Local hatch

[Nershi]

Have they been relocating them in northern MN? I had heard of the relocation program but didn’t know they were doing it in the northern third of the state.

I kinda assumed they were making their way north as our average temps are warming. You’d never see turkeys in northern MN 15 years ago. Each year you’d see them a little further north and now you see them often up here. We have them by my house and nothing with the landscape has changed. It’s all state land around me with good grouse habitat from the state selling off harvest rights in sections each year. We had a ton around a few years ago and a cold winter knocked the flock down significantly. Just kinda assumed weather was regulating their northern range but I don’t know much about turkeys.

I’ve seen them up north of leech in the Chippewa national forest in old growth pine
forest. They were a long ways from any fields. Seemed like an odd place for turkeys to live.

[Mallard_maniac]

saw them this year near Cook. Buddy had them last year on bear baiting trail cam outside of lutsen.

[Fish Felon]

Birds of prey eat grouse, and I'm sure eat the fukc out of grouse chicks. A cooper's hawk will start up a grouse chick i bet in short order.

In my lifetime, from being an 8yo kid when I have solid memories of what it was like back then to what it's like now.....

I'd love to see some actual figures on the total increase in the raptor population in the grouse range. I'm thinking a tenfold increase has to be a pretty reasonable figure. 25X wouldn't shock me. I was born in 1981, and we were coming off DDT. There wasn't shit for raptors. Seeing a hawk, let alone an eagle, was a big deal. I remember one time driving to the cabin in the back of the family van and seeing there was an eagle sitting in a tree off 169 or 371 and I shit you not....

....it was just like being at Yellowstone in that there were at least a dozen cars pulled over on the side of the road, with a few dozen people standing next to them taking pictures (back when you needed an actual camera to do so and getting photos developed wasn't cheap) or they had binos strapped around their neck and they were staring up at the thing.

Nowadays?

I'm constantly worried about my cats and have chucked beers as I'm running at eagles swooping down at them. In the fall, the same rice lakes I never saw an eagle at ever until I could legally drink will now have fifteen spaced evenly around the edge and the fukcers aren't afraid of the fact that they know I have a gun.....there'll be multiple that swoop down at the same time and hover over you close enough to where you're able to make legit eye contact with them as they try to get your ducks. I've lost more than a few ducks to eagles.

In addition to the increase of "death from above" for grouse, there are also more ground predators than ever, IMO.

Let's face it....trapping as a sport is dead. Besides maybe the odd hipster woodsman setting out a few traps and then going back to his tiny cabin to drink some micro brew his buddy made that includes a bit of maple syrup he and his buddy procured....who the fukc traps anymore?

I grew up as a white kid in the 'burbs with two parents from Iowa. When I was in college I remember bringing in a duck to get mounted at a taxidermy shop in Northern MN. I asked what the weird animal in the showroom was that to me....might as well been a freaking chupacabra.

"That's a fisher."

I had no idea what it was. Never seen one. Never heard of one. Never saw one in East Central MN due to their reclusive nature. This summer?

I've had 6-7 cross the road in front of me if seen them running up the ditch while driving....big fukcers too = mini-wolverines.

I've never seen so many fox as this year. There's a family of fox that I see weekly and hear every other night. I'm not doing speed these days but at the start of the summer I was and every night, I could walk out with my headlamp on and see their eyes somewhere in the woods....was pretty worried about my cats roaming the place. When separated from their mom and then startled, like when some random dude shines them at night, and they don't know where mom is.....let out what I'd call an almost death-bleat....I've heard it before numerous times in various woodland places and I always thought it was some sort of bird. Blood curdling.

They're actually not that afraid they just sound like it. The mom would always sit on the nearby ridge and watch me.....wait for me to leave, which would be quick. I'd turn my light off and go back in, and take my cats with me, so she could double back and get her scared pups. It didn't take long before I was more worried about my cats messing with one of her pups than I was about them messing with my cats. One of the fixed males I've got is Big....probably over twenty pounds. He's almost two and is still got a little playful kitten in him. The fukcer will be sitting on the ground on all fours, belly resting, and do like a kangaroo hop up across the cabin, gets about four feet in the air, to land on one of the other cats in the same exact position he was when resting and leaving the ground.....he doesn't appear to twitch a muscle doing this.....makes Michael "Air" Jordan look like a joke. I've never seen any cat do this but man....the other cats fukcing hate it, and it reminds me of how insanely freakishly muscular cats are. My cats aren't fat. They're lean killing machines.....that don't leave the property. I've never seen them cross the frontage road where the foxes are. Never once seen their eyes reflect back at me at night.

I have seen other cats. The leaping cat of mine I was just talking about was sired one night out in the woods and born at the cabin so the one big Tom I routinely see literally night be his dad. The female I have is now fixed but the stray Tom that was once her lover still seems to like to come by and say, "Hi." It's little social things like this about animals was not in tune with when I was younger that makes it increasingly difficult with each passing year to kill anything besides fish.

Anyways, getting back on track to my point....

I've never seen more fox than I have this year, which I enjoy. The guy who once brutally blew the top of the heads off of the cutest, tiniest, most innocent little fox pup family ever in maybe the most sadistic and fukced up way of killing a family of animals I've ever heard of has repented....feels awful for doing it and always will....and now greatly enjoys seeing fox around. They're an amazing and beautiful animal.

This spring and early summer when I was going to work right at sunrise it was routine to see two even three or four foxes milling about during a ten or fifteen mile drive to the job site. Passing the nearby resort one morning an hour after sunrise that day, I had one slowly cross in front of me to where I had to literally make a stop as he crossed.....seeming to not have a care in the world. A half mile up at the T-intersection there was another fox, bright red with the blackest of ear tips, just sitting there on his haunches enjoying the morning sun on him, with his head turning and then tracking the passing cars....just like a dog.....hell, just like me for that matter trying to turn onto a busy highway and not get smoked by passing traffic.

There are a lot more of a lot more different types of animals in the woods now compared to prior when turkeys arrived. There might be some truth to them eating grouse eggs or being really territorial, it certainly wouldn't surprise me, but that's a pretty myopic view of what's different and seems like a pretty obtuse effort to make a scapegoat out of one thing......simple-minded people like to have one thing and one thing only to be able to point at as the problem......since it keeps things simple.



One last note in regards to trapping:

Isn't it ironic that for decades the trapping community worried about animals rights activists and pointed at PETA as their main threat, what killed trapping is what is killing hunting, and mankind as a whole in general.....


....Nintendo, then Sega, then Playstation, then Xbox, and then the final nail in the coffin?



Fukcing handheld computers that double as a communication device.

[emptymag]

They were a long ways from any fields. Seemed like an odd place for turkeys to live.

Turkeys live in woods.

Remember when Christopher Columbus or whoever found this land and their where turkey everywhere and nothing was farmed.

[Nershi]

They were a long ways from any fields. Seemed like an odd place for turkeys to live.

Turkeys live in woods.

Remember when Christopher Columbus or whoever found this land and their where turkey everywhere and nothing was farmed.

Yes I am well aware of that. You cut off part of the paragraph. Do you think old growth pine forests with very little undergrowth is good turkey habitat?

About the only life I find in those types of forest is red squirrels which is why the turkeys seemed out of place.

[emptymag]

I wouldn’t say good but I have seen turkeys roost in pine trees a bunch of times.

Turkeys are odd. So dumb they are smart?

[maplelakeduckslayer]

Was pretty surprised when I saw the first flock at the cabin 8 years ago...now this spring my dad had one mount a hen right in front of the sliding door at the cabin. Their explosion is pretty amazing.

[Fish Felon]

All they need is hardwoods....supposedly.

I dunno...there are a lot of places that turkeys are thick that are pine forests out West.

Most of the original MN turkey proponents cut their teeth on Merriam's in the Black Hills. There aren't any oaks there, it's all cedar and pines. It does seem like it'd be more conducive for turkeys for some reason, due to the type of grass fields, but then again.....I bet if you look at the aerial of the border running with Canada and MN and the Black Hills it's probably pretty similar....not looking at typography and avoiding the spots that are shield lake saturated (which are many, but nowhere near the amount of area that isn't saturated).....hell, there are way more pockets of hardwoods like oaks up in Northern MN than what the Black Hills have.

I dunno....I'd bet turkeys will be thick in extreme Northern MN in 10-20 years.

The first turkey i shot in area that was extremely pine heavy and there were turkeys everywhere.