Why are deer and turkeys different?

[sugarray]

A thought . . .

When a deer comes to your setup with decoys or a blind or just you on the ground they will stomp, blow and run off.

When a turkey comes in they see the hen that has been calling and doesn't mind the blind at all nor the decoys.

Why do you think deer are more in tune to something being different than turkeys?  Turkeys will know if you raise your gun when they pass behind a tree and notice that difference, but deer know that the blind wasn't there yesterday. 

[dirt road ninja]

1. The deer's brains is at least 10 times bigger.

2. Turkey hunting with a blind has only been popular for the last 10 years. It will take then more then a few generations to wise up. IMO
It took ducks and geese awhile to wise up. Years of getting shot at out of a strange box on the side of a pond educated them. I do believe the will become leery of blinds over the season and as species over the next few generations.

3. Turkey can't associate scents with danger. Beating the deer's nose is 99% of deer hunting.

As far as raising/drawing your weapon, both freak out if they see you. Turkeys just see better then deer. I've never noticed turkeys spooking if I raise my gun when they are 100 percent behind a tree, but I have been busted when they 99.9% behind a tree.

[longspur]

I think this was mentioned before and got pretty heated up, but the scientists who waste there time and our money on such stuff have determined that turkeys are amoung the dumbest animals. They have unbelievable eyesight and hearing but they can't figure out squat. The ones that people call smart, you know, the ones that take hours to come in and circle around behind you. Are you telling me that he knows something is wrong and comes in anyway???hummmmm

[stinkpickle]

...The deer's brains is at least 10 times bigger...

This.

[drenalinld]

I can't figure it out Ray. If you hunt deer out of a blind, it better be brushed in good. For turkeys, the more it is out in the open, the more comfortable they seem to be around it. Good question.

[mountman62]

I think this was mentioned before and got pretty heated up, but the scientists who waste there time and our money on such stuff have determined that turkeys are amoung the dumbest animals. They have unbelievable eyesight and hearing but they can't figure out squat. The ones that people call smart, you know, the ones that take hours to come in and circle around behind you. Are you telling me that he knows something is wrong and comes in anyway???hummmmm

must have been them scientist that don't turkey hunt

[savduck]

When a deer comes to your setup with decoys or a blind or just you on the ground they will stomp, blow and run off.

Ive had a field full of them in North Dakota at 20 steps that could care less about a blind. No special camo, smack dab in the middle of an alphalfa field.

Some deer are spooky just like some turkeys are spooky. i had a gobbler this season snub a DSD hen.....yep thats right.

[vaturkey]

Deer & Turkeys might be different in some ways but one thing makes them alike !  They both taste good !

   vaturkey 

[GobbleNut]

 "the scientists who waste there time and our money on such stuff have determined that turkeys are amoung the dumbest animals. They have unbelievable eyesight and hearing but they can't figure out squat."

Okay, then explain this one for me:
We have a suspended feeder at our cabin.  We don't get up there often enough to keep the feeder full all the time.  Sometimes is will get down to a level where it still has some feed in it but it won't get thrown out when the motor kicks on. 

Well, one day, one of the guys was watching a group of gobblers that had come into the feeder.  It kicked on, but was down to the level where nothing, or very little, came out of it.  One of the gobblers flew up and landed on the feeder and started rocking it back and forth, making more feed spill out of it.  He then flew down and all of them fed on the grain for a while.

I'll let you all draw your own conclusions from that about just how smart turkeys are,....but I know what my conclusion is......

[longspur]

If that turkey stood there and thought rationally that there must be some more corn in there and figured out that he needed to shake the feeder to get it to come out then he is a smart cookie and I concede. I've been wrong before. Thanks for sharing that.

[GobbleNut]

I don't think I would go so far as to say that turkeys, or most other animals for that matter, have the ability to think "rationally" about that kind of thing.  But they must have something going on in that pea-brain that would allow them to figure out to jump up on that feeder.  It probably happened by accident at some point....maybe one of them flushed up in the air during a skirmish or something and hit it.  but somehow or another, they learned to associate rocking the feeder with more grain falling out of it.  Whatever it was, we found it to be quite interesting.

...And sorry for misdirecting this thread a bit......

[drenalinld]

and then you see a gobbler strut for an hour up and down a two strand barbed wire fence obviously wanting to be on the other side with the hens???

[GobbleNut]

"and then you see a gobbler strut for an hour up and down a two strand barbed wire fence obviously wanting to be on the other side with the hens???"

Ain't that the truth!  ...Saw a hen trying to get through a 4-strand barbed wire fence one day.  Watched her for a few minutes as she went back and forth...back and forth.  We left for at least two hours and came back by.  She was still trying to get through the fence....back and forth.  I finally got out of the truck and walked down the fenceline toward her.  As I closed in on her, she just ran back and forth faster,...until I finally got up about ten yards from her,...at which point she flew over the fence and away.
Sure makes you wonder.....

[VaTuRkStOmPeR]

You're trying to make this a multi-tiered question, when really, it's very simple.

A whitetail deer, especially, a mature one, lives and dies by its nose.

A wild turkey lives and dies by its eyes.

Both rely heavily on a sensory organ to provide critical survival information.  One is able to make more complex determinations than the other.

[ILIKEHEVI-13]

If a turkey could smell, they would be dang near unkillable.