Eastern Wild Turkey Gobbling

Early April usually brings a lot of gobbling activity in our area, but things have been slow this year. I usually encounter turkeys each day, but I have not gotten any good still shots of them gobbling or strutting. I am mostly seeing young gobblers also known as "Jakes". Two large gobblers showed up frequently until lately, but they are elsewhere now. I did record one gobbling with the Canon XL-H1 as it passed through a nearby meadow and have recorded some spectacular footage of turkeys fighting which I hope to post as video clips in the near future.

Since I have had such poor luck lately, I decided to dip into the archives and post two shots from a close encounter with mature gobblers from April 8, 2007. Turkeys are more likely to gobble in early morning or in late afternoon and evening.

In this instance a flock of two or more mature gobblers, Jakes, and hens came in front of my blind at 8:37 in the morning. Since the birds were in the woods I was only able to get an exposure of 1/90 sec. F4 at ISO 200.

I had stated in an earlier post or comment that I have never been able to actually capture a gobbler in full gobble, but I later recalled this shot. I still am not happy with it. For a picture such as this to be successful, it has to make one literally "see the sound" which is difficult to do and I am not sure that this is entirely successful from this standpoint.

Canon 10-D 500mmF4

Canon 10-D 500mmF4

Canon 10-D 70-200mmF2.8 L

I was hidden in the blind shown above and used the 500mm F4 which may be seen attached to the Canon XL-H1 camcorder in this instance-although the photos in the post were taken with the 10-D.