Mountain Bike Turkey Scouting

Published by Steve Hickoff | July 19, 2010 | 0 comments

Prime turkey scouting doesn’t usually involve 86 degrees Fahrenheit and a Sunday afternoon in July.

This time it did.

Forget that the Maine fall turkey season is months away. Forget too that this is the hottest summer I can remember here in New England.

Here in the off-season I tend to combine mountain biking and looking around in my turkey spots. Sometimes my turkey spots hold big bucks like the one I saw just after daybreak, prancing through the tall field grass like a show pony, all velvet headgear outside its big ears.

Sometimes I even find the big birds.

On my recent 10-mile loop of two-wheeled, off-road biking, I went from pavement to gravel to dried mud to cut field to creek to back field. It’s there I stopped in the shade to catch my breath. Something told me turkeys were nearby.

I’ve mentioned this sort of hunch I’ve had while hunting—or even while driving around in the truck—in print, and to friends and family, including my wife. The hypothetical spot usually looks like it would hold turkeys, I expect to see them, and there they are.

“But what about the times you feel that and don’t see them?” she asks, ever the skeptic.

“I only care about the times I do see them,” I reply with a smile.

Anyhow, I had that feeling, stopped in the shade of the field edge. It was a place I first turkey hunted almost 20 years ago. I wheeled a little further ahead: Up popped a red head, then three more big gobblers, under 10 steps away. They were loafing in the afternoon shade of a big pine on a field edge, sort of bedded down as deer would.

Even after all these years a turkey sighting never gets old. They didn't stay around for long. A few seconds there, then the gobblers were crashing away through the woods, and gone.

The Maine fall turkey shotgun season opens Oct. 16, 2010. There’s no telling whether these four gobblers will be around come then. Right now though, I’m declaring one of them mine.

(NWTF photo)

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