I fell off a ladder at work on January 28 and tore part of my rotator cuff off the bone of my right shoulder. Reconstructive surgery to repair the damage occurred on February 9, so going into this season I wasn't even sure if I would be able to hunt at all. However, several things pointed towards the possibility that it might not be so bad as I first imagined when I hit that concrete floor.
First, I have a world-renowned surgeon who did a tremendous job of putting me back together, and after I gave him a copy of my book and explained what my life is really all about, he said everything would be just fine if I took it easy and did all my exercises. He even arranged office visits to fit around my spring schedule! Of course, I would be in a sling that kept the right arm and shoulder strapped to my side for 8 weeks, but that was do-able....once I painted the white elastic sling olive green! I also was lucky in that the injury happened on the job, so the 5 month recovery period (which spanned the entire spring season) would be covered by workmen's comp insurance...meaning, for the first time in 33 years of turkey hunting I would have a steady paycheck all throughout turkey season! Yet another bit of luck is that even though I am tremendously right-handed, I shoot long-guns lefty because I'm left eye dominant. Guiding duties slated for the first 10 days in Florida would allow even more recovery time before shooting a gun, so I vowed to slow down my usual hectic springtime pace and just take it easy and use Florida as a time to mend and recuperate. Any hunting after that would be a bonus.
Well, I sure didn't want to risk tearing the shoulder apart and having to go through this whole terribly painful ordeal again, so I was very careful and diligent about doing everything the doctor and my physical therapists said to do, and once I crossed the FL line driving one-handed, I actually starting thinking that everything might work out ok. I also have a network of great friends down there at turkey camp who assured me that they would be there to help whenever I needed it, and this was a huge mental relief for me.
I always go to FL a few days early to scout my properties, but this year things looked bleak...in 5 days of scouting, I only heard 2 toms gobble about 3 times each, and both of them were far beyond the property line fences. I finally saw a tom on Thursday, but that was it, and with 6 clients slated to begin hunting on Saturday, I was very worried. After guiding so many people on these properties, for so many years, I should've known better....
My first client was the lovely Kyla from Texas, who was seeking the capstone to her World Slam. One of those aforementioned friends from camp (Doug Pickle) even volunteered to forego his opening day hunt in order to video Kyla's adventure, so we set up my Double Bull blind directly behind one I had built out of cypress logs and Spanish moss, and although standing in about 3 inches of water, he had 3 cameras rolling when a pair of toms raced in to confront the DSD Strutter soon after dawn on Saturday. Here's a picture of Kyla and her crippled guide, and another of her and the very wet (yet beautiful!) final tom of her World Turkey Slam:
After meeting her parents back at camp and spending a few hours storytelling and such, it was time to go meet my next clients back at their motel in town. These 3 fellas were very excited about hearing of Kyla's great hunt and eager to hit the woods, so after a quick lunch we ventured forth. I put 2 of them in my DB blind in another good area and set out the Strutter and a couple girlfriends, then the 3rd guy and I headed to another property that has always been very good to us. It's a cattle farm, and in the back pasture is a small cypress pond with 2 live oaks growing beside it. Turkeys LOVE to hang out under these oaks, so Friday night after dark I had built a cabbage palm frond blind along the edge of the pond. But, when Bob and I showed up Saturday afternoon, we discovered that those cursed cows had stomped my blind into the mud!
Quickly rebuilding a poor rendition of the original blind with salvaged fronds and nearby brush, Bob and I settled in to wait with a DSD jake and a couple hens up on the roadway, 30 yards from us. We didn't have long to wait, as a couple hours after sitting down a tom answered my periodic yelping with a loud gobble, and soon 3 big gobblers came around a corner of the field and hustled over to confront the young interloper who had invaded their territory. Bob shot the first one as he approached my jake, but he didn't die....he simply got up and walked on down the road with his wings spread out like a buzzard drying himself in the sun, then laid down in the field 100 yards from us. His head was still up, so we sat tight to see what developed, and 20 minutes later he stood back up and walked another 50 yards before laying down again. The head was still up this time too, so again we held pat and 15 minutes later he got back on his feet and went 30 more yards, then seemed to fall over, rather than just lay down. I grabbed Bob and we hustled towards the tom, and I told him to bust that gobbler again if he so much as moved a muscle. As we got to about 40 yards I could see the tom's head snaking around, so Bob let him have it and we soon had his Osceola underfoot. Here is Bob and his tom, with one of the oaks on the right:
The next morning was VERY foggy, so I took the other 2 fellas to a sod farm behind the landowner's house, where he had been seeing 3 toms regularly for a month. We did hear gobbling, but it was all from across the neighbor's cattle pasture, so we then used the fog to shield our movements as we set up closer to the fenceline. Once relocated I got a couple toms to answer a call, although they were both a long way off. However, the 2nd bird soon started coming our way, and before too long he was just a couple hundred yards off when yet a 3rd tom gobbled the same distance behind us. A hen had just showed up from the direction of gobbler #2 and I anticipated the tom to soon follow her path, so each of us was peering out the windows on that side of the DB when all of a sudden we heard the unmistakable sound of a turkey wing making contact with rubbler....gobbler #3 had raced in to our setup and was smacking my Strutter upside the head! Well, that didn't work out very good for him, and Gary soon had his foot on the tom's throat:
Now it was time to get a bird for the ringleader of this circle (circus?) of friends....Charlie. Charlie is well known on many of these forums, and has hunted with me in FL 3 times. We always have a great time and share many laughs along the way. We also have had some tremendous hunts, but the rest of the day was a hot, humid bust, and the following day it rained till noon and all we had to show for it was a very entertaining hour+ episode with a hen who came to battle one of my dekes. She would grab the fake hen by the head and then shove her around in circles for long minutes at a time, until she had driven the stake down so low that the decoy could no longer spin. Finally she left, and when we eventually went out to pull the set, there was a veritable racetrack of tamped-down grass surrounding my faux hen.
The next morning we went back to try for the second tom that accompanied Kyla's, and although I heard no definite gobbling, I thought just maybe a tom had sung out from the same direction that Kyla's pair had originated. Soon thereafter, we could see a group of hens coming from there with a tom strutting along behind, and once he spotted my Strutter and 8 hens he came at almost a run with no hesitation....and practically on the very same path as he had come with his buddy just a few days previous. Things didn't work out any better for him on this day than they had for his partner, so here's Charlie and the tom. In this picture you can see Kyla's blind to the left. We set up further right because it was dryer ground:
With my next clients not scheduled for a few days, I now found myself with a little free time to rub elbows with the masses over on the public ground where I hunt. Holding a gun up was simply not possible with my arm in a sling, so I bought a telescoping monopod that strapped to my barrel, and away I went. Everything would have to be perfect in order to make it work and be able to shoot one-handed, but on the second morning of trying, that's exactly what happened. I'm very proud of this picture and what it represents; the hard work and perseverance it took to succeed:
A couple days later I found another tom, but I was supposed to meet my next client mid-morning and so I was hunting on watch-time, rather than gobbler-time. That is an important distinction! About 9am I finally got set up real good on him, but after I called he shut up. I didn't know if he was coming in, going away, or just hangin' with the ladies, but I suspected it was the first option. Still, after an hour he hadn't showed up, and I really needed to get going. I KNEW that I should be giving it 15 more minutes, but I didn't, and when I stood up to sneak out of there, the tom spooked from 40 yards away. That would not be the last time this gobbler bested me........
Nick is another member of these forums, and we hunted the rest of the day and the next morning without doing any good, although we saw a couple toms. The final client of the year then joined us for the afternoon hunt and despite numerous turkey encounters, we couldn't quite get one killed. However, the following morning's hunt produced a couple of pig Osceolas coming from across the neighbor's cattle farm, and Nick then shot this big, old tom at 21 yards:
At this point we had taken 5 toms off of ground where I hadn't seen or heard hardly anything before the season started, so I decided to take Steve (yet another forum member with a "handle" very similar to mine...Hooked Spur) to a new property that I had never hunted before. It entailed a bit of a drive to get there, but it was worth it, as we saw several red heads (suspected jakes, but not confirmed) and heard a few late afternoon gobbles. I couldn't hardly wait for he morning hunt, when I thought there might be a dozen toms gobbling all around us!
Well, it wasn't that good, but we did hear a couple distant toms. Then a half-hour after flydown time a tom answered from much closer, and was soon gobbling good and coming in from directly behind our huge live-oak setup. This tom gobbled lots, and drummed a ton as he rapidly closed the distance, and at one point he had to be mere feet behind our tree and drumming so loud that even Steve heard it (he told me it had been years since he'd been able to hear that beautiful sound). Then, the tom fuzzed and buzzed his way around our setup on Steve's side, and died splendidly at 16 yards. Here's Hooked Spur and his tom in a beautiful Spanish moss draped picture, and some of the gorgeous habitat we hunted:
With guiding duties now out of the way, I headed back to my public ground to even the score with that gobbler I had boogered, but things didn't go as planned. In fact, I hunted him for the next 11 days in a row without stuffing him in a cooler, and while some of the difficulties were due to my physical limitations and how I was forced to hunt, this bird also did things I have never seen turkeys do. For instance, one morning he gobbled great from his roost 100 yards back in a thick swamp with deep water. I had been set up 40 yards out from the swamp an hour before first gobble, and never said a word as he continued to rip it for two solid hours! Then, he promptly shut up and never said another word. I knew he hadn't flown down, as I could've heard him, and finally a hawk screamed in his face and he gobbled....more than an hour after he'd last uttered a peep. A few minutes later he comes flying towards me, but instead of landing in the burned palmetto flat where he'd spent a couple hours gobbling the previous day, he landed in a tree on the edge of the swamp, less than 40 yards from me. I was sorely tempted to shoot him right then, but I resisted and a couple minutes later he flew right back to his original roost, where he again sat silent for another hour. Then, he once again flew to the swamp edge (but 80 yards south of me) and stood around in that tree for 20 minutes before finally pitching to the earth.....which promptly swallowed him up. I never saw, nor heard another thing from him that day. What turkey in their right mind does that kind of stuff, then touches ground for the first time at 10:30? Devil bird............
I finally reached my limit of frustration and accepted an invitation to go hunt Green Swamp West, which is a Special Opportunity Hunt. These properties can be pretty darned good sometimes, and it sure proved so the next morning when I heard 5 toms gobbling. Three of them were roosted together, and the first of those to touch sand came right in to my very first call, so he went home with me:
Overall, I was in FL for about a month and had a TON of fun, but it was the hottest, humidest, buggiest season we've had down there in a number of years. In fact, I was miserably uncomfortable the whole time, but the good folks who share my camp, along with the excellent turkey hunting we experienced, more than made up for the weather. Here are a few pictures of camp life and some of the dear friends and certifiable turkey killers who make my FL time so special. I wish I'd taken more pictures. The final night in town some of us even went to dinner at a place that sells all-you-can-eat Quail for $18. You ought to see 87 year-old Marie attack those birds....the term, "Piranha in a feeding frenzy" comes to mind!!!
A few words about decoys. I have only used them myself a few times, and don't care for them. In fact, I am basically anti-decoy in my own personal approach to a hunt. However, when I'm guiding I use them extensively, since my job is to get turkeys in range of my clients. In short, these things work. Heck, I've been known to set out up to 15 DSD's at a time, but again, I do this because they work, and because in these special instances I can drive out and set the flock up after dark. I've never even heard of anyone else doing this, but on the sod farms and flat cattle ranches where I hunt in Florida, it's possible for turkeys to see these fake flocks for hundreds of yards....and nearly every time, they've just GOT to come have a closer look! Here are a couple young guns protégés of mine (Trevor and Matt) who are well on their way to becoming legends in the sport, admiring part of my flock:
With my shoulder feeling better every day, I left Florida and joined my good friend Doug in VA. I love that state for a variety of reasons, and not just because of the great turkey hunting it has to offer! There is so much beautiful ground, and the area where he lives is alive with history of the civil war. We even hunted around the Cedar Mountain Battlefield, and I always visit several of those when I am in that area. The first morning (after getting about an hour of sleep), I hunted with Doug's friend Kevin and his youngest son Shawn, and while they went to sit on a powerline, I was free to roam around. I got on a bird early, but it was 10 o'clock before I got him killed and then discovered he had 3 beards. Only after I met up with the fellas did Shawn let me know there were actually 4 beards!
The next day I participated in the First Annual Virginia One Shot Governor's Hunt as a guide, but I didn't have anyone to guide so they let me hunt. There were LOTS of turkeys gobbling on that farm, and the four of us guiding had a total of something like 180 years of turkey hunting experience between us, but we failed to bring any turkeys to the awards ceremony. That's turkey hunting! However, it was a TON of fun, and I can't wait to come back next year!
I then hunted at Quantico Marine Base...a place where I had failed to even hear a tom the only times I had been there before. It started out like that again this time, but about 9am I finally heard a couple different birds gobbling, and after a long battle with multiple moves and countermoves, I finally called a pair of them to within shooting distance. Here's the one that stayed around after the shot:
Finally, Doug and I teamed up on a tom he had messed with on the Governor's hunt, and we pooled our superlative, collective skills and calling (well, maybe a little luck was involved, after we first spooked the tom with a typical rookie mistake of walking too far into a roost area too close to daylight) to pole-ax him at 29 yards. He was a real bleeder:
Ah, Delaware. Not my favorite state aesthetically or otherwise, but it seems to always produce for me whenever I draw a tag in their lottery. I got there a day before my Season C permit started and drove around looking for birds in the field for a while, before I found a tom with 3 hens in a spot that doesn't seem to get much pressure. Why would it? This tract is all small pines, with seemingly nothing to offer turkeys, but there he was shortly before dusk. As it grew darker I watched them walk towards the only hardwood I could see nearby...a big old oak on the edge of the pines....and deduced that it would probably be the tom's roost that night. And sure enough, it was. But, turkeys being turkeys, he plumb avoided me at daylight and it wasn't until a couple hours later that I finally called him and his girlfriends in for a close inspection of my hiding spot. That's his roost tree in the background:
First, I have a world-renowned surgeon who did a tremendous job of putting me back together, and after I gave him a copy of my book and explained what my life is really all about, he said everything would be just fine if I took it easy and did all my exercises. He even arranged office visits to fit around my spring schedule! Of course, I would be in a sling that kept the right arm and shoulder strapped to my side for 8 weeks, but that was do-able....once I painted the white elastic sling olive green! I also was lucky in that the injury happened on the job, so the 5 month recovery period (which spanned the entire spring season) would be covered by workmen's comp insurance...meaning, for the first time in 33 years of turkey hunting I would have a steady paycheck all throughout turkey season! Yet another bit of luck is that even though I am tremendously right-handed, I shoot long-guns lefty because I'm left eye dominant. Guiding duties slated for the first 10 days in Florida would allow even more recovery time before shooting a gun, so I vowed to slow down my usual hectic springtime pace and just take it easy and use Florida as a time to mend and recuperate. Any hunting after that would be a bonus.
Well, I sure didn't want to risk tearing the shoulder apart and having to go through this whole terribly painful ordeal again, so I was very careful and diligent about doing everything the doctor and my physical therapists said to do, and once I crossed the FL line driving one-handed, I actually starting thinking that everything might work out ok. I also have a network of great friends down there at turkey camp who assured me that they would be there to help whenever I needed it, and this was a huge mental relief for me.
I always go to FL a few days early to scout my properties, but this year things looked bleak...in 5 days of scouting, I only heard 2 toms gobble about 3 times each, and both of them were far beyond the property line fences. I finally saw a tom on Thursday, but that was it, and with 6 clients slated to begin hunting on Saturday, I was very worried. After guiding so many people on these properties, for so many years, I should've known better....
My first client was the lovely Kyla from Texas, who was seeking the capstone to her World Slam. One of those aforementioned friends from camp (Doug Pickle) even volunteered to forego his opening day hunt in order to video Kyla's adventure, so we set up my Double Bull blind directly behind one I had built out of cypress logs and Spanish moss, and although standing in about 3 inches of water, he had 3 cameras rolling when a pair of toms raced in to confront the DSD Strutter soon after dawn on Saturday. Here's a picture of Kyla and her crippled guide, and another of her and the very wet (yet beautiful!) final tom of her World Turkey Slam:
After meeting her parents back at camp and spending a few hours storytelling and such, it was time to go meet my next clients back at their motel in town. These 3 fellas were very excited about hearing of Kyla's great hunt and eager to hit the woods, so after a quick lunch we ventured forth. I put 2 of them in my DB blind in another good area and set out the Strutter and a couple girlfriends, then the 3rd guy and I headed to another property that has always been very good to us. It's a cattle farm, and in the back pasture is a small cypress pond with 2 live oaks growing beside it. Turkeys LOVE to hang out under these oaks, so Friday night after dark I had built a cabbage palm frond blind along the edge of the pond. But, when Bob and I showed up Saturday afternoon, we discovered that those cursed cows had stomped my blind into the mud!
Quickly rebuilding a poor rendition of the original blind with salvaged fronds and nearby brush, Bob and I settled in to wait with a DSD jake and a couple hens up on the roadway, 30 yards from us. We didn't have long to wait, as a couple hours after sitting down a tom answered my periodic yelping with a loud gobble, and soon 3 big gobblers came around a corner of the field and hustled over to confront the young interloper who had invaded their territory. Bob shot the first one as he approached my jake, but he didn't die....he simply got up and walked on down the road with his wings spread out like a buzzard drying himself in the sun, then laid down in the field 100 yards from us. His head was still up, so we sat tight to see what developed, and 20 minutes later he stood back up and walked another 50 yards before laying down again. The head was still up this time too, so again we held pat and 15 minutes later he got back on his feet and went 30 more yards, then seemed to fall over, rather than just lay down. I grabbed Bob and we hustled towards the tom, and I told him to bust that gobbler again if he so much as moved a muscle. As we got to about 40 yards I could see the tom's head snaking around, so Bob let him have it and we soon had his Osceola underfoot. Here is Bob and his tom, with one of the oaks on the right:
The next morning was VERY foggy, so I took the other 2 fellas to a sod farm behind the landowner's house, where he had been seeing 3 toms regularly for a month. We did hear gobbling, but it was all from across the neighbor's cattle pasture, so we then used the fog to shield our movements as we set up closer to the fenceline. Once relocated I got a couple toms to answer a call, although they were both a long way off. However, the 2nd bird soon started coming our way, and before too long he was just a couple hundred yards off when yet a 3rd tom gobbled the same distance behind us. A hen had just showed up from the direction of gobbler #2 and I anticipated the tom to soon follow her path, so each of us was peering out the windows on that side of the DB when all of a sudden we heard the unmistakable sound of a turkey wing making contact with rubbler....gobbler #3 had raced in to our setup and was smacking my Strutter upside the head! Well, that didn't work out very good for him, and Gary soon had his foot on the tom's throat:
Now it was time to get a bird for the ringleader of this circle (circus?) of friends....Charlie. Charlie is well known on many of these forums, and has hunted with me in FL 3 times. We always have a great time and share many laughs along the way. We also have had some tremendous hunts, but the rest of the day was a hot, humid bust, and the following day it rained till noon and all we had to show for it was a very entertaining hour+ episode with a hen who came to battle one of my dekes. She would grab the fake hen by the head and then shove her around in circles for long minutes at a time, until she had driven the stake down so low that the decoy could no longer spin. Finally she left, and when we eventually went out to pull the set, there was a veritable racetrack of tamped-down grass surrounding my faux hen.
The next morning we went back to try for the second tom that accompanied Kyla's, and although I heard no definite gobbling, I thought just maybe a tom had sung out from the same direction that Kyla's pair had originated. Soon thereafter, we could see a group of hens coming from there with a tom strutting along behind, and once he spotted my Strutter and 8 hens he came at almost a run with no hesitation....and practically on the very same path as he had come with his buddy just a few days previous. Things didn't work out any better for him on this day than they had for his partner, so here's Charlie and the tom. In this picture you can see Kyla's blind to the left. We set up further right because it was dryer ground:
With my next clients not scheduled for a few days, I now found myself with a little free time to rub elbows with the masses over on the public ground where I hunt. Holding a gun up was simply not possible with my arm in a sling, so I bought a telescoping monopod that strapped to my barrel, and away I went. Everything would have to be perfect in order to make it work and be able to shoot one-handed, but on the second morning of trying, that's exactly what happened. I'm very proud of this picture and what it represents; the hard work and perseverance it took to succeed:
A couple days later I found another tom, but I was supposed to meet my next client mid-morning and so I was hunting on watch-time, rather than gobbler-time. That is an important distinction! About 9am I finally got set up real good on him, but after I called he shut up. I didn't know if he was coming in, going away, or just hangin' with the ladies, but I suspected it was the first option. Still, after an hour he hadn't showed up, and I really needed to get going. I KNEW that I should be giving it 15 more minutes, but I didn't, and when I stood up to sneak out of there, the tom spooked from 40 yards away. That would not be the last time this gobbler bested me........
Nick is another member of these forums, and we hunted the rest of the day and the next morning without doing any good, although we saw a couple toms. The final client of the year then joined us for the afternoon hunt and despite numerous turkey encounters, we couldn't quite get one killed. However, the following morning's hunt produced a couple of pig Osceolas coming from across the neighbor's cattle farm, and Nick then shot this big, old tom at 21 yards:
At this point we had taken 5 toms off of ground where I hadn't seen or heard hardly anything before the season started, so I decided to take Steve (yet another forum member with a "handle" very similar to mine...Hooked Spur) to a new property that I had never hunted before. It entailed a bit of a drive to get there, but it was worth it, as we saw several red heads (suspected jakes, but not confirmed) and heard a few late afternoon gobbles. I couldn't hardly wait for he morning hunt, when I thought there might be a dozen toms gobbling all around us!
Well, it wasn't that good, but we did hear a couple distant toms. Then a half-hour after flydown time a tom answered from much closer, and was soon gobbling good and coming in from directly behind our huge live-oak setup. This tom gobbled lots, and drummed a ton as he rapidly closed the distance, and at one point he had to be mere feet behind our tree and drumming so loud that even Steve heard it (he told me it had been years since he'd been able to hear that beautiful sound). Then, the tom fuzzed and buzzed his way around our setup on Steve's side, and died splendidly at 16 yards. Here's Hooked Spur and his tom in a beautiful Spanish moss draped picture, and some of the gorgeous habitat we hunted:
With guiding duties now out of the way, I headed back to my public ground to even the score with that gobbler I had boogered, but things didn't go as planned. In fact, I hunted him for the next 11 days in a row without stuffing him in a cooler, and while some of the difficulties were due to my physical limitations and how I was forced to hunt, this bird also did things I have never seen turkeys do. For instance, one morning he gobbled great from his roost 100 yards back in a thick swamp with deep water. I had been set up 40 yards out from the swamp an hour before first gobble, and never said a word as he continued to rip it for two solid hours! Then, he promptly shut up and never said another word. I knew he hadn't flown down, as I could've heard him, and finally a hawk screamed in his face and he gobbled....more than an hour after he'd last uttered a peep. A few minutes later he comes flying towards me, but instead of landing in the burned palmetto flat where he'd spent a couple hours gobbling the previous day, he landed in a tree on the edge of the swamp, less than 40 yards from me. I was sorely tempted to shoot him right then, but I resisted and a couple minutes later he flew right back to his original roost, where he again sat silent for another hour. Then, he once again flew to the swamp edge (but 80 yards south of me) and stood around in that tree for 20 minutes before finally pitching to the earth.....which promptly swallowed him up. I never saw, nor heard another thing from him that day. What turkey in their right mind does that kind of stuff, then touches ground for the first time at 10:30? Devil bird............
I finally reached my limit of frustration and accepted an invitation to go hunt Green Swamp West, which is a Special Opportunity Hunt. These properties can be pretty darned good sometimes, and it sure proved so the next morning when I heard 5 toms gobbling. Three of them were roosted together, and the first of those to touch sand came right in to my very first call, so he went home with me:
Overall, I was in FL for about a month and had a TON of fun, but it was the hottest, humidest, buggiest season we've had down there in a number of years. In fact, I was miserably uncomfortable the whole time, but the good folks who share my camp, along with the excellent turkey hunting we experienced, more than made up for the weather. Here are a few pictures of camp life and some of the dear friends and certifiable turkey killers who make my FL time so special. I wish I'd taken more pictures. The final night in town some of us even went to dinner at a place that sells all-you-can-eat Quail for $18. You ought to see 87 year-old Marie attack those birds....the term, "Piranha in a feeding frenzy" comes to mind!!!
A few words about decoys. I have only used them myself a few times, and don't care for them. In fact, I am basically anti-decoy in my own personal approach to a hunt. However, when I'm guiding I use them extensively, since my job is to get turkeys in range of my clients. In short, these things work. Heck, I've been known to set out up to 15 DSD's at a time, but again, I do this because they work, and because in these special instances I can drive out and set the flock up after dark. I've never even heard of anyone else doing this, but on the sod farms and flat cattle ranches where I hunt in Florida, it's possible for turkeys to see these fake flocks for hundreds of yards....and nearly every time, they've just GOT to come have a closer look! Here are a couple young guns protégés of mine (Trevor and Matt) who are well on their way to becoming legends in the sport, admiring part of my flock:
With my shoulder feeling better every day, I left Florida and joined my good friend Doug in VA. I love that state for a variety of reasons, and not just because of the great turkey hunting it has to offer! There is so much beautiful ground, and the area where he lives is alive with history of the civil war. We even hunted around the Cedar Mountain Battlefield, and I always visit several of those when I am in that area. The first morning (after getting about an hour of sleep), I hunted with Doug's friend Kevin and his youngest son Shawn, and while they went to sit on a powerline, I was free to roam around. I got on a bird early, but it was 10 o'clock before I got him killed and then discovered he had 3 beards. Only after I met up with the fellas did Shawn let me know there were actually 4 beards!
The next day I participated in the First Annual Virginia One Shot Governor's Hunt as a guide, but I didn't have anyone to guide so they let me hunt. There were LOTS of turkeys gobbling on that farm, and the four of us guiding had a total of something like 180 years of turkey hunting experience between us, but we failed to bring any turkeys to the awards ceremony. That's turkey hunting! However, it was a TON of fun, and I can't wait to come back next year!
I then hunted at Quantico Marine Base...a place where I had failed to even hear a tom the only times I had been there before. It started out like that again this time, but about 9am I finally heard a couple different birds gobbling, and after a long battle with multiple moves and countermoves, I finally called a pair of them to within shooting distance. Here's the one that stayed around after the shot:
Finally, Doug and I teamed up on a tom he had messed with on the Governor's hunt, and we pooled our superlative, collective skills and calling (well, maybe a little luck was involved, after we first spooked the tom with a typical rookie mistake of walking too far into a roost area too close to daylight) to pole-ax him at 29 yards. He was a real bleeder:
Ah, Delaware. Not my favorite state aesthetically or otherwise, but it seems to always produce for me whenever I draw a tag in their lottery. I got there a day before my Season C permit started and drove around looking for birds in the field for a while, before I found a tom with 3 hens in a spot that doesn't seem to get much pressure. Why would it? This tract is all small pines, with seemingly nothing to offer turkeys, but there he was shortly before dusk. As it grew darker I watched them walk towards the only hardwood I could see nearby...a big old oak on the edge of the pines....and deduced that it would probably be the tom's roost that night. And sure enough, it was. But, turkeys being turkeys, he plumb avoided me at daylight and it wasn't until a couple hours later that I finally called him and his girlfriends in for a close inspection of my hiding spot. That's his roost tree in the background:
