I have a 200 acre farm in northeast Kentucky. I've been hunting it since 2002.
For the most part, I feel like I'm hunting the same turkeys I met up with when I first got here. Individuals pass on, but where gobblers gobble and where hens go to forage seems to be nearly eternal. The terrain dictates the behavior.
If I work a gobbler that likes to roost in a given area, a few years later another gobbler will show up in that area and he'll act fairly similar. I even have names for some of them. There's the Virginia Rambler,the Garbage Pit Bandit, Mister Natural, etc. For instance, let's take the Garbage Pit Bandit. There's an island of scrubby trees and blackberries just to the east of a oak grove penninsula. In the middle of the grove is a sinkhole where the previous owners dumped trash. Nearly every spring, a flock will feed in the late morning and then again in the mid-afternoon. Usually there's a gobbler strutting between the island and the peninsula. I tried for years to hunt that gobbler.
It took until just a few years ago for me to have success. Normally, what happens is that I spy the gob on my way in to the cabin for lunch. If I do a bit of sneaking, I can get up to another island at the east end of the field and sit there in the shade and call to the gob at Garbage Pit. Sometimes, I can draw him out into the middle of the field, but 20+ years of trying, I'd never got him to come all 200 yards .
20+ years? That's not the same gobbler, but it could just as well be from the behavior I'd seen.
Here's the whole story:
The End of the Garbage Pit Bandit
Are they nomadic? I usually show up at camp around March 1. It may take a few weeks before I hear them for the first time. Where they go and what they do over the winter is a bit of a mystery. Once they show up, they roost in the same spots, go to feed in the same fields and loaf in the same woods.
It won't be the same tree every night. In fact they'll sometimes roost 200 yards away some nights. I don't know why. I used to think it was weather and wind, but that didn't pan out. What I think happens is that they just browse through the woods until late afternoon and suddenly decide it's time to roost and they pick the nearest tree and go for it. Most nights, they end up at the same tree, because they're such creatures of habit, but moving roosts is not a sign of stress or incoming weather or much of anything.
As an example: I can take a gobbler amid hens 80 yards from the roost and have them plop down the next day from the same tree. On the other hand, I can have two nearly identical days of weather, no contact with the birds and find them roosted across the pasture on Day 2, only to return the next night.
