While I've seen some cool turkey behavior in the past, I had never seen an all out brawl. I've seen the irritated spurring of one another and some chasing, but not to this extent (of course I've also see the flogging of dead birds). Took the two boys, 8 and 13, to a big, 50-70 acre field on Saturday morning where we knew a handful of gobblers were spending time (because we scouted the evening before). No gobbling on the roost, but as soon as the sun started poking up, three hens hit the field about 250 yards away. Got three birds fired up pretty good, two off to one side and one behind us. Shortly thereafter, three jakes came out to join the hens, followed a little later by two nice longbeards. I tried everything to pull the hens to me, but they, and their companions, wanted nothing to do with us. They all seemed to just be hanging out and feeding, with one of the gobblers remaining in strut pretty constantly. It all changed when another longbeard came out from our end of the field. He skirted us at about 45 yards (I am not letting kids shoot that far), ignoring my pleading and barreling toward the party in the middle of the field. As soon as he got there, he went into full strut, then all hell broke loose. The hens hightailed it as soon as the flogging started. For the first few minutes, the three longbeards jumped in the air at one another trying to spur each other. The goofy jakes just stepped back and watched, slowly circling the melee. Then it got really interesting. The flogging stopped and the two strutters went chest-to-chest, pushing each other and wrapping their necks around the other's neck for several minutes. After a while, they just resumed feeding and slowly filtered off, following the hens back into the woods. I hoped I could pull one of the non-boss birds to us, but I couldn't even get them to gobble. I told my boys that this was an awesome opportunity to see turkeys turkey even though we didn't get to kill one.

Unfortunately, I continued to show the boys how best to screw up on minimally-gobbling birds for the rest of the weekend, screwing up three different attempts to circle and close on three different birds. It sure is hard when a) the gobblers are henned up pretty much all day; and b) they just won't gobble. Had fun anyways. Thought I would share since this site has been so slow.

Feel free to toss in a story about cool turkey fights you've seen before.