Bringing home a tom often depends on having done your fieldwork properly before the season opens. Photo by Bruce Ingram.

Every February and March, popular sporting magazines run stories about the need for turkey hunters to do pre-season scouting. Although these articles often make for entertaining reading -- some scribe details how he found a longbeard in February that he called in and killed on opening day of the season -- I find such claims dubious.

After all, the vast majority of mature birds have no individual identifying characteristics that help us distinguish one gobbler from another. And, second, the wintertime behaviors of toms -- what they're doing, where they're locating -- will bear little to no relationship to the activities they'll be into when the season commences.

Let's take a look at the folly of scouting too early and discuss more-effective ways of preparing for the season.

WHAT ARE GOBBLERS DOING NOW?
Just what are the gobblers and hens up to, right now, in the middle of winter? Well, both sexes are actually going about their daily routines pretty much as they did in the fall, when you would see a flock meander by while you were on that deer stand.

The males really have only three things on their primitive minds now -- and none of those is mating. The first is survival: A turkey's senses of sight and hearing are exceptional, and this bird's wariness is legendary; those survival senses never shut off. The second is to establish dominance over other males in his flock -- a drive that begins immediately after hatching and never wanes or ceases. The third is simply to find food.

The females, of course, are driven by the two of those same motivators: survival and food. But their other instinct is to protect the jennies that remain with them. As many turkey enthusiasts know, the jakes have long since left the flock and are engaged in sorting out dominance issues in their young male gangs.

So at this time the birds are sorted out into what amounts to four separate flocks: the mature males; mature females that don't have young, having lost their broods for whatever reason; gangs of jakes; and assemblies of jennies with their maternal hen.

Especially during the late-winter period, these various flocks travel epic distances to find food. Telemetry studies have shown that some flocks trek 25 or more miles from their starting points in the course of a month. Prior to the opening of hunting season, turkeys will range great distances in order to find food, in particular when mast both hard and soft is scarce.

Thus, February scouting forays on properties that you plan to later hunt may yield sightings of turkeys, but these birds may or may not be the ones that are around come opening day. And their flock dynamics will definitely have changed by then, as more mingling of the sexes will obviously take place as the opener draws nigh.

Additionally, turkeys may be in certain general areas now, but even if they remain in the vicinity, their specific habitat needs will have changed by opening day; by then, for instance, hens are more likely to be in locales near top-quality nesting areas such as clearcuts with deadfalls and brushpiles.

None of this is to say that you shouldn't scout in mid-to-late winter. I'm just stating that any information gained now is at best irrelevant and at worst totally useless -- unless it's interpreted correctly.

WHEN TO BEGIN SCOUTING
So, all of the above in mind, when should we begin scouting? My answer: Start 10 or so days before turkey season. Biologically speaking, flock dynamics will from that point be basically stable until the hens begin to incubate their eggs -- a period of roughly six weeks.

While mature toms gobble lustily on the roost, jennies and mature hens will be roosting nearby. At flydown time, when gobblers commence to strut, hens will almost always be feeding in proximity. During this 10-day stretch I've occasionally observed some mating occurring, although the peak of that is likely yet to come. Often fighting, seldom gobbling, jakes and subdominant gobblers will be flitting about the perimeters of the assemblages of hens.