Scouting

I live in Phoenix now. When I started hunting turkeys, I lived in New Mexico. The first place we went that fall in 2001 was part of the Sacramento Mountains range in New Mexico. After moving to Arizona I wanted a place to hunt where I could meet my dad halfway. To get to the Sacramentos from Phoenix is about a 10 hour drive. As it turned out, about a year after getting to Phoenix my Jeep Grand Cherokee started becoming unreliable and I started flying to Albuquerque to meet my dad. The move to find a new spot to hunt was very beneficial to us though. The place where we started hunting in 2001 was not bad, but it wasn't great either. In scouting for a new spot we have looked in a lot of areas. The exercise left us with a better understanding of turkey habitat and reading sign. Here are a couple of things that I've found. An area can be pretty dry, but there must be a source of water that is available every day. The quaility of water is important and turkeys tend to not drink as much from murky water. Old sign doesn't mean that turkeys are in the area. They may like that area for some reason, but probably have vacated it or found greener pastures if there isn't fresh sign. In areas where the geography allows it, Merriams turkeys will migrate from higher altitudes to lower altitudes in the winter. This migration results in an area being great one season and terrible the next. Of course certain spots tend to hold more birds on average, but might be weak some years. Good Merriams habitat contains a couple of things other than a stable water source. First and most important is Ponderosa Pine. There needs to be plenty of Ponderosa. Pole sized Ponderosa is dense and creates a good source of food for Merriams. Medium sized more mature trees are used for roosting. Besides ponderosa I have noticed a lot of live scrub oak. The live scrub oak provides a mast product for turkey during mast years, but there has to be another food source during off years. In the areas that I hunt this is alligator juniper. In dry years I've seen turkey sign that is filled with juniper seeds. You can tell its Alligator Juniper because the scat is purple like the ripe berries. I don't think that one sead juniper is as important, because areas with one sead don't seem to hold as many birds. There also seems to be a kind of holly in areas with a lot of turkeys. I don't know why, but its something I've noticed. These things in my opinion are the main components of turkey habitat in New Mexico. I have seen vast Ponderosa forests that don't seem to have a lot of birds in them. I think that the mixed Juniper and other plant diversity is important.