No Podcasts, but. . .
There will be no podcasts of my scouting trips this year. I tried. I failed. Nothing went right. It all went wrong. The turkeys did not cooperate until this past weekend. Normally, I’ve been out three or four times before this time of year. However, I did not hear a peep out of them until last weekend– nothing I could record, but they were at least there.
I got down to the farm well before sundown on Friday. I had a nice treat. There was a gobbler roosting just behind the Tobacco Barn, less than 200 yards from the front porch. This fellow was taking up a post that had long been silent. For several seasons running, I tried in vain to shoot one of his predecessors before I gave up. The roost is too well placed. A gobbler in that tree has a perfect view of the tree line, the barn, the intervening pasture. There is a pond that protects the tree like a moat on one side. Try as I might, I could never get in without him spying me. I finally wrote it off as a waste of time. This was the first time in 15 years that tree had been occupied. I contented myself with sitting on the front porch and enjoying my dram of Scotch and listening to the floor show. He was still sounding off when I went to bed.
I went out to the Honey Hole this on Saturday. Sure enough, the Heartbreak Ridge crew were there and in good voice.  I reached into my bag, pulled out my recording rig and. . . Nothing. The Digital Audio Recorder sputtered and issued a message that it could not find its batteries. No amount of coaxing would bring the DAC back to life. Drat.
I did get a nice treat. The hens of the Heartbreak Ridge crew gave quite a serenade. It set off gobblers all along the hillside and it allowed me to take a fairly decent inventory of the turkeys I will face this season. A lot of the usual players are back– or at least their children and grandchildren. It is shaping up to being a good season.
Rain started in the late morning. By then I was back at the farm, beating on the recorder. I tried new batteries, external power– nothing. It just would not recognize that it was getting proper power. Rather than dink with it anymore, I decided that a replacement was in order. E-Bay had a used replacement in good working order. I ordered it. It will be in hand by mid-week.
KYHillChick came down to camp for another session of deep cleaning. I helped shovel out a decade’s worth of detritus, while she scrubbed all the surfaces. By the time she left in the late afternoon, we are well past the half-way mark in this project. The housekeeping at camp has been rather lax since we all stopped going down as a family. ‘HillChick has been working her new job as a massage therapist, often taking clients on Saturdays. Angus and Moose now have lives of their own, and it is no longer a matter of packing up the whole family and heading down to camp every weekend. Often times, it’s just me alone now.
There are now hens out in the fields. They only seemed to show themselves when ‘HillChick or I had to go out on the porch to deposit another bag of garbage. They would run like scalded cats, but be back out within the hour. Whatever is holding their interest in the field, it must certainly be filling an intense need. My guess is that it is fresh clover beginning to grow, and with the rain coming, worms.
Thunderstorms hit in the evening, but it was all blown out before midnight. The temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees from the morning before.
When 0400 came, I was still half-awake and just in the process of fixing coffee when I absent-mindedly picked up the recorder and tested it. It powered up without a problem (WT?) This had been a doorstop less than a day previous and there was already a replacement on order. Oh well, (sigh) I’ll have a spare now. I put everything in the bag and set off. Except that I didn’t. The full thermos of coffee didn’t get packed. This is the second weekend in a row I’ve gone out with out my coffee. Yikes.
I stumbled out to the listening post closest to the gobbler that had been sounding off behind the Tobacco Barn, figuring he might give me another concert. Nope! He had skedaddled with the oncoming storm and I finally heard from him way out behind Garbage Pit. I packed up and wandered back out to the Honey Hole. Nothing! Except I did run into the Virginia Creeper, who had come out of Left Leg Creek, obnoxiously early to hang out in the pasture by the Honey Hole. We had a brief glance at each other just before he launched and flew back to his refuge in Virginia. Drat again!
This pre-season, despite all the set-backs, has not been without merit.  For the past 10 years, I’ve noticed that when I come back to camp after a winter hiatus, there are sometimes just plain flat no turkeys around. As the season progresses, they’ll suddenly show up, take their places on the ancestral roosts, and conduct business as usual. At times, I’ve wondered if they were ever going to show up at all. At times I’ve wondered if they were there, and just being extra quiet. Over the past few weekends, I believe I witnessed proof that they really do migrate. Yes, there are days where they are quieter than usual, but this year, I got to see their progression better than I had before.
My best hypothesis for the migration is that the turkeys are scouring the woods for acorns all winter and move off my ridge when the acorns run out. When I come back March 1, the woods are filled with V-shaped scratches, but there are no turkeys. I think they come back when the clover starts growing in the pastures. I only say that, because most years, that’s what I find in the gobbler’s craw. The more active the year, the more clover I find.
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The place I hunt is similar. No toms to speak of up until right before season. and any sort of rain or storm scatters them far and wide for a day or two. I was happy to see a dusting spot that had recently been scratched out and used on one of the dirt roads when I was there last week looking for mushrooms. I also found a hillside that I have never hunted or heard a bird in that spot before, littered with fresh turkey scratchings. I’m having a hard time sleeping in the past week with all the thoughts of the upcoming season rattling around in my brain. This time of year gives me the same feeling as Christmas morning gave me when I was a child.