Early Hunt Finds Toms Too Busy In West Texas
STEVE KNIGHT
VANCOURT - In the Concho Valley, it rains too seldom, the wind blows too often, winter is often slow to retreat and summer arrives too soon.
For those reasons, the Rio Grande turkeys that roam the range seem to take their sweet time getting the spring breeding season under way.
Saturday (a week after the spring season opened) started off cold with temperatures dipping into the 30s. The sun hadn't even cleared the horizon when the turkeys awoke in an ear-shattering symphony of gobbles and yelps. There was no way to tell how many roosted in the area the night before.
Within minutes, a gobbler was standing no more than 20 yards away, but out of sight behind the giant agarita bush I was hiding behind. For a half hour or longer, we carried on a conversation - he gobbling and me replying with a yelp. At one point, a second tom close by joined in. Like the other bird, he wouldn't come around the corner.
I sat with my shotgun ready for a quick shot that never came.
I can only imagine what was causing the birds to hang up. It came down to a couple of possibilities: they were either with hens and were more than willing to allow another to join, but not willing to come and get her; or they were young birds, not jakes, but not old-timers, and were unwilling to challenge the full-bodied decoy I put out with a hen model.
Despite that toms had been gobbling for more than a month on the ranch, it didn't come as a surprise to find them "henned up" a week into the season.
A strong north wind blew across the Denis Ranch that spreads across portions of Concho and Tom Green County as Tyler's Alan Haynes and I took a late afternoon tour April 3. Haynes has been on the 5,000-acre No Talent Hunting Club lease for 28 years, and while members have come and gone, a huge turkey flock has remained a constant. And so has a late season breeding peak.
Typical to western Texas, locating turkeys isn't particularly difficult. The birds roost in the old pecans and live oaks that line Kickapoo Creek.
After leaving the roost each morning, the birds scatter spending time strutting, breeding, eating and loafing. Pegging their route, however, is next to impossible. As another hunter said, "they don't know where they are going, so there is no way you can."
As Haynes and I rode the lease, a storyline kept repeating - after a strong hatch a year ago, jake numbers were off the scale and if you saw a mature gobbler, he was surrounded by a harem of hens.
Breeding activity is caused by a number of things, the most important for the gobbler being the length of daylight. Weather, diet and range conditions also play factors, but this is a good year for Rio Grande turkeys. The region received an unusual six inches of rain in March, something bound to help nesting conditions and produce what Haynes said will be the fourth consecutive good production year.
In the wild, a hen can reproduce in her first year. Toms don't mature sexually or aren't allowed to breed by more dominate gobblers, until year two and beyond. Based on research using domestic turkeys, a young gobbler may be able to breed up to 20 hens per season while an older bird may breed up to 14.
This means that as the days go along, bred hens will quickly fall out of harems and begin a long period of nesting. That is good news for hunters who have two times they can be successful at calling toms, before the hens get interested and after they go nest.
For this region it looks like it will be another week before the majority of hens go nest and conditions turn ideal. Then the race is on because with each passing day, toms begin to lose interest.
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