Turkey Week 2008, Recap

I’m back. My turkey hunt is over. There’s one in the freezer, and I am glad he’s there. The birds were quite uncooperative overall.

Angus and I went out again this morning. The gobblers have been making good sounds from the roost, but they shut up and crawl in a hole immediately after pitching down. The trees are a good week behind their normal schedule. Maybe the turkeys are too. I think it has been a confusing year for them. This morning was no exception. We had five gobblers responding to us, but none showed up.

We saw a lot of single hens the last three days of hunting. Normally this would have been a good sign– the gobblers are being left alone while the hens go off to nest. We should have made more connections. Frankly, I threw everything I had at them, and I ventured into places I’d never hunted before. Nothing worked completely well.

I did a lot of growing over the week. For one thing, after catching the poachers earlier in the week, I was determined to keep a tighter tab on the boundaries. That ended with me on the fool’s errand of attempting to locate the source of some really over-the-top calling that turned out to be coming from hunters way over on a neighboring parcel calling to gobblers on still another neighbor’s property.

I managed to lose my hat on that folly– an over-twenty year veteran of my turkey hunts. It was an original Trebark boonie. I’m now on a backup hat that I don’t like as much. Another thing I learned this week: there is nothing quite so wretched and pitiful as turkey hunters who lay on a call for two hours straight doing the same set of ultra-loud cackles and then give up and go home only to be out in the same spot the next morning. They never got a shot all week. Once I realized they were well off my property, I could just sit back and laugh to myself over them. It was good calling. It was just totally out of place and way too loud. Their plan was simple: since overall, the turkeys were not being all that cooperative this year, these guys sat in one corner of their property and called to every turkey they could reach on neighboring parcels in hopes that they would lure them off. Thank goodness they were gone by Saturday Morning.

I found myself calling twice to the same gobbler that never came in. He was particularly loud, boisterous and turned on and off from sun-up until mid-afternoon and responded to everything. He is also pretty much un-huntable. He has a small oak grove just off my property that he sits in all day. I finally found out about him from the neighbor. At least two other teams of hunters had been on him this year, and no one has gotten close. I had one like that a few years ago– for three seasons he spent his Springtimes camped out by an old oak in a fenceline. There was no way you could ever put the sneak on him. He never went more than 50 yards from the roost and he never responded to calls closer than 100 yards away. He was also a confirmed bachelor, who never gave a whit about hens. After I found out the score on this new guy, I gave up. I have had enough of chasing great white whales with waddles. I will leave it to others to take up the challenge of Captain Ahab. Give me a nice willing two-year old with testosterone flowing in his veins– you can have your misogynist freak hermit turkeys.

Wednesday afternoon, I did something I’d never done before. I took off for a largely forgotten part of the interior of our farm and just sat out on the end of a point and called. Several things happened. One, I got a nice nap in, and woke up to a gobbler coming in to check me out. Sadly, he got intercepted by hens and dragged off before he got to me. Secondly, while I was sitting there contemplating my next move, I got busted by another pair of hens. I just froze, and it worked. I just used mental powers to tell them and myself that I wasn’t there– that I was actually home watching Brit Hume and they went right around me. No face mask, no gloves– there I was sitting out in the middle of the woods and I fooled them with mental telepathy alone. Either that, or I’ve become so sedentary that even bald-faced in the afternoon sun, I was that easy to mistake as a stump. I prefer the former rather than the latter.

There was quite a bit of loss in this year’s hunt. I lost my hat– I told you about that earlier. I also lost the Single Barrel call that Brian sent me to test. I had moved my set-up with Angus Saturday and went to pack up and go back to the original set-up about 200 yards down the pasture with the decoys; the Single Barrel was just not there. We tore up both set-ups and walked the pasture back and forth. It just was not there. I had not lost a call in ten years, and here was one of the nicest calls I’d ever had my hands on. That probably makes me a crud, but there you have it.

On the other hand, you have to keep your focus– lost hats, lost calls don’t mean squat. On the way back, I spied a turkey coming out of The Hand, a little copse of trees we frequently use as a set-up. Using hand signals alone, I got Angus down and got him back down the trail a ways so we could plan our set-up. He and I put the sneak on the bird, and he was in position, when the hen came past a pair of cedars and out into the open. Sadly, it was just a plump hen. The good news is I have a 10 year old hunting partner that can do a improvised set-up and ambush a bird on a moment’s notice. Counting coup on that hen rated right up there. I know when the time comes, #3 son will be up to it.

I have two pics to show you and discuss:

The first is a pic of “The Hand.”

It didn’t end in a trophy kill, but most of my better stories are like that. I had already come in from the morning hunt. I heard a gobble and looked out over the tobacco barn and I saw gobblers and hens out in one of the pastures. I did some quick figuring and decided I might be able to use the folds of the land to do a massive end-around and come out at The Hand, overlooking their part of the pasture. The Hand is a called that, because it looks like an outstretched palm in the 1994 aerial survey. It’s actually the place where the 1850’s house stood. My house, the 1902 house is the third on the property, and many of the boards from the 1850’s house made it into the the 1902 house when it was razed. All that is left is the foundation stones, and red cedar trees now choke the site. It’s the big grouping of trees on the right of the picture.

I grabbed my gear in record time and actually got up and into The Hand unseen. By then, the group of turkeys had gone from where I had seen them to the Blackberries, a second copse of trees out in the middle of the field (down there more towards the left of the picture. From there, the flock moved into Garbage Pit, an grove of oaks on the far left that is dominated by a sink hole that the previous owners used as a dump. By the time I got into position, I was over 250 yards from them, and they were fading fast. I pulled out the single barrel call and hit them with a cackle. That stopped the dominant gobbler as well as the sub-dominant gobbler he was bullying.

Over the next half-hour, I used the Single Barrel– a crystal on poplar and the Dixie Darling to lure the two gobs off the hens. It was working too– I got a good hundred yards separation between them and the hens. However, no call is as good as live hens, not even the ones Brian makes. Eventually the hens said something and the gobs turned around and followed them into the oak grove. I packed up, and beat a path down the hill where I had first spied them and then back up to the Blackberry Patch. This is a 20 yard long patch of blackberries and locust trees about fifty yards out into the pasture from the edge of the Garbage Pit grove. Again, I was able to get in undetected– I’m still picking out the stickers. I set up on them and started calling with the Single Barrel again. However this is when the plan unraveled.

I’m a righty, and I was in a precarious situation where I had to use the Single Barrel one handed with my left hand while keeping the shotgun pointed in a likely direction with my right. About this same time the hens decided to leave and the gobblers followed along behind them. The way they took was a good 80 yards away, and before I could figure out a better way to call to them, I think I moved my barrel a little too much and the whole flock busted and took off flying.

My points in telling you all this was that these calls have fantastic volume, and make a good sound at that volume. This all happened with a stiff 12-15 MPH wind too. Whatever Brian is doing with this soundboard works. Secondly, I want to crow a little bit– I’m just a few months shy of fifty and I can still put a serious sneak on the birds for an old fat man.

The second pic I want to show you is the Barn at Broken Corners and the pasture where Son of Natural as well as his father before him, Mister Natural used to do their afternoon strutting. Again, this is a big pic; click on it and view it or save it to see the whole thing.

That’s the barn over on the left. It’s a good two hundred hards to the impenetrable cedar thicket on the right. Son of Natural was beyond that, and down in the hollow a hundred yards or more when he picked up my yelping from inside the barn. Again, this was all happening with a stiff 12-15 MPH wind blowing with gust that rattled that old barn like it was shaking apart.

It’s amazing to me that turkeys can pick up those sounds from so far off and with so much accuracy in localization. I called to Son of Natural about four times over and hour and then BANG, there he was strutting 19 yards in front of my barrel. It’s also amazing to me that the Dixie Darling could put out a believable call at that volume.

Anyhow, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it I still have two more weekends. Each one will be devoted to my sons and their quests. I hope they grow as much from theirs as I have from mine.

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