Bearded Hen?
 

Today was the first day of the extended fall turkey season for my area of PA. I'm in WMU 2E. Anyway, I scattered a flock a little before noon and called a couple of them back in. I shot this bird but I'm not 100% percent sure what it is. The longest strand of its really thin beard is about 7" but it has no spurs and is the size of a hen. It does have a lot of almost orange spots on its head and upper neck which kinda makes it look like a jake but one of this year's jakes surely wouldn't have a 7" beard, would it? The breast feathers are not black tipped and it does have feathers on the back of its head so I'm gonna say it's my first bearded hen. Whatever it is it's gonna be part of tomorrow's Thanksgiving dinner.

a lot of hens have beards. it is a hen. probably 6-8 years old.

Nice bearded hen!

- jake

Sorry but the head color to me is all wrong imo. I believe that is a Tom. A male.
I have harvested toms with absolutely no spurs.

Still a nice fall harvest. Congratulations

JW

Thanks JW but I'm not so sure.

Again, the breast feathers did not have black tips like a normal gobbler and the body size was that of a typical fall hen.

With all these trans surgeries going on these days they must be doing turkeys now too. Or maybe the game commission is feeding them puberty blockers? :s13: Just kidding...

Here are a few more photos.

Whatever it was I reported it as a bearded hen.

OH, BTW, I harvested that bird with a 12GA Browning Gold 3 1/2 shooting Win Long Beard XRs in #4 shot through an old TruGlo by Bansner's TG156 choke. I usually use the same load in #5 shot but I haven't been able to find any of those for almost a year now. Those #4s are brutal though. Besides a few bb's in the head and neck one of them also snapped the right side wing bone completely off at the body from about 35 yards.

What really sucked though was that the bird still managed to sort of glide down a steep ridge and land right in the entrance to an old underground coal mine on my property. The entrance caved in probably well over a hundred years ago but there is still water seeping through and that's what the bird landed in. I spotted it laying there with binos from near the top but it took me at least five minutes to slide down the hillside and recover it.

When I first spotted the flock they were on a bench near the top of the ridge scratching under some wild grape vines and cherry trees. There were also four or five deer mixed in with them. I had placed a ground blind out on the point of the ridge only a couple of days earlier and I did that because I had seen a few grapes still hanging on. By the time I checked to make sure all of the birds had left the area and then crawled into the blind they were already calling trying to regroup. It only took a couple of minutes to call two birds into shotgun range.

When I opened up the bird's craw it was full of grapes.

Fall turkey hunting is a blast and sounds like you planned that one out perfectly

- jake