Made the annual trek to PA to hunt with zsully and ajabbo for a few days and had a blast! Hard to even put into a story all of the different moves that were made the first 2 days. We were in birds Thursday and Friday, we just played major cat and mouse over and over. Absolute roller coaster of ups and downs, frustration, excitement, exhaustion, you name it.
Saturday morning started the same way, sat where a bird was roosted 2 days prior, and he gobbles all the way across the property. We make a move, uphill of course, because NOTHING in PA is flat like I'm use to here in VA. Bird gobbles great, as he's moving farter and farther away. Wonderful, here we go again.
We decide to give up on him and go try to find another bird, walk all the way back to the truck, pull out of the landowner's driveway and make it about 200 yards down the road, and see a strutter standing in the middle of the road with a couple hens. Literally in the middle of the road. He's headed across the street to a field where he'd been seen numerous times in weeks past by Zach and Adam. We put the trucks in reverse back into the guy's driveway, and begin the trek up the side of the field, just inside the woods to try to get above him and make it to a small gap in the upper portion of the field. We make it to the top, and Adam crawls into this gap behind a strutter decoy to try to put eyes on this bird. As he makes it to the gap, he turns around and says "he's coming", and you can see on his face the panic. He somehow rolls back out of the way and him and Zach get hidden and I'm ready and watchin this 10' wide gap with a strutter decoy stuck in the middle of it 15 yards away, and that's all I can see, heart about to beat out of my chest. I didn't realize "he's coming" meant he was going to be there so fast, but the bird zips across that opening and straight up to the strutter decoy and goes to the right side of it, where I have to look through a bunch of briars but feel like I've got him, squeeze off the shot and completely whiff. The bird jumps about a foot up in the air, comes back down to his feet and just stands there (thank god), and the 2nd shot puts him down. Had he sailed off of the top of that field after I missed, I think I would have cried the whole 6hrs back to VA, but fortunately he didn't, and I got to ride home on cloud 9 with the biggest bird of my life, and top off the trip sitting on the hill with 2 of my best buds. We absolutely got our butts kicked for 2.5 days, and ended it in the best way I could possibly imagine.
These 2 guys worked their tails off to put me on a bird, and I cannot thank them enough. Another trip etched into my memory forever, and an upgrade!
This has been one of the craziest seasons I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing.
(https://i.ibb.co/5g800CqY/PA1.jpg)
Congrats on that Stud of a Tom, legit 1 1/2" ivory spur!! Congrats on a great season also!!
Grfeat story and a stud of a bird bro. Z
Fantastic my brother, WOW WHAT A TOAD!
Nothing LIKE pulling out a walk-off win in the bottom of the 9th !!! :jackson:
Congrats on a HORSE of a bird !!!
.....and upgrade is just icing on the cake !!!
Congrats twyatt! Great stuff!
We had so much fun. Of course it was that type 2 fun where you wonder why you put yourself through it and then in the end you would 100% do it all over again a thousand times over just to sit on top of a hill staring over a luscious green field sharing success with buddies and recapping the work that went into getting to that point.
Gobblers or no Gobblers, I'll take a day in the woods with my buddies over anything. Always a special time when we get together, and here's to many more years of chasing what we love. Heck of a visit and one heck of a gobbler at the end.
Very good!