Farm Update

I was beginning to have farm withdrawals after not being down there for more than a month.  I finally made it down this past weekend to get a little work and play done.  Right before turning in to the drive to our place, I saw a big ol’ tom in full strut about 60 yds off the road near the edge of a field we often see them.  I stopped and watched as my spring turkey fever instantly went through the roof.  I normally make an effort to not do any calling when I’m not actually hunting, but I couldn’t resist the urge and gave out a series of yelps with my mouth to see if I could get him to gobble.  Each time I yelped, he would turn his body side to side almost as if he was “strutting harder” if that even makes sense.  No gobbles though…

My binocs were in the back of the truck and I was really wishing I would have grabbed the DSLR camera and telephoto lens at this point.  I watched him strut for a good couple of minutes and then he began to break out of strut a little.  Now, I never have seen a pair of turkeys breed in the field before, but I have seen toms attempt to breed the decoys I'm hunting over…and that was exactly what this guy was doing.  I knew what he was doing but couldn’t figure out why for the life of me.  As I continued to watch, it all made sense…shortly after a hen stood up and walked off into the woods with the tom following.  Apparently the hen was sitting down that whole time he was strutting and I just couldn’t see her through the tilled corn stubble.  Quite an exciting start to the day!

Next on my list of things to do was to refresh a couple of mineral licks.  In the past I have always used the Whitetail Institute’s 30-06 mix and/or Trophy Rock’s and have had great success with both.  The cost of replenishing them began to add up though so I decided to switch to a homemade recipe that is available on many places on the internet, which many have probably seen before.  You can get all of the supplies at your local ag and feed store.  The recipe is as follows:

Di-Calcium Phosphate (1 part)

Trace Mineral Salt (2 parts)

Stock Salt (1 part)

Be sure to not mix the ingredients until you are ready to pour it into the lick.  I use a couple of 5 gallon buckets to mix and pour the mix, then dump some water over the mix after adding it to the lick site if it’s dry.  Our farm and the word dry don’t really go together so there’s normally already water in the lick, in which case I just mix it in real good with my boots.

I’ve had a Reconyx and Scoutguard camera over my main lick for the past month with the intent of doing a side-by-side comparison between the two cameras.  Well, the Reconyx took 1,473 pictures and the Scoutguard only took 50.  Obviously the Reconyx won this battle but something obviously wasn’t working right on the Scoutguard.  I pulled it and took it home for some troubleshooting.  I was using an off-brand memory card and hoping that was the cause of the problems, otherwise I may have to send it in...again.

The lick has been getting a lot of action…mainly from some big doe family groups, but also from several bucks that are already starting to sprout some velvet.  The main lick is in a heavy doe family area and the does normally kick the bucks out of the area here in a month or two when they are getting ready to give birth.  It may sound crazy, but I firmly believe it to be the truth.  I get many pictures of does kicking bucks away from the lick that time of year every year.  And then the number of buck pictures quickly drop off to nearly nothing through the summer months while they are raising the fawns.

After replenishing the licks, Riley and I aimlessly walked through the woods hoping to stumble on a shed or some mushrooms with no luck.  I carried a crow call with me and gave out some calls throughout the walk to see if I could get a lonely tom to shock gobble.  The winds were blowing 20+ mph though so I didn’t expect much out of it but was worth of try.  This technique works great and has helped me to bag some late morning gobblers in past seasons.

We did stumble on a climbing stand that was left 15+ ft in a tree on our walk through the woods.  Now, for those of you that know how climbing stands work, I think you can guess what must have happened here.  It’s obvious the stand slipped/broke and the guy fell down to the ground.  There’s no other way to get down once up there unless they used climbing sticks and just left the stand.  But judging how the bottom piece is dangling there, my bet is someone fell.  This was just off our property line on land I also have permission to hunt.  Nobody else has permission to hunt this area that I know of, but we do have some locals that own an extremely small tract nearby that roam the entire area like they own it all.  My guess is it was one of them, and I hate to admit it, but a little grin came across my face when I saw this.  We’ve run these guys off our land many times and have had trail cameras and stands stolen.  I do hope no one was seriously hurt, but I'm sure they at least had to change their pants after a fall like that.  It looks like the stand has been there awhile but I was in this area before last season and never noticed it…perhaps I just didn’t see it?  I'm going to mention it to the farmer to see if anyone else has permission to hunt his land for the past several years.  

Before we headed out we made a quick walk through the tract of timber we had been doing the TSI.  I was happy to see the spring storms and heavy winds brought down a lot of the trees that were hung up.  I snapped a few pictures on my cell phone of some of the damage we made before heading home.