Every year for as long as I have lived on my country road I have several sure indicators that spring has arrived.

Such as the turkey vultures with their six-foot-wide wing span, they arrive each year from the south on the first day of spring and they go to work right away to clean up the carrion along roads and fields from winter killed animals.

I once asked my wife if she thought that birds could smell, I wasn’t giving them much credit until I read that vultures have both keen senses of vision and a sharp sense of smell. Their olfactory organs are large and well-supplied with nerve endings.

I will use that with a couple of fellows that I know that have keen senses of smell, too.

Another sure sign of spring is our annual visitor the black bear, who leaves muddy (large) paw prints on the deck and trashes the winter bird feeding station. This bear comes at the end of winter each year and has his routine down to a tee! That is our signal to clean up the feeders and relocate them to the garage and place all garbage cans inside as well.

Finally, the turkeys start to flock up and we see groups of hens and gobblers roaming the countryside on a frequent basis. Give me a flock of hens lining up in a field to search for grains and worms and I will show you a group of gobblers not far off fanning their tails and strutting to show off.

Turkeys have always been important to man in North America. Natives and early settlers found wild turkeys as a steady food source and it earned the symbolic role as the main course at many a Thanksgiving meal. The wild turkey is nothing like the domestic birds that we serve on the banquet table now a day. Wild turkeys are lean and dark meat birds that quite often have to fun or fly for survival.

The hens are quiet and shy birds, we have one hen that frequents are feeders regularly and we refer to her as the estate bird. She knows are routine and patiently waits for my wife to fill the feeders and she catches up to the spilled feed when she goes back into the homestead. The new arrivals have been a larger flock of hens that somehow decided to call our neighborhood a home range.

They appear and then they disappear from the area. Turkeys like to roam in search of food, water and roosting areas. Once you disturb any of those areas you can be sure that they will abandon that property rather quickly.

The gobblers are quite impressive standing nearly 3 feet tall and up to 4 feet long. Gobblers weigh in the range of 15 to 25 pounds with a few super birds pushing 26 to 27 pounds. Plumage is an overall rich brown and many times looks black in the shadows. Feathers in the sunlight are often many beautiful shades of green, copper, mahogany and blue highlights.

The beard of a gobbler is often the prize of many hunters that seek wild gobblers. These beards are rudimentary hair like feathers which are mesofiloplumes which protrude from their breasts. Hens generally do not have beards but every now and then you will find a hen with a beard. A beard of 12 inches or longer is wonderful to a turkey hunter but any beard showing makes a turkey fair game in spring gobbler season.

Turkeys start showing their sexually mature by the end of their first year and near the end of March start to put on their courting rituals.

Daylight and temperature plays a large role in determining when a hen is receptive to a gobbler’s advances. In April the hens will slip away to find a suitable nesting area. Nesting birds are very susceptible to wet, cold weather and predators.

Hens can store the gobbler’s sperm in her oviduct so that fertilized eggs can be laid up to four weeks after mating. Hens lay an egg a day and a normal clutch of eggs ranges in the 8 to 15 range.

The incubation period is about four weeks the poults begin to hatch and the hen broods them eventually leading them away from the nest. When they are first born their defense is to hide from predators under leaves and limbs in the brushy understory. When they get around six weeks old they can be a fairly strong flier.

Enjoy the rituals of spring with the wildlife and remember to leave the young wildlife alone if you happen to find some hiding in your woods lot. Mother is not far away and remember that hiding is the way of the wild.

Have a beautiful Easter Holiday and hide some eggs for me.

Jay Hewitt is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle.