Yesterday was my first good day out scouting this year. I was able to monitor the flydown of four flocks on either side of a ridge. It was pretty much a typical morning for the turkeys. The gobblers gobbled a bit, the hens yelped a bit, everybody took their turn plopping down into the leaves and they all milled about squaking at each other.

. . . and then they were gone. There is nothing quite so unexpected and sudden as the feeling you get when you realize that you are now alone in the woods. It is as though they all got on their cell phones, and counted down together and then jumped through a secret trap door and vanished. The silence is breathtaking.

Where do they go? Do they all go over to somebody’s trailer to watch Oprah? Are they surfing the net? Are they out getting breakfast sandwiches? Where do turkeys go?

I know what you’re going to say. They’re off feeding. Well, here’s one back at you: they can’t all be feeding in the same place, and if they were, they’d be squawking at each other. No, this is something more sinister. This is not an easy answer.

It’s like the one about bucks always travelling upwind. That’s what they used to say. If that was true, and here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’d have all the bucks slowly migrating eastward and slightly nrthward, and they’d all quietly leave the state, and all the bucks in Kentucky would be all bunching up on the Ohio River, waiting to get across.

Ditto for turkeys. I’ve heard the schtick about them going down into the creek bottoms to feed. If that were true, all I would have to do is go down to the bottoms and have to muscle my way through the crowds of turkeys. I have been there. They aren’t there. I have been on top of the ridges, the bottom of the ridges, the sides of the ridges, all over the place. The fact of the matter is that turkeys disappear somewhere, and no one can give me a good answer as to where, and then they show up later in the morning in my pastures on top of the ridge and go about their business.

I will tell you what I think. I think they are on break. I have seen this behavior working in manufacturing plants for a good part of my adult life. Things will be very busy out on the plant floor. There will be fork trucks running up and down the aisles, people will be busy, people will be calling to each other and everything will be noisy with the hustle and bustle of life in a factory. Then all of a sudden, you will look up and the machines will be idle and the operators will be gone and the aisleways will be empty. It’s break time. A little over a quarter hour later, the noise of the factory floor picks up again, the aisles start to fill up with traffic and things get back to normal.

I think that is what is going on with the turkeys. They are on break. If that is true, all we have to do is find the break room, and we have it made. I see no mention of it in the rules– you cannot shoot them on the roost, but nobody said you can’t nail one by the vending machines. If that is the case, we need to be looking for a special room somewhere with vending machines that have bugs, lizards, and corn. We need to find a seedy roach coach pulling up on a forgotten logging road selling stale honey buns. We need to find the picnic table with all the cigarette butts that looked like they’ve been held in a beak– then we will finally have the secret place turkeys go after flydown.

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