Still pretty young and learning a lot of stuff with my dad seems like we alway trust the spot. Does it pay off to scout and look at multiple properties and other spots on public land. Always seems one of us kills every year atleast. Do a lot of you scout or just show up opening day?
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At the very least, I would listen several mornings in different areas. For one thing, someone might be at your first choice spot when you get there. And then..you need a place after one of you shoots. Lots of other reasons but those are a couple
If you always hunt private with no other outside hunters influencing the turkeys and their movements....trusting the spot will work
However if your hunting public the more areas your familiar with the better you off you will be
I still scout my private spots but probably more just because I'm itching for turkey season. Hunting on public out of state it's just scouting while I hunt.
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I haven't scouted in probably 15 years. Most days, I'm in a place Ive never been when day breaks. Some days I'm off the mark, but most days I'm right in the game.
Scout, scout, scout. And I've located several birds in the two or three mornings leading up to the opener with any luck.
Scout when you can before season- where scouting results shine is when the birds aren't talking or playing the game very good. Been a season saver a couple times for me!!
I have lots of places that historically hold birds on a giant piece of public land and I almost never scout those places prior to the season. In addition, with the increasing influx of hunters we have here, most of those places are getting hit pretty hard at the start of the season so there is little use in scouting them anyway.
On the other hand, I am increasingly map-scouting out-of-the-way locations that I think might hold pockets of overlooked birds. Sometimes I will try to find time to scout those out, but the distances to those locations often make that impossible without committing at least a couple of days. As such, I often go in blind and hope my guess about those places holding gobblers is on target.
Hunting out-of-state a few times each spring, I am always relegated to trying to pin-point places that will hold turkeys by perusing maps and satellite images. That is just another facet of spring gobbler hunting that I enjoy, and find to be rewarding, when my pre-hunt research (long-distance scouting) proves to be correct.