us and those trees, but her nest was right there undereneath that.

There they go.

So that was a successful brood check.

We had two hens and what we think are seven poults.

So they're at least that's three poults per hen, which is great.

And we'll mark that on her sheet when we get back to the office and see her again in another week for her final brood check.

So we're at Peabody Wildlife Management Area, and this is a habitat that's very typical of this area.

And we've got a lot of open herbaceous communities, open grasslands and some larger hardwood tracks.

So most of our broods are using old disc blocks, firebreaks, anything that can keep the understory, that ground layer open.

So we also check our broods every single day, even though we're not doing a like early morning counting poults.

We kind of expect them to be in the same general vicinity every day.

I just took two angles with the telemetry from a point along the road here and a point along the road here.

All we're looking for again is that she's kind of just staying in the same area, doing the same thing every day.

If she would have taken off and, you know, crossed a major highway or crossed a major water body with poults that are only three and a half weeks old, then I'd be concerned and then I'd be brood checking her early in the morning tomorrow.

But I'm not concerned.

I am pretty happy with her and hopefully we'll get her last brood check here soon.

This year we have currently 24 broods going.

I don't have enough manpower and staff to do all of the early morning brood checks in a timely manner.

So we also use game cameras, cell cams to help us do our brood checks.

So we deploy those in areas that the broods are using, and we can capture the time stamp on the camera and match that with the time stamp on their GPS collar to confirm whether or not they have poults still.

So we are about to do a nest check.

We know based on the GPS data where this hen should be.

So if that hen is out here and I am down here, I know roughly what angle that hen should be at.

I should be able to hear that bird if I point my antenna at her.

I also can pick her up, you know, kind of in this general pie wedge, we'll call it.

And so I've recorded these angles.

If I can pick her up anywhere between 20 and 40 degrees on my compass, then we'll go ahead and mark her as still nesting and still incubating.

Today is her hatch date, though, so hopefully if she's not up this morning, she'll be up this afternoon and we might get to actually go recover it.

So she is up.

But if she did hatch this morning, she probably is either in the process of hatching still or freshly hatched.

I want to give her another couple of hours to move away from her nest.

We'll back around to her here in a few hours.

So we are about to go in and do a nest recovery.

All we know right now is that this hen terminated her nest.

She should be still incubating.

She should have been on for another week and a half.

But she left yesterday.

It looks like she left yesterday morning, according to her GPS data.

So now we're going to go in and see what the cause of termination was, whether it was predated or abandoned.

We expect about 60 to 80% of our nest to fail.

It's unfortunate, but because we have this daily check in with our nesting hens, we're able to get out and determine why it was terminated.

So we can tell, okay, well, was it a predator?

Was it abandoned?

Did it get mowed?

Having this fine resolution like GPS data is so valuable because we can really accurately say, this is why the nest failed.

Field snacks.

Right here we have the nest bowl.

And then what we can see here looks like a lot of breast and back feathers.

Something probably took a dig at this hen while she was on the nest.

Like I said, she failed early in the morning, according to her GPS, so it probably gave her a little bit of surprise.

Swiped at her.

She got away.

We do know that she is happy and healthy.

She's about a mile and a half south of here right now, hanging out with a couple other hens that did not nest.

So it might look ugly, but she's okay.

She doesn't feel sorry for herself.

She doesn't have time.

I█ll document some photos for our archives, and we'll also collect eggs for genetic sampling.

And we'll also take a closer look at the indentation to see what kind of carnivore may have taken a dig at her in this nest.

All right, so we're heading back right now to go recheck the hen we checked on this morning.

She was up this morning, so we're going to see if she's still up and off her nest.

If she█s up then we'll go check out her nest and see if it hatched.

So 31 degrees, which means she is right on her nest.

Just means that she's back on incubating.

Or she's back on supervising the hatching process.

I'm not sure.

We'll go ahead and we'll download her data, make sure that she is indeed incubating and isn't just behind her nest with her brood.

So we'll check in on her and confirm the test.

Okay, so if she were up and moving, it would take a GPS point every 15 minutes.

She is not up and moving.

She's taking hourly fixed points, which means that she's sitting still and incubating, which isn't a bad thing.

I'll let her take an extra day.

So we'll try again tomorrow.

All this data that we're collecting is going to go back to the state.

So that way they can inform their management decisions and their harvest regulations.

But it's also going to contribute to the larger body of literature on wild turkeys.

So that way we can start really painting a picture of how this bird is doing across the landscape.

And that's across the entire United States, not just here in Kentucky.

The opening day to Kentucky's dove season is just over a week away.

And here's a few things you might need to know before hitting the field.

So today we're in Grant County.

We're going to be going to Curtis Gates Lloyd WMA the public dove field to check some hunters, make sure everybody is in compliance.

Shouldn't be any real big issues up here today.

Opening day of dove season.

So hopefully there's plenty of birds for people to shoot at.

We'll see what happens.

It█s important to patrol dove fields because of the sheer amount of people that can be on a public field.

They can be very crowded.

It█s always good to have eyes on a public field.

How are we doing, gentlemen?

When checking a dove field we want to make sure that everybody has a hunting license first and foremost, along with their migratory bird permit The migratory bird survey, the HIP survey is also required so we make sure everyone has that number.

which shows that they filled out the survey.

which all those numbers go into data for the department along with any federal programs for migratory birds.

So you've got the migratory bird permit, but you also have to have a hunting license.

There was one gentleman who had his migratory bird permit but had not purchased a hunting license.

He recieved a citation for hunting without a license.

Not only are we looking for compliance with regulations making sure everyone has license and permits but also we want to address saftey issues that might be out there.

Making sure people aren█t shooting low birds.

Make sure people aren█t set up in areas they aren█t suppose to be set up where they can shoot across the road or have shots rain down on a passing car or anything like that.

If you would happen to damage someone else's vehicle other than yours, you could be held liable to pay for those damages.

Just something to keep in mind, though.

Care if I check your gun real quick?

You loaded?

Yes, sir.

All right.

Whenever I█m checking someones shotgun I always ask them first if it█s loaded.

Sometimes they█ll unload it when they see you walk up to them.

I█ll unload that gun.

Making sure it█s pointed in a safe direction and then going through the process of checking the magazine to see if it█s plugged or not.

All right, you█re good to go.

One in the chamber?

Yup.

You got your license handy real quick?

Yeah, I have a screenshot.

That works.

You got the migratory bird permit.

So you need two things.

You need a hunting license and then you need the migratory bird permit as well.

Let me check your gun real quick if you don't mind.

Okay.

So you're tube right here that holds your shells.

It has to be plugged.

To hunt with a shotgun, the gun cannot be capable of holding more than three shells.

So that's going to be two shells in the tube So if I can fit three shells in here, that means it's not plugged.

So it doesn't have a plug in it.

Another situation where he didn't have a license.

He had his migratory bird permit and his HIP survey.

Then he also did not have a plugged shotgun.

His shotgun was capable of holding more than three shells.

Anytime we come across a violation we try to do little bit of education on it as well, make sure that everybody knows what the rules and the regulations are and get them squared away as best as we can before we send them back out in the field.

Good afternoon.

Officer Sorrell, Fish and Wildlife.

We had any luck yet?

The vast majority of people that we come in contact are compliant.

They have everything that's required.

Hunting license, permits.

Every once in a while you'll find somebody that may have forgotten something, but majority of the people are happy to see us when we're out on the field.

It keeps everybody honest.

It shows them that we're out there doing our job and enforcing those rules and regulations that everybody's supposed to follow.

Have we had any luck?

One?

All in all, today went pretty well.

It was a little slow as far as opening day goes, but the weather's been really good.

Most people out there have had some shots at birds.

There were a few issues that we had to address with citations, but no major egregious violations.

Perfect.

Hopefully that trend will continue and hopefully just a successful dove season.

Alright you have everything.

I appreciate it.

No problem.

You guys have a good one.

You too.

Good luck.

Now let's check in and see who else has been out having fun in this week's ones that didn't get away.

Here we have Caleb Forshaw, who came to Kentucky from Williamsport, PA to fish Taylorsville Lake and catch these hybrids.

Nice job.

Here we have Paisley Joe with the channel catfish that she caught at Minor Clark Fish Hatchery during the annual fishing derby.

Congratulations.

Here we have Kenji Ishmael with a catfish that he caught while fishing at Jacobson Park.

Here we have Natalie Rice with a few rainbow trout that she caught while fishing below Wolf Creek Dam.

Rebecca and Delaney England hit the Ohio River near Maysville, Kentucky and caught this beautiful spotted bass.

Nice job.

Hagan Taylor went to Green River in search of smallmouth, but instead caught this huge drum.

Shannon and Eden Smith went night fishing on Nolin Lake and caught this beautiful white bass.

Nice job.

11 year old Payton Nance went down to Whitley County, Kentucky and caught this beautiful largemouth bass while fishing in his grandparents farm pond.

Check out this near 50 pound blue catfish that was caught by Dustin Herman while jug fishing on Barron River Lake.

The kids have gone back to school and summer is winding down.

Now is the time to get ready for our fall hunting seasons here in Kentucky.

And remember, hunting and fishing on private property is a privilege.

Always ask permission and thank the landowner.

Until next week, I'm your host, Chad Miles, and I hope to see you in the woods or on the water.