Turkey Camp Wrapping it up

Season ended Sunday. After a cursory effort to close up camp, Angus and I cleared out for home. I could get philisophical here. I could try and relate all this to a bigger picture, but I won’t. This season was grueling. It beat us down. We were lucky to get out.

We did have casualties. I don’t know what I had that got hold of me back on the Opener. All I know is that I started coughing and didn’t stop for two weeks. I missed the last half of Opening Week, flat on my back in bed. Everybody had it to some degree or another. SuperCore started out in a bad way, still recovering from pneumonia in March. He’s now got double pneumonia and missed the whole last half of season.

Coughing bad enough that the turkeys were shock-gobbling in response was bad enough, but there were other things impinging on our success. The season was all topsy-turvy. My guess is that things were just a week or two early this year. The hottest action for us was on the Opener– we’ve never had that before. Usually it is towards the end of the first week. Weekend #2 was deathly quiet.

Weekend #3 was not much better, but the last weekend– that one was just down-right strange. One thing I noticed all through season was the number of demonstratively horny hens I heard. At first I thought we had poachers on the property. I couldn’t believe the amount of bad calling I was hearing– really over-the-top stuff. However, I finally figured out it was all hens. They were not just plaintive, but down right scary. The gobblers were answering them, and answering me as well, but I cannot remember a gobbler actually cutting in on one of my calls all season. From all the goings-on, I deduced that there were just a whole lot more hens than usual and that it was hard for the gobs to keep up.

The rainy weather certainly had its effect as well. Usually we would see parades of gobblers and hens out in the field from the first week on. They would also start hitting the dusting spots as the weather warmed. However, we saw no mid-afternoon dusting or strutting. In fact, the turkeys stayed well back in the woods for most of season. That is sort of odd. Usually, it starts raining and after a bit, the turkeys come out into the fields. Nope. We were there, waiting for them. They never showed.

Did I mention the rainy weather? This is when a bubba’d-up paint job really shines. Yes, I got some rust on my gun. My Mossberg 500 has had a Krylon paint job for two years now. There are a few nicks in the paint, and I got some rust blooming where the paint had gotten knocked off. The answer? Before I’m put the gun away, I’m going to use steel wool on the spots and spray — fifteen minutes and it’ll be good as . . . well, I won’t say new, but it certainly won’t be rusty anymore.

I mentioned the last week of season being strange. It was. First off, we were surrounded by horny hens and lackadaisical gobs. Second, usually by this time we’re seeing a lot of single hens out and about, and this usually heralds the end of the Lull. This never happened. I think we saw one lone hen the whole season. Third, lone hens are usually followed a week or so later by the lone gobblers, out prowling about, gobbling down every hollow, looking for love. Again: no-go.

This sounds like a screwed up, unhappy season. However, we DID manage to bag two off the property, and that is nothing to complain about. I could have tagged out the first day if KY did not have a gobbler-a-day limit. I missed another in Week #2, and SuperCore also counted coup on a few jakes.

I’m waiting now for the fields to dry out, so I can clean up my few remaining blinds and start preping for deer season. With rain predicted for the next week, that puts things off clear to Memorial Day.I’m hoping that prediction is wrong, because soon the eggs will be hatching and the nests stand a good chance of getting soaked.

We had one parting gift from the turkeys. Saturday morning , Angus and I were on our way out. It was one of the few picture-perfect days we had. We rounded a bend in the track and there was a gobbler out in the middle of the pasture, strutting like he was on TV. He was a good 300 yards out, but we set up on him and worked him for a while. At one point he went a bit lower off the top of the ridge and we stuck out and did an end-around that brought us up a couple hundred yards closer. By this time, he had wandered into a thicket to chase hens, but it made for a fun hour– getting that bird to strut and gobble for us.

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