What drew my attention was the salient, bright red head bobbing through the faint putty-green April pasture, a mature tom, beard dangling like a pendulum, as he approached a thin brush line skirting a spring-fed pond. Ahead of him were five or six drab hens, walking alertly, heads high, some dropping to feed.

Early spring on the hillside.

I wouldn’t have noticed the small midmorning flock had I not let my eyes wander momentarily off the left side of the road to that pasture where I often see stuff. In fact, having seen my first turkey, a solitary hen, walking through an oak stand the previous day, perhaps a quarter-mile up the road, I was looking for turkeys, but wasn’t ruling out deer, a moose, maybe even a cougar if I was lucky, all of which have been seen there by my or others’ eyes in recent years. Never hurts to know what’s lurking in the neighborhood.

At the base of the hill I pulled into my garage, exited the truck, walked my dogs to the kennel and headed for the house. Upon walking through the parlor door, I went immediately to the phone sitting on a mahogany Pembroke table, picked up the receiver and dialed my hunting buddy. Had to report the sighting to the man who had just asked me what I was seeing for turkeys. “Nothing” I had told him then. But that was a few days earlier. The times they were a changin’.

“Isn’t it funny how their pattern changes with the seasons,” he said after I told what I had seen. “You don’t see a turkey up there all winter and, bingo! there they are come spring.”

More curious to me was the timing. What I had seen was more indicative of later spring, when mature gobblers have assembled and are guarding their mating harems. Seemed a little early for that to me. But if you think of it from a gobbler’s perspective, I suppose it’s never too early. He isn’t breeding them yet, just tailing them, staying in touch till the time is right. Then he and other dominant toms will stake out their territory, hoard their harems and scare off all competing suitors with ferocious gobbles and slashing spurs.

Be it known there’s never a better time to wake with the woods than during the gobbling season, when mature toms shake the budding, skeletal hardwoods with their throaty roars, then fly down to strut zones where they entertain their ladies with a robust mating dance.

Nature’s springtime chapel.