Hen Behavior

[CornPirateKiller]

Last week, my brother and I put in our time chasing longbeards. The weather and other factors worked against us but I still loved the hunt even though this Spring we were unsuccessful. We had the opportunity to observe some amazing hen behavior as we hunted, though.

This Spring, I obtained a mounted hen decoy. Everything I've seen and heard about using a mount as a decoy told me that the gobblers would come running if they saw it. Not true. The old toms were still as cagy as ever. We did have several hens give my decoy some close scrutiny, however. We were sitting in our blind, the decoy out about 15 yards when a hen appeared out of the woods to our right. She spotted the decoy and made a beeline right for it. The first thing I noticed was that she was a lot bigger than the other hens that had been around that day. Secondly she was much lighter colored and had rump feathers and tail tips that were almost white, like a Rio or Merriams strain. I though she looked odd, but when she got up beside the decoy, she really put on a show. She dropped her wings, fanned her tail, and strutted! Her neck even swelled and turned bright red. At 15 yards, I could clearly see she had no beard or spurs, but she sure acted like a gobbler. I think her testosterone levels were a little higher than the other hens. I wish I'd had a video camera because most people that I tell about this think it is pretty odd.

Anyone else ever see a hen strut?

[Borch]

In the Black Hills this spring we had a hen come in in fullstrut the entire way. Lucky my daughter noticed it had no visible beard and the head was pink instead of white/blue/red. She fool my buddy as he asked where'd the tom go? It's the first time I've seen it anywhere. Often I've seen a posture like a half strut but nothing like this.

I hope you enjoyed the show. We sure did!

[Sturg]

I've also seen that behavior. I would suspect she is probably asserting her dominance. Get a strutting tom decoy and your odds of pulling toms in will rise dramatically. My friends and I went 11 for 13 using the strutting toms this year. Two jakes and nine longbeards including three longbeards with 1.25 in spurs. I usually set up 3 decoys. Two hens and one mounted tom. We use blinds and set the dekes 10 yds out the shooting window. I had 8 different mature toms come in in 8 days of hunting (both MN and WI). Good luck next time!

[Hotspotter]

Sturg:

The success of this tactic, IMO, is highly dependent upon:

-season

-population of birds in the area you're hunting

-weapon (bow/gun)

As far as season is concerned, even jake decoys the latter half will cost you more toms than they'll bring in. For every dominant bird, there's 4-5 more that are sick of getting spurred everytime they try to assert their agressiveness. Lots of birds means lots of competition and fighting. After a few years of having subordinates sulk away from jake/tom dekes during later season hunts, I stopped this.

However, this might be something for a bow-hunter who needs his birds close. If/when you do ellicit a response, my bet is that it's a fairly agressive one, hopefully bringing the bird in very close for a shot.

After this year's bow season, I'm somewhat soured on dekes altogether. Of the better than 25 toms/jakes that were called within sight of our dekes this bow season G & H, absolutely zero of them showed any interest in our deke setups whatsoever. And we tried about every possible combination you could imagine, on everything from the smallest jake to very agressive younger birds to long-spurred quiet, old birds.

Mounted dekes are the next step for me.....that and a double axel trailer to haul my double bull, bow/gun, dekes, calls, binocs, etc.

Thanks for the tips, I might give it another try during bow season next year.

Joel