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.
