If midday scouting isn't practical for you, go after work. The same type of information can be gathered in the evenings, and you have the additional possibility of hearing or seeing turkeys fly up for the night. Barred owl calls also can come into play for evening roosting excursions.

WHAT'S IT ALL MEAN?
So the 10-day pre-hunt scouting "season" has concluded, and you've located birds on a number of properties. What's the best way to exploit this information? My most urgent advice is to use only the data that you've gained from this particular pre-season.

For instance, many make a mistake in feeling compelled, even after all their scouting, to hunt areas that they've always hunted, that they've killed birds on in the past, or that they have a tradition of going afield on with buddies and/or family members on opening day. Loyalty to the past may be good for camaraderie, but it's a major error to let it influence hunting decisions. Just because birds used to dwell in some woodlot doesn't mean that they're still there.

I have permission to hunt seven farms within an 11-mile radius of my workplace. One of those farms has in particular been a longstanding early-season hotspot for me; I've killed five turkeys there during this decade, and I hunted there on the opening day of the 2007 season. Yet when I visited it during the 2008 pre-season, I only heard one gobbler, and he was always with hens.

In a chart that I make after the pre-season has concluded, I labeled the tom as "difficult to kill" and ranked the farm at seventh among my seven choices -- and despite the success I'd experienced there in the past, I never visited the farm the entire season. A buddy who shares hunting rights with me for the place gave it a try several times but never once came close to killing the aforementioned longbeard. "He just won't come," my friend would lament to me every day after he'd failed to call the old boy in; I'd already determined that during the pre-season. It's no shame to admit that sometimes we just can't kill certain birds.

Once the pre-season is over and I've ranked my hunting properties as likely hunting sites, I plan out my season's regimen. In the first three days of the season I go to the three places in which I've found the most-vocal longbeards. After those hunts, I then make a decision to return to one of those locales or move on to properties four and five. At the end of every week, I evaluate the past week for success and failure and devise itineraries and strategies for the following week. The pre-season reconnaissance still plays a part, of course, but I give greatest weight to the most recent actual hunting trips.

There are all kinds of reasons to visit hunting tracts many weeks before a season begins -- enjoying exercise and reestablishing contact with landowners, to name two -- but gathering information that'll prove valuable during the regular season isn't likely to be one of them. Wait until that 10-day period before the season begins, and your success rate will probably improve.