Sunday, July 15, 2012
The Turkeys Come Home to Wildwoods
My brother and I along with our wives have been feeding and protecting a few wild Rio Grande Turkeys up at our place at Lampasas. There used to be a lot of turkeys on the place and the surrounding ranches. When we were kids we often saw them, but for at least a decade they have been gone except for a passing gobbler looking for a hen once in a blue moon. I can remember when they used to roost in some of the taller older trees on the ranch. Last year three gobblers and a couple of hens found our feeders. We starting putting out a variety of foods that turkeys like to eat in hopes of holding them and restoring them on the place. We have not allowed any hunting of turkeys on our place and have been trying to keep them from getting shot by holding them on our acreage as much as possible. We lost one of the gobblers deer season that was killed by the landowner next to us. We have been hoping to get them breeding in the area and get a foothold on bringing them back in numbers to the ranch.
This weekend we all went up and did some work at the place and plowed a new food plot. My brother had drilled a water well and wanted to set up a sprinkler to be able to help the food plot along so we plowed it close enough to the well to try to get a start on the crop. We are hoping the deer and turkey will have something extra to see them through hard times.
After a day of hot work we changed out the memory cards in the game cameras and could not wait to get home and load them on the computer to see what visitors had come by the feeders in the last week. We thought you might like to see some of the unusual critters we had this week. Hope you enjoy them as much as Mike and I did, Wild Ed