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.

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?

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.

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.