4-1-18 Happy Easter.
Our first spring turkey hunters arrive tomorrow. The walk-in and freezer are up and running; the cleaning crew has everything ready to go; and my wife, Jeri, spent the afternoon yesterday doing all kinds of things to the lodge from shower curtains to light bulbs to new rugs in the barn's bedrooms. She nearly wore me out. It was as close to an honest-day's-work as I have done in months.
Max Sanders continues to be quite busy with his extensive inventory of cameras. This past week he submitted photos from several sites. Each batch of photos is rich with information and we are fortunate to have access to all the work done by Max.
Posting the photos to the website can be super-problematic sometimes. This week's offering has over 30 photos. It would be nice to have the photos from a certain location all together in the collection. But Network Solutions, who hosts the site, will jumble them up. I post them in groups of ten at a time. Sometimes, the site won't take all of them, or even half of them. So I have to back-up and re-submit the ones which were not accepted. Of course I have to make notes on which were taken and which were not. This week, it took six different attempts to get all 32 photos posted.
So below you will see numerous things. Max still has his camera on the cottonseed and the deer still visit the pile, even though it got wet during the recent rain. But with the winter weeds now getting large enough, the deer might quit the cotton seed to focus on the more palatable weeds.
Turkeys are now found in abundance at most of our feeders. A few of the more remote ones show only modest activity, but that will change as the birds move ever farther away from their winter roosting sites. By mid-May, the turkeys will be long gone. As you will see in one of the photos, our feeders draw plenty of doves, too. But here in Texas, you cannot hunt doves over bait. You can hunt a field of milo, but you cannot hunt a feeder dispensing milo. Go figure. But dove season doesn't begin until September 1 anyway. By then, eating our milo, the doves will be too fat to fly.
Sadly, some of the feeders are drawing feral hogs. Without Max and his cameras, we'd never know how many there are and how often the come. Max notes that many of them come at all hours of the day and night. It is impossible to predict their movements. One image in the collection below has a feral hog alongside what just might be the Easter Bunny. See if you can spot this fabled creature.
You will see several photos of turkeys sitting atop one of the feeders. What compels a bird to perch there? Surely there can be no feed on the lid. But is the visibility better? Does the bird feel safe from predators? Is a gobbler looking for a likely nearby hen? Or, if the penthouse bird is a hen, is she trying to get away from the pesky gobbler who is trying to have his way with her? As with all-things-turkey, there are always more questions than answers.
Trail cameras postings over the next month will cease as our attention is turned to reporting on the spring turkey hunters. Every four days or so, I'll be posting photos and reports on what's going on with the turkey fanatics - er, ah - addicts. No, wait - they are the highest class of hunters that exist. But man, are they ever serious about their sport. We can hardly wait to hear all their stories.
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