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Old February 22, 2013, 06:23 PM   #3
buck460XVR
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Join Date: December 28, 2006
Posts: 4,342
Food plots and supplemental feeding are good, but there are other things turkeys require too. If you are in a northern latitude where it gets below freezing for periods of time, turkeys need water to be able to process the food they find and create the body heat needed to prevent them from freezing to death during the cold winter months. This means a spring or some other form of water that is always open. Then there are desirable roost trees. While turkeys will travel long distances to obtain food, they generally return to areas that have preferred roosting trees. These areas hold birds year after year regardless of the food crops around them. Southern exposure during the fall means bugs will be active later into the year, along with easier scratching thru snow in the winter. It also means faster greening up in the spring. Hens need high protein greens early in the spring to stimulate egg laying. This too is more important in the northern areas of their range. They also prefer certain types of terrain and habitat that cannot always be easily changed. This means you can't always draw turkeys to a particular small area, regardless of what you do. During breeding and hunting seasons, giving turkeys an area where they are not continuously harassed or spooked keeps them close. In other words, come the middle of hunting season, one will find the most turkeys in areas where they are disturbed the least. This does not necessarily mean hunted the least. Gettin' in and out without being noticed or spooking birds is the key.
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