Howdy friends! Let me get my disclaimer out immediately, I'm not a turkey hunter but watch lots of YouTube videos!!! Any help, suggestions, critiques or comments graciously appreciated.
This weekend was VA youth weekend. We had a horribly windy day Sat, our worst day on the property to date.
Sunday we got in early to my favorite spot and about 30 mins after sunrise we heard a hen about 100 yards away. I think it was a hen, no gobbles and she would yelp back to our yelp. ***If anyone has a good video on identifying hens/jakes by yelps please share. We moved locations to a big ag field on the property. I don't like this field because of its size. As suspected we saw quite a bit of action but everything was 350+ yards away. We set up a blind where we have seen birds this past week
?. Overall we counted 6 Tom/Jakes and 7 hens.
I had a Jake decoy over a hen on the ground and Toms would gobble to our yelps but had zero interest in our decoy setup.
The first turkeys we saw were 3 Toms bugging in the field. Only 1 Tom would gobble back to our yelps. Two of them would strut. With binos, I thought all 3 had beards, but possibly only 2 did? The kiddo and I did a lot of back and forth with binos. We could hear other faint gobbles in the background. My amateur assessment is that a dominant bird and hens were in the woods behind them. I think they were non dominant birds. I was hoping for them to come to our decoy set to run my Jake off.
We had hens wander out into the field onesie twosie all afternoon so my assessment is that hens aren't on the nests yet.
Later on we observed 3 more Toms appear. I am questioning their body language. Only one bird would 1/2 strut. Isn't that something a Jake does? They had beards, but they could have been 6" or 7" beards. I'm a bit baffled on this. We watched them for over an hour.
Pre Season Scouting:
Almost every night last week that field has a nice Tom with hens. It started with 8 hens and by Friday night it was 4 hens. We got to watch him breed a hen Friday night.
Experts- any input or advice?
