Over and Over Again

It come down to a pile of gear in the dining room, a couple of gun cases, a bag of laundry, and in this case a large unwieldy carcass to get stuffed in the freezer. Spring Gobbler Season is over. Five hunters with only one gobbler between us for 21 days of hunting– that is about as wretched as it gets.

Looking back on it, I think we were done in by good weather.

That sounds like a lame excuse, but let me explain. If you rewind the tape, I was able to get back down to camp really early this year, the weekend after the SuperBowl. The gobblers were already sounding off. We had fantastic gobbling well up to Yute Season, the first weekend in April. Then the bottom fell out. We hardly heard a peep out of them the rest of the season. My theory is that breeding occurred early this year and that prime hunting sweet spot that is supposed to happen during Opening Week was pushed back to somewhere in March. It makes pulling off my one gobbler all the sweeter.

Moose had a run-in with an old adversary of mine last weekend that typified the season as a whole. A gobbler will occasionally roost less than 250 yards from the cabin. He finds the big tree out in back of the Tobacco Barn, and he sits there all season gobbling his head off. The trick is to not hunt him, especially at flydown. He has an ideal vantage point from that old oak. It stands a long a fence line stretching out to the west and affords a bird a good view of the ground to the north, south and east across open pasture. I have wasted a good part of season trying to hunt a bird that roosted out of that tree. He’s one gobbler I never named. I guess because I would just as soon forget he exits. However, Moose was itching for humiliation, and went out to see what he could do one afternoon after lunch. Two hours later, he was in with a story.

He’d fallen asleep and woken up with the bird staring him down from behind. He had come awake to the sound of the gobbler’s footsteps on his back side. At his first twitch the bird had run off into tall grass. It matched my experience from years ago exactly.

I came back out Thursday afternoon to hunt Friday morning. While I was eating my lunch this bird came out to the back of the Tobacco Barn and gobbled his head off, and continued to do so. Eventually, he got a hen fired up and the two of them tormented me from cover for close to an hour. However, when I rose to get binoculars to see where the din was coming from, I was just high enough to see the gobbler in the shade of one of the big oaks leading down Vine Street, less than 100 yards out. That was it. He was gone.

All that good weather had its consequences. There were a bunch of bad storms that came through. I was sitting on the front porch for the first, that big storm that spawned tornados over by Louisville hit Falmouth and then moved along Route 22 towards Powersville on April 2. I was about 2 miles south of it, but saw the wall cloud and the rotation. I only received a couple strong gusts and a short burst of rain, but the storm left a trail of hail on 22 that was a site to see. It look liked it had snowed, the hail was so deep. However, if you looked out into the pasture, there was a sharp demarcation and beyond was just green grass.

Another storm came through while I was back in town on April 10. The action was covered by Ryan Hall in real time. The funnel came over Falmouth and then set down briefly in Brooksville, before crossing the river and hitting Port Union.

The night before The Opener, we had another storm come through. That one dumped 1/2 inch hail directly on us.