Love is in the air

[Native Hunter]

 

[letemgrow]

Healthy population!

 

[Mennoniteman]

It looks like you have way more hens than gobblers, or are the rest of the longbeards elsewhere? How soon does your spring gobbler season open? Ours is still a month away, May 3rd, which unfortunately is after most of the breeding season is over.

 

[Native Hunter]

It looks like you have way more hens than gobblers, or are the rest of the longbeards elsewhere? How soon does your spring gobbler season open? Ours is still a month away, May 3rd, which unfortunately is after most of the breeding season is over.

Our season doesn't open until April 12. We have a lot more turkeys than you see in that picture above, but there is one little issue that happens sometime. They also like to spend some time across the creek in a big 80 acres bottom that belongs to someone else. So, I do have a good chance of getting one, but when they cross the creek, it's probably time to go home and come back another day.

Pic below is same crop field as above on an earlier date. They are picking up waste soybeans.

 

[yoderjac]

It looks like you have way more hens than gobblers, or are the rest of the longbeards elsewhere? How soon does your spring gobbler season open? Ours is still a month away, May 3rd, which unfortunately is after most of the breeding season is over.

I don't think that is unusual at this time of year. We often see a few fairly dominant gobblers grouped with a harem of hens. Less dominant, satellite gobblers, often stay out of sight of the dominant gobblers. From spring pictures, it often seems like there are many more hens than gobblers. Jakes are also often away from these groups, but not always. Gobblers will often tolerate jakes to a point where they get too close to the hens. There are some mornings when the sky lights up with gobbling activity in every direction, yet we you see a group of hens there are often a small number of gobblers with them.

We have a camera network running 24/7/365 with pictures transmitted back to camp. In the fall, I will often see large bachelor groups of mature gobblers and similarly large groups of older 1.5 year old jakes (sometimes called super-jakes). Jakes from that spring are often still immature enough and still hanging with the family groups of hens and often times difficult to tell from hens in pics if beards are not visible.

I would not use pics from the spring of mixed groups of hens and gobblers as a good indicator of sex ratios in your turkey population.

 

[Native Hunter]

This was a year I really enjoyed hunting.