Seamster said one statistic that stood out to him in the 2005 summer brood survey is that, in the Piedmont, only 41 percent of all hens observed had poults -- extremely poor reproduction.

"That makes for a strange survey, because we had a high number of hens without poults, but the hens that were observed with poults had good numbers of poults, especially in some areas. When you look at the total number of poults per hen, it wasn't good," he said.

Seamster believes that a large percentage of the hens observed without poults were year-old hens, produced in the huge 2004 hatch, that do not normally have good reproductive records.

"The irregular age structure of our current population is a contributing factor in this year's hatch," he said. "We had our worst hatch in 2003, which resulted in very few 2-year-old birds in the population this year, but all three regions of the state had exceptional productivity in 2004. So a large percentage of our population this year consists of 1-year-old hens. Some research indicates that young hens are not as good at nesting and brood-rearing as adult hens. Logically, those hens would have lower reproductive success than normal.

"I think that's the case. Those young hens aren't as successful at nesting and rearing as older hens. Older hens are better at picking nest sites where they're more protected from ground predators, or at protecting them. Young hens are sexually mature, but they're just not very experienced at hatching and raising, and that could have contributed to our poor reproduction.

"We did have a large number of young hens out there, and the few older hens that did nest seemed to have done pretty well. The hens with broods had pretty good numbers."

The poor hatch should keep the number of jakes in this spring's harvest down, he said. "In 2004, we had a real good hatch, so there will be a lot of 2-year-old birds out there. There were many jakes last spring, so I think we'll have a good spring this year. I don't expect to see nearly as many jakes as there were last year, and I think our percentage of jakes in the harvest will go down."