When I got up this morning, I was hard at work trying to convince myself it just wasn’t going to happen.  The lady on the weather radio told me it was raining, winds gusting to 25 mph, and 52F.  That is not my idea of turkey hunting weather.  I went out on the porch and got hit with stinging drizzle– not even the dogs wanted to go out.  SuperCore was not all that enthusiastic either.  After a strong cup of coffee, we decided it couldn’t be all that bad going out to Midway.  At least there we would be in under cover:

Yeah, I know.  That isn’t exactly my idea of a turkey blind either, but it beats sitting inside.  It has windows that open front and back and the shutter opens out like an awning.  We went out really early to beat the next band of rain and got settled in.  I had the South window; Supercore the North.  Along about sunrise one of the big boys sounded off about 70 yards to the West.  I waited a while and then let him have a nice run of excited yelps.

Around sunrise +45 Supercore spotted a gob and three hens at 200 yards, hanging out in front of MOHH (Mother of all Honey Holes).  They loitered there for a while, and could not decide whether to stay put, wander into the woods, or come down towards the blind.  I gave them a little lost call  and a few clucks, just above the noise of the downpour and they turned our way.  One hen held back and the gob stayed with her, strutting back and forth.  Eventually the party moved down towards us and the hens passed by the blind and entered the food plot on my side.  About this time Mister Moto started cranking from just on the other side of MOHH and started coming too.  I threw some heat out the back of the blind– didn’t faze the hens any, and I got the idea that Moto might be coming in.  The gob out in the field picked up the pace as well, and drew closer to the blind.

The gobbler got behind some tall yellow clover, and SuperCore stuck his barrel out through the window and when the gob stuck his head out again, SuperCore let go a salvo of #5 at 25 yards.  The hens scattered. Moto went berzerk and turned on his auto-gobble.  We saw the wing of the other gob turning over as he rolled down the hill into the woods.

I had SuperCore hole up, rather than go fetch the turkey immediately.  We switched places in the blind and I started laying out some aggressive calling.  Moto faded at that point, but the calling got the hens that had been scared off from the shot back out into the field.  We kept working the scene for another 20 minutes, and finally decided that was all that we were going to see for a while.  We left the blind and went to look for the bird.

No gob!  We went to where he’d been shot and the pasture was clean.  It took about five minutes of looking to find him.  At last we located him.  The gobbler had flopped and rolled about 20 yards and finally expired in the fenceline leading into the woods.  We cleared out of Midway and headed back.  The gobbler went a hair over 20 lbs, but SuperCore said it felt more like 40 on the way out.  We stopped about halfway back and had a cup of coffee from my thermos.

The bird was a bit of a fooler.  In the field he looked like a 3-beard mature gob with good spurs.  Even after i got the tape on him, I was still  having trouble deciding if it was 2 or three beards.  One went just a hair under 11 inches and the other was 7.  The third beard?  You can see what we were seeing in the pictures, but when I got the beards off and got them straightened out it looked like part of the gobbler’s larger beard had been knocked off at some point.  There were 11 inch strands and 8 inch strands, but they were all intermingled.  It was a huge beard however.  The spurs went inch-n-one-eighth on one side and and even inch on the other.