Hunted yesterday afternoon for a few hours and our Ms season closes this week so our woods are pretty grown up and that means the mosquit and nats are terrible. They were so bad that my thermacell couldn't fend them all off which got me to thinking. I wonder if turkeys are bothered by them as well and head to open fields during the day when the mosquit and nats are bad like they were yesterday to escape from them? Any thoughts on this?
Yes they're bothered by them. I've seen them constantly shaking their head when the mosquitoes are thick. Not exactly sure how they combat the problem.
I am not 100% sure about this but isn't this one of the reasons they dust themselves?
Author Wade Wineman from Miss. had some interesting thoughts on mosquitoes and turkeys in both of his books based on hunting river swamp turkeys there.
Don't know how much mosquitoes bother turkeys but the gnats this year have been horrible. I have seen gobblers continually shaking there heads to fend off the gnats. I don't think an open field would do much good you'd probably have to go underground to get away from them. I guess to a Turkey it's just part of life.