Am I a Successful Turkey Hunter?

If you find me out on the web still listed as somebody’s pro-staffer, you’ll see that I never claimed to be an expert turkey hunter, only an expert beginning turkey hunter. If you want to look at what makes me a success, it is that I have looked at it as routine. I always try to approach each season as though it is my first. I always strive to keep things simple, and I always try to learn from whatever I am doing. It’s been nearly 40 years, and I’m still pretty much that guy who pulls on his box call for the first time and gets gets a gobbler answering, and I still feel like it is a miracle. I still feel like a dang fool out there with my shotgun, and I’m still sure I can hear the gobblers laughing at me. You hear them too, right?

The other thing that makes me successful is that I’ve been hunting the same 200 acre plot since 2002, and I’m out there all the time. I’m now hunting the great-great-great grandsons of the gobblers I hunted that first season. They aren’t all the same, but they do have similarities.

You hear a lot of talk about gobblers having individual personalities. To some extent that is true, but the geography has a lot to do with it too. That is, after you’ve been hunting the same place for a number of years, you start to see similarities. A gobbler moves into a given area and starts sounding off from the same roost that once housed one of his late great ancestors. That gobbler will often have the same “personality” as his predecessor. After 17 seasons, it gets to be somewhat the same to the point where I can hunt the Son-of-Mister-Natural the way I hunted old ‘Natural himself. If he roosts in A), that probably means he’ll go strut in pasture B) and if I show up at Noon and hit him with some rauckous yelps, I’ll probably get a visit before dinnertime. Is it the lay of the land that makes the gobbler’s personality, or is it that some gobblers are attracted to certain landforms? The answer is Yes– one of those will do nicely.

As a result, I can say without question that I am the greatest turkey expert on my little piece of the Greater Neave/Browningsville Metroplex. I claim nothing more or less.

This post has already been read 835 times!