Scouting Report– Happy Easter

I rolled out of the rack at 0637, determined to make one more attempt to scout out a gobbler. Dressed in jeans, my barn coat and bedroom slippers, I threw on a pot of coffee, opened the back door and took a few steps away from the kitchen window so the sound of the percolator would not interfere. I made my first owl hoot.

Nothing. My scouting was a failure. This was my third morning of trying to scout up a turkey. So far it was a dismal failure. I walked around to the front of the house and hooted. Nothing. Lastly, I came back three-quarters of the way around the house and tried once last time.

Garrrabble-rabble-robble-robble!

Ah! Success. I ducked back in and grabbed a cup of coffee and went out to sit at my thoughtful spot and continue the scouting trip.

By the time I made it back out, the gobbler had shut up. I tried twice more. Each time I could hear my owling bouncing off the ridge over by Mattox Road and coming back to me. That was well over a half-mile away. Then somebody turned on the switch.

I don’t claim to be the best at owling. I know I won’t win any contests, but it’s loud and it is usually good enough to honk off the owls, and that is what I’m really looking for. When you’re out hunting, you may not hear the owls in your neighborhood, but if they’re there, they can do more to help you locate gobblers than anything else. Up until this morning, Easter Sunday, I had been 0-3 for the weekend. No owls, no turkeys, no nothing.

This is not only rapidly approaching the breeding season for turkeys, but it is also the season for the barred owls. They become very territorial and do a lot of calling to maintain their boundaries. When you interpose yourself as the new, boisterous interloper in the neighborhood, every owl has to belly up and announce his position or he stands to lose his place in the woods.

Stop and imagine me for a moment. I’ve got the rough dimensions of John Wayne when he was my age. Imagine John Wayne coming out on the main street, Winchester drawn a,nd yelling “Hand over the women!” I somehow can communicate that same sort of message to the owls. The next thing I knew after that third try was that every owl in the township lit up, and with them came the gobblers.

All told I had about a half-dozen gobblers going, and I lost count of the owls. The owls had gone way past simple hoots and who-cooks-for-you-alls and were turning themselves inside out with chuckles. A gobbler less than 200 yards out eventually woke up and put his oar in the water, and that got the hens fired up and the next thing I knew I had a real party going all the way to top of Gobbler’s Knob. All I had to do was sit on my thoughtful spot and drink coffee and listen.

When the sun finally rose a half-hour later, the owls had quieted down, but the gobblers and hens were still going at it. My ankles and feet were quite frizzed– temps were around 25F when I walked out the door and I was still in my bedroom slippers. I ducked back in and decided to go for a bit of hike. I took the time to drag out my new neoprene socks. With it being this cold, I figured this would be the acid test.

I’ve got a 150 year-old barn about half-way to Gobbler’s Knob that has a great view of the pastures and also works as an ideal listening post in the Spring. It overlooks two hollers and a saddle between them at the base of the knob. When I hunt this end of the farm, I usually stop there and owl a couple times to get a final bearing on the flocks before heading to the roost where I intend on spending flydown. When I got to the barn, there was all kind of action going on. The flock closest to me had some serious fussing going on as two hens were purring and flogging each other, and this kept the energy level up among the four flocks that were in earshot of each other. Eventually the hens wandered up close to the barn, and even though I never caught sight of them, I was probably less than forty yards away.

Eventually, things quieted down. The gobbling stopped, the squabbling ceased and the flocks headed out for wherever they were going to spend the mid-morning. All of a sudden I was alone, save for one lone hen that seemed to have gotten herself off the track and was cranking a lost call down in one of the bottoms. About that time, I noticed that my feet had warmed up in the new socks to the point where I could at least feel them again. It was time to go home and pour myself a second cup of coffee.

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