Is It a Bad Omen If All Your Digital Game Camera Images Are of Hens?

People love the spring for a variety of reasons. Those individuals who live in the northern parts of our country welcome spring as an end to shoveling snow, high heating bills, and bulky winter coats and boots. Some enjoy the reawakening of plants that have been dormant for so long. Others enjoy the smell of the air and earth that have been newly washed by spring rains. But for a large group of outdoorsmen, there is another attraction to this time of year - spring turkey season.

Hunting turkeys requires much more than just waiting for opening day, heading into the woods, and making a great shot hipod. Pre-season scouting is vital to success. Turkeys are creatures of habit and as such, will usually follow a routine. Unless you have unlimited time to spend in the woods patterning these birds, the best tool available to achieve your goal is a good digital game camera.

Determining the proper placement for cameras requires a bit of pre-planning. Look for droppings, feathers, roosting areas, scratching, and dusting areas. Analysis of data obtained from scouting cameras will indicate strutting zones, feeding areas and common travel routes, including entry and exits to fields.

A camera focused on a suspected strutting zone will indicate not only whether it is still being used by turkeys, but when it is most active and from which direction gobblers are approaching. One placed over dusting areas will yield photos with a time/date stamp informing you of the best times to hunt from a well placed ground blind. Other excellent places for trail cameras are creek crossings, fence openings, or logging roads. Placing decoys along these routes may help in putting the toms at ease.

In my blog last week, I wrote that our digital game cameras had captured far more images of hens than toms during pre-season this year. According to the National Wild Turkey Federation, this is not necessarily a bad sign. Many wildlife biologists think that an excess of hens helps gobbler populations in several ways.



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