Male or female? I would guess male if they stay together every day.

How long are the beards?

What is your address, and when do you plan to NOT be home in the next few days.

I hope they are busy eating bugs and not crops. Or engaging in their always entertaining mating dance rituals.

I love wild turkeys and have been seeing them pretty often lately. I've definitely seen more males than females this year, and that has been true most years. I wonder if the females hide?

A female wild turkey with an injured leg hung out with our friendly doe, Hey Baby, and her twins all summer and autumn. They visited my compost pile, along with their herd of 5 to 7 other deer, every evening in summer looking for something good to eat. Hey Baby is less scared of me than the other deer are and will come almost uncomfortably close to me when she sees me headed for the compost pile. When I come out with a bucket, she knows there may be something good in it to eat. By winter, the wild turkey's leg had healed and she was walking on it again (albeit with a limp) instead of hopping, but she still traveled with the deer herd. Maybe they made her their honorary mascot. I used to go out in the evening and put a little pile of hen scratch out for the injured wild turkey and she'd come eat it as soon as I went back indoors. If I forgot to feed her, she came and stood by the pickup and stared at the back door, of the house as if willing me to come out and feed her. I also had a pan of water out there for her and she drank from it several times a day. She left the deer herd in March so presumably she returned to the flock for mating season.

Some years I hear the wild turkeys more than I see them and other years I see them more than I hear them. I notice them most when working in the back garden as that is closer to the part of our property that they tend to roam.

I hope they are eating bugs. I haven't seen any potato vines with bites missing.
In the same plot, the PEPH peas are popping up.

scottokla,

I'll keep that offer in mind.

Dawn,

I'll hope they are eating bugs. We were thinking about putting some wild guineafowl out there to eat bugs but turkeys may be just as good.

I'll second the poster above. If anyone has rural land and needs help with the removal of deer, turkeys, ducks, quail, pheasant, hogs, etc just give a holler.

Johnny, I wouldn't worry about the PEPH peas. If the turkeys didn't dig and scratch up and eat the seed, they surely will not bother the plants now. They will wait and eat the peas once they are forming in the pods. Wild turkeys can fly over the fence into my garden, but they don't, and they've never bothered my southern peas, but I know people who have had wild turkeys strip their pea plants of peas in the summer time.

Maybe your group of turkeys is a bunch of young males just waiting for a pretty young turkey hen to come along so they can impress her with their dance moves.

Dawn