I’m less than a month from chasing elk with a bow in Wyoming. As such, I’ve been hitting the road lately. I don’t particularly enjoy running but I can stick with it as long as there’s something to look at. My home is far enough outside of town that I can usually find a few deer or turkeys or something while I’m out. Today it rained so I went to hit the elliptical. These guys came by 3 times over about 80 minutes:

In more than a month I’ve had 3 hens and 15 poults checking in regularly. I give them two cups of cracked corn each night after I feed the dogs.

With my cell phone, from my truck.

More than 2 years ago I made a post about building and setting up your own turkey feeder. If you’ll recall, I suggested that one of the more important points in turkey feeders is that the turkeys won’t leave their general area to use your feeder. You need to place it in a nature travel path or area of high concentration. It also seems to help if it’s open.

So what about your front yard? Well my wife and I had been seeing a hen recently with 8-10 poults. Usually we saw them on the driveway, but upon closer inspection I discovered that they were also dusting in my jalapeno plants! So I went down to the creek and pulled the feeder I had up this spring (the one that gave me these shots) and moved it to my own front yard.

I didn’t see any turkeys for a few days but there was some suspicious sign. After a week I set up a camera to see what was coming by:

As you might imagine, it wasn’t taking long for the feeder to get cleaned out. Experience has taught me that once the deer find a turkey bucket you’re going to have a hard time in that spot. They learn that they can head-butt the bucket and then eat what falls out. A few of them will get in the pattern of hitting it at night and by morning the bucket is empty. Obviously the deer (and coons) had found me, so I tried to switch over to cracked corn hoping the deer would be less interested. Nope. In the past 2 weeks they’ve cleaned me out of 100 lbs of cracked corn. The turkeys were still coming in every day but I was going broke… So now for the past few days I’ve taken to throwing out about 4 cups of cracked corn each night when I feed the dogs. So far the deer seem to think picking through my yard for cracked corn is a waste of time… but we’ll see…

Anyone have any experience on this? Ideas?

So it’s crazy hot here in the midwest. But, it’s also getting to be that time of year again… Yup, time to lace up the shoes and get training to chase those critters. As such, I headed out after work with my daughter to hit a trail nearby that sometimes has some wildlife to keep me entertained. This guy was with another smaller buck:

I took a picture with the corner of my jogging stroller in it so you could see how close we got:

I ran into a couple of bears on my recent Manitoba fishing trip. This guy let us get to 40 yards or so with only a little drama…

To give you some idea of how close I was, this is a picture from my cell phone. The wife and I have seen him around occasionally since last fall. Based on his size I would guess he’s just a really dark grey squirrel but I’m certainly no expert. We seem to have both grey and red in about equal numbers. Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

I saw lots of bears:

And they decided not to eat me (although sometimes it seemed they were giving it too much consideration):

Tomorrow I’ll start a day-by-day type breakdown…

I stumbled upon this guy yesterday while chasing a tom and 4 hens around trying to catch a few good pictures. It turned out better than any of the turkey pics.

Last week from the cam by my house:

Just a doe watching me wander by.