whatever those things are on his head and neck --- folds? flaps? nodules?
Gotta learn your turkey parts, Fred
. The extensible one that gets longer when tom turkeys strut is called a snood.
C
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http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20080429/COLUMNISTS/804290341/1097/
Learning the use of a turkey snood
Published: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 11:06 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 11:06 a.m.
On every turkey, there is a fleshy projection on top of the "nose" called the snood. There has been a lot of pondering about the function of the snood over the years by turkey hunters. On gobblers, the snood is long and overlaps the beak, dangling far beneath it. On a hen the snood is not much more than a bump that sticks up just behind the beak.
I've seen turkeys peck at one another's faces in acts of aggression, with the one being pecked turning away. But until I became a witness to a fascinating display during a recent turkey hunt, I always doubted a painting I once saw of a pair of gobblers locked in combat, each with the other locked onto his snood with his beak.
I took a hen turkey during last winter's hunting season and had Vic French, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission's Southern Coastal Region Management Biologist, mount her as a decoy. Vic does taxidermy work on the side and turkeys are one of his specialties as a wildlife manager and taxidermist.
He gave the mount a plastic head, which attached to the neck with a sharpened wire and was given a lifelike paint job. The body's underside has a socket for a stake, which is set into the ground. The tail fits into a slot on the rear of the body and the decoy is extremely realistic because it is in fact, a hen turkey's skin and feathers over an expanded foam body.
Cpl. Mike Savoie of the Camp Lejeune Wounded Warrior's Battalion sat with me in a turkey blind overlooking a chufa patch. We had called an hour and a half to a gobbler that stayed aloof back in the woods. But a hen and two jakes came into the chufa field.
One jake had no beard and the other a beard of about 5 inches. The jake with no beard puffed up and spread his wings like a buzzard, with the spot on his chest where his beard should have been less than an inch from the decoy's beak. When she didn't respond, he grabbed her by the snood, pecking it violently and repeatedly, until he snapped the hard plastic protuberance completely off, knocking her head sideways in the process.
The other jake got into the act, assuming a breeding position behind her. He kicked off her tail and pounded it into the ground with his feet as he tried to mate. When the hen would not submit, he flogged her sides and head with the forward part of his wings, knocking her head over until 4 inches of wire were showing.
Even with almost no head and no tail, the hen was apparently still attractive because the larger jake then grabbed her where her handle of a "snood" used to be. This confirmed what I assumed. The snood acts like a ring in a bull's nose. Grab it and it's so sensitive, the rest of the turkey will have to follow.
Mike started raising his shotgun, but I stopped him. I wanted a chance at the big gobbler still sounding off in the woods. The hen was watching the antics of the jakes from a few feet away, probably glad the attention was on the artificial hen.
I used a mouth call to make a sharp pop, which in turkey talk is an alarm call. The jakes backed off, now that they had made the lop-headed hen mad. Then they slowly moved away and into the forest, while I kept my hand on Mike's shotgun barrel to keep it down.
"That's one of the most exciting things I've ever seen," he said. "We should have had it on video. I was afraid they were going to ruin your $250 decoy and was going to shoot that jake to defend it."
That's the U.S Marine Corps' appropriate way of thinking. I suppose I could get Vic to put a new snood on the decoy or make a new one out of epoxy putty.
Then again, perhaps I won't. The mounted turkey hen may already be too realistic for practical hunting use. She may be better off without her snood.
