While southern states have opened up, youth seasons that have come and gone or about to happen in the next week. Northern states have weeks yet to go before youth season commences and the regular season that typically opens up a week later. With a month to go here in New York an often overlooked period is the transition from winter to spring that is upon us. With wild turkey populations reported to be significantly reduced across the northeast, a time to gather critical Intel for your own personal assessments is readily at hand.
The last of the big winter flocks are into the weeks of fracturing into smaller groups as the fighting for dominance peaks for the rights of breeding. As I pen this, snow cover is nearly gone if not completely so. Food sources are now available that were not just a week or two ago. In short the flocks will be moving in mass or sizable sub groups into the well known historical strutting and roosting areas that we all become more familiar with after getting a few seasons under our belts. If you are taking out youths for the early season or will be hunting your regular season, the opener is less than a month a way and you’ll want to take advantage of this now.
This week and the next several weeks coming up are a perfect time to take a child to cruise your stomping grounds and the areas surrounding them to glass the fields and open areas for low impact scouting. Often you can cover lots of ground in the comfort of your vehicle and will only need to make the walk to hidden fields, otherwise not accessible from a roadside vantage point. Rainy days are excellent for finding flocks. Our family will cruise prospective areas often as a relaxing time to see what we may see. We do this a lot year round as countryside sightseeing was a fun time when the kids were young as it is now with a more determined purpose.
Scouting at this time will give you an overall sense of how big the local populations are, the makeup of gobblers vs jakes vs hens. Often you’ll find gobblers trailing the main flocks if they are not already strutting and fighting, doing their very best to impress the hens. It is often said during the late winter months that you’ll see all of them or none. It’s not the time to panic as large flocks have a uncanny ability to thwart our efforts to find them at times. If you have been following since the beginning of the year, you’ll have a hit list of likely places to check.
Whether you find them on properties you hunt, Murphy’s law says you’ll find them on properties you can’t. During this time, flocks you find a mile down the road on a property you don’t have access too, are just as likely to be front row and center come opening day. Over many seasons you’ll learn this first hand. I would stress that as you do your scouting it is to your advantage to not educate gobblers on your calling abilities long before the season starts. Gobblers will learn and pattern our actions every bit as much as whitetails do in my opinion. Personally I like my gobblers to be as dim witted as possible about what I’m looking to do. Unaware and unmolested by a parade of slamming truck doors, and voracious loud calling will do just nicely, thank you.
With wild turkey populations in reduced numbers compared to the last two decades many of us are mulling the decision as to whether or not to hunt specific stomping grounds at all, leave it be in the hopes of aiding a recovery in local populations. It is a personal decision, and I’ll state that we all act in good conscious and it is to our advantage to gather all the relevant Intel we can to decide wisely. In my little slice of gobbler utopia, I have a running list that I currently refrain from taking a fall bird of either sex and several former spring hot spots that I leave alone for the time being. Places that once held 10-15 long beards any given spring are now subject only to the occasional bird cruising through. We can agree that as sportsmen we can regulated ourselves well ahead of a government agency to restrict bag limits and not over hunt areas we know to be in decline.
I’ll wish each of you the best of luck in working up a grand plan for your spring season and if at all possible urge each of you to introduce a child or new hunter to a time honored tradition we have come to love and cherish.
MJ
© 2021
Mike Joyner- Joyner Outdoor Media
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