Ecology Blogs

The Boston Mountains are the high, cut-up southern edge of the Ozark Plateau, and they are a major source of Arkansas's turkey harvest. This ecology report walks the oak-hickory hollows of the Ozark National Forest, reads three years of AGFC brood and harvest data, looks hard at what prescribed fire did and did not do for nesting hens at White Rock, and lays out the 2027 spring zones that split these mountains.

Virginia's Eastern Shore is one peninsula with two coasts. The seaside runs behind 14 undeveloped barrier and marsh islands; the bayside faces the Chesapeake across tidal marsh and creeks. This field report walks both shores, the Volgenau Virginia Coast Reserve, the refuges at Chincoteague and Cape Charles, the 2026-27 duck and brant calendar, and the two striped bass slots that split the peninsula down the middle.

Western North Carolina's trout country runs from native brook trout in the high headwaters to stocked delayed-harvest reaches below the towns. This field report walks the ecology, the 2026-27 delayed-harvest calendar now underway, the Davidson River's actual classification, the Cherokee Enterprise Waters, and the Smokies rules that differ from the state's.

Alabama's two upland national forests hold turkeys in hardwood and mixed pine country that works very differently from the Coastal Plain. This deep dive covers oak mast, the near-absence of young forest, fire, southern pine beetle, feral pigs, the Sipsey Wilderness, and what the 2025 brood and harvest numbers actually say.

Conecuh National Forest covers 84,224 acres of pine, bog, and floodplain on Alabama's Florida line, and fire decides what kind of turkey country it is in any given year. This deep dive separates what the research actually measured from what gets repeated, and explains how burn timing, rotation, wild pigs, and the 2026-27 county split shape turkeys in south Alabama.

From the Kissimmee chain through Lake Okeechobee to the mangrove edge of Florida Bay, South Florida's water runs one long gradient. This field report walks the ecology, the bass spawn, the snook and tarpon calendar, the duck marshes, and the water-management projects that decide how all of it fishes.

Apalachicola Bay is harvesting wild oysters again, but only on three reefs and only through February 28, 2027. This field report walks the estuary, the longleaf and wiregrass interior, the barrier islands, and Blackwater paddle country, with season-by-season planning for the Forgotten Coast.

Alabama's Black Belt grew from Cretaceous chalk and once held a prairie mosaic that is now almost entirely gone. This deep dive follows the eastern wild turkey through that changed landscape, from nest timing and brood survival to what Alabama's 2025 turkey report shows statewide, and why no one has yet published a Black Belt hatch number.

From St. Marks to Hudson, Florida's Big Bend and Nature Coast hold the second largest contiguous seagrass area in the eastern Gulf and a shoreline USFWS calls one of the largest undeveloped coastal areas in the nation. This field report walks the ecology, the species calendar, the spring-fed rivers, the 2026 rules, and the small towns that anchor the inshore tradition.

Alabama counted 1.53 poults per hen in 2025, below its own 2.00 line. This field synthesis walks through the state brood surveys, the vital-rate science on hens and poults, nest predators, habitat, and why moving opening day has not, by itself, brought turkeys back.

At the bird's-foot tip of the Mississippi River, Delta National Wildlife Refuge is building new marsh and losing old marsh at the same time. This deep dive explains how crevasses, the spring flood pulse, roseau cane die-back, and hurricanes shape the ducks, geese, shorebirds, and pelicans at the bottom of the flyway.

The Chesapeake is a diving-duck estuary, and its waterfowl story runs through its underwater grass beds. This ecology deep dive follows wild celery, widgeon grass, and eelgrass from collapse to partial recovery, then traces what that has meant for canvasbacks, scaup, and the eastern tundra swans that now feed as often in fields as on the water.

MDWFP calls the Pascagoula the largest undammed river in the contiguous United States, and its floodplain still runs on a natural pulse. This field report walks the cypress-tupelo bottomlands, the conservation history behind them, and the seasonal signals that shape a deer, turkey, duck, fishing, or paddle trip in southeast Mississippi this fall and winter.

Far-west Kentucky is where the Ohio meets the Mississippi and the ducks come down the bottoms. This field report walks the Jackson Purchase WMAs, the managed water of Ballard and Boatwright, the reclaimed mine grasslands of Peabody, and the timing signals that shape the 2026-27 season from teal to the late-January push.

Louisiana's coastal marsh is among the most important wintering grounds for ducks in North America, and it is disappearing. This is the ecology of a landscape-scale crisis: what land loss and saltwater intrusion mean for gadwall, pintail, and the non-migratory mottled duck, and for the Mississippi Flyway that depends on this coast.

Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia are among the few southeastern states pursuing elimination, not control, of feral hogs. The math behind that goal -- and the decades-long Great Smoky Mountains case study that tests it -- explains why the answer is still uncertain.

In the ACE Basin's rice-field impoundments and tidal marshes, feral hogs are a long-established presence, rooting through Gullah-Geechee-built levees, tidal flats, and barrier island turtle nests in one of the Southeast's great conservation landscapes.

North Carolina's coastal plain sits at the northern edge of the Southeast's feral hog range, where pocosin peatlands, Carolina bays, and the Albemarle-Pamlico estuary meet an expanding invasive population. It is a case study in what an early-stage invasion looks like -- and what a narrowing window to stop it might still accomplish.