GobbleNut's Hunt Log

[randy6471]

 Congratulations and thanks for sharing Jim! Sounds like you are definitely having some great hunting and those Merriam's are beautiful! Good luck, safe travels and hope you keep it going!!

[crow]

Yes Sir, nice write ups and congratulations on your gobblers

That was some fun back to back hunts

[GobbleNut]

May 9th:  Departing tomorrow morning early for Nebraska.  Hunting there for a couple of days and then on to South Dakota to meet up with other GOATS there!  Will be gone until sometime around the 20th, so probably no reports on this log until I get back unless our cohorts are posting by phone. Good luck to all teammates that will be hunting between now and then.  Any updates to the team scoring will have to wait until I return since I do all of that stuff on my PC rather than on a phone.  Everybody take care, stay safe, and good luck to everyone (even our competitors).   

[JeffC]

Safe travels GN, looking forward to some great stories and pictures.

[West Augusta]

Good luck and safe travels. 

[GobbleNut]

May 11th:  Arrive at first hunt location in Nebraska (private parcel per invitation from hunting buddy's friend).  Set up camp and look over property.  Habitat looks fantastic but only one hen turkey seen in looking over area.  I hear no gobblers at dark, but hosts hear birds in one location and graciously insist that my hunting partner and I hunt them the next morning.  Unfortunately, gobblers are across property line, so we are resigned to trying to call them to our side of line.  Plans made for next morning to attempt that...

[GobbleNut]

May 12th:  (Also known as "the day the wheels began to fall off"  )

Before daylight, my hunting partner and I head to property line closest to gobblers before daylight,...but conditions are very windy.  Gobblers are supposedly in creek bottom about 200 yards from property boundary.  We listen at first light for gobbling, but none heard.  I try locator, but nothing.  Friend decides to move west along creek, hoping to find birds.  I stay at location since these are the only birds heard the evening before.  I will wait them out.

Thirty minutes later, I have still heard no gobbling, but decide to set up in position overlooking the creek bottom below me.  Full light now and still nothing heard, so I decide to initiate action with some hen talk.  Still nothing answering.  Sitting for half hour overlooking bottom below me, suddenly I see three jakes walking up the creek 150 yards away.  I call to them, and immediately they look my way, turn, and start walking toward me.  The lay of the land is such that I cannot see a portion of the slope below me beyond about thirty yards for roughly fifty yards (this will come into play in this story!). 

The jakes walk straight towards me, going out of sight in the area I cannot see.  Shortly, they come into view at thirty yards looking for the hen, and walk up to fifteen yards looking around.  To this point, they start gobbling in unison, still searching.  After two or three group gobbles, they walk away slowly to my left and out of sight, at which point I call again.  They gobble back,...and suddenly, I hear another gobble from where they had initially come from down in the creek bottom.

I call. The jakes gobble, and the new arrival gobbles,...getting closer.  Then, there he is,..a mature gobbler floats into the opening 150 yards away in full strut!  I call,...jakes gobble,...he gobbles and struts.  I expect him to follow the same path as the jakes in their approach to me, but he eventually turns and heads out of sight back down the creek.  My thought:  this is a mature bird that has been through this rodeo before and he has no intention of coming up here without seeing the hen he hears,...a mistaken impression that will come into play very shortly.   

I am sitting there, gun laying beside me, watching the slope below for any signs of the gobbler or other participants.  Nothing.  To my right and twenty yards away is a thicket of cedar trees, but between me and the cedars, there is nothing but open grass slope.  For minutes, I sit watching the slope, all the time thinking the gobbler had departed down the creek,...when suddenly he steps out from behind the cedars at twenty yards walking straight to me!

I am caught completely off-guard!  Gun is laying beside me and no way to get it shouldered without him being able to see me move.  He keeps walking slowly up the slope towards me.  If he turns to my left and goes where the jakes went, he will walk behind some brush and I will be fine, but instead, he turns right and starts walking up-slope across open grass with absolutely nothing between him and me.  I decide to slow-walk the gun up, knowing it is unlikely to work with him being so close. 

At my first move, he looks over and I fully expect him to flush, but he keeps walking,...but unfortunately moving further to my right,...not a good thing for a right-handed shooter (at this point, I am reminded of the importance of learning to comfortably switch to one's off-hand, and that I should have practiced it more).  It quickly becomes apparent that I cannot slow-walk the gun up, so I just spin to my right and bring the gun up,...still thinking he is going to fly at any second,...but he doesn't.  He just keeps walking up the slope getting further to my right, but still within easy gun range! 

At this point, another complication arises.  As I am turning to my right, gravity is pulling my body down-slope to my left.  I am losing my balance as I bring the gun up, which, along with my thought that he will fly at any second, makes me hurry to get a shot off.  Looking back at the moment I pulled the trigger, I am now quite aware that I was too quick to jerk the trigger, although I thought at the time I was "on him".  I apparently was not.  At the (first) shot (which I later paced off at less than 25 yards), he ducked down as the shot went somewhere near his head and started running up the slope, but still well within range.

Unfortunately, I was an unraveled mess by then, and took a second, wild, even-more-off-balance shot as he high-tailed it up the slope away from me,...again, missing him completely (no wounded gobblers in this story, thank goodness).  At this point, anybody that has had a similar experience doing something like this knows exactly how one feels at that moment.  I was shocked,...and devastated.  I had literally not missed a turkey in years,...and had even bragged about that on this forum!  What they say is true,...doing that sort of thing usually will come back to bite you in the butt at some point.  It did here (and would continue...).

I/we hunted the rest of that morning,...and I actually heard more distant gobbling that I could have gone to, but I thought one of my hunting partners was on those birds, so I did not,...only to find out later that nobody was on them and I could have.  At any rate, after the mornings hunt, me and my partner decided there were too many of us hunting too few gobblers on the property,...so we decided to depart and leave it to our hosts to hunt. 

That afternoon, we packed up camp and moved on west to hunt some public stuff...   

[GobbleNut]

May 13th:  Windy conditions on the prior evening made it impossible to roost any gobblers, but we had decided on a specific public location to start off this morning.  Unfortunately, other hunters were at that location when we got there before daylight so we resign ourselves to a "driving, stopping, and locating" tactic.  For the first couple of hours, we drive around...running into other hunters at every turn.  ...Discouraging to say the least.

However, we eventually drive down one canyon and run into a beautiful gobbler with hens right on the road.  We back off, park, and try to initiate a conversation.  The turkeys have apparently departed the bottom and have moved up-slope "somewhere".  Guessing where they might have gone, we work our way up a ridge and eventually get a response from the opposite ridge. 

We work our way over there and end up having a long conversation with this gobbler (don't know if it was the same one, or not), but he will not let us get closer than about 100 yards before moving away (pretty typical action from heavily-hunted gobblers from what I have seen over the years).  We keep working him, but he eventually moves on private ground and we give. 

That's it for the day...although driving around on the "private" holdings, gobblers are standing along the road seemingly laughing at us without a care in the world.  Ahh, to know some willing private landowners in the area!   

[GobbleNut]

May 14th:  Still windy, and we had not been able to roost birds again the evening before because of it.  Before daylight, we are back in the area where we had worked the gobbler the previous morning.  I let my hunting partner out there and head on up the canyon using my "tried and true" locating tactics to try to strike a gobbler before daylight.

Before long, I strike a bird, but he is again on private ground and in a very poor location for any sort of reasonable set-up.  Nevertheless, I get as close as I can and eventually get him going.  For an hour and a half, I work on him, trying to get him to come off the property.  He answers every call willingly, but the terrain makes it impossible for him to come directly to me,...and the indirect routes are not much better. 

Eventually, he makes a move around the various obstacles between us and ends up walking down the two-track road to a point 100 yards away where I can see him standing on the road.  To get into range, however, he must cross a steep-sided creek drainage and creek, and it becomes obvious that he has no intention of doing so, and I have no way of moving without him seeing me.  I try all my tricks, but he eventually gets tired of waiting and moves back up the two-track and shuts down.  Day two on Nebraska public land is done.

My buddy cannot make contact with the gobbler worked the previous morning. Time to move on to South Dakota!

[GobbleNut]

May 15th: (The rest of the wheels fall off)

Driving around the vast public land areas of the Black Hills on the 14th, some things become clear:  This is a tremendously large place with spectacular amounts of fabulous-looking turkey habitat.  Secondly, if there are many turkeys here, they are not making their presence known to us.  We are in hunting mode, but cannot raise a single response from a gobbler all day long.  Personally, after all the hoopla surrounding turkey hunting in the Black Hills, I am dumbfounded by the lack of evidence that they are here.  (Footnote:  interaction with locals seems to suggest the population has taken a nose-dive over the general area in the last couple of years)  However, the evening of the 14th, we do end up roosting gobblers in a couple of locations, so there is some promise.

Before daylight on the morning of the 15th, I drop off my hunting buddy at location of one roosted gobbler.  Unfortunately, this gobbler is roosted on private ground very close to multiple houses. (This was a recurring problem hunting here,...EVERY gobbler we found in four days of hunting was either on private ground and/or very close to dwellings).
 
My plan is to drive and locate to get an idea of turkey abundance,...or in this case, the lack thereof.  I plot a route and head down the road, stopping at likely spots trying to hear a gobbler.  I cover miles of great looking habitat in the next two hours without hearing a peep.  After flydown, I switch to hen yelping,...and after a few more miles, I finally get a gobble response from behind a private holding, but on public ground.  I park and head that way.

Walking into the area I got the response, I eventually get the gobbler to answer my calling.  He is off a ways, so I continue towards him, working around through some thick conifers to hide my approach. As I am gaining ground, suddenly I hear "putting" some distance ahead. but not from the vicinity where the gobbling is coming from.  Thinking I have probably blown the hunt, I stand for a bit to listen, but eventually the gobbler gobbles again from a few hundred yards ahead and I move on forward toward him, thinking that maybe I am still in the game.

I move over a low rise, then stop to call, still at least a couple of hundred yards from where the last gobble had come from.  At my first call, a hen answers and the gobbler responds.  I move forward to a low rock outcropping, kneel down, and call again.  Multiple hens answer, the gobbler responds,...and all are closing the distance.  I adjust myself so I can shoot off of the rock outcropping and call.  They are all closing fast!  I am ready with a solid rest,...call again,...more responses and CLOSER.  These birds are on their way and committed!  I am ready and confident.

More quickly than I would have thought, I see a turkey pop up over a rise at thirty-five yards.  I am expecting a hen, but this is a gobbler!  I adjust the gun slightly and get on him just as a hen comes up next to him,..and then another.  They look around with increasing concern and then start walking in a line angling slightly away.  The gobbler clears the hens and I settle the beads on his head and pull the trigger, fully expecting him to collapse in a heap at the shot.

BUT HE DOES NOT!  Instead, I recover from the shot and look up to see turkeys running away,...and there is no turkey flopping on the ground!  I have done it again!  Inexplicably, I have missed what had become a gimmee shot over the years!  Running the scenario through my head over and over since, I still have no idea how I missed this gobbler!....but he was gone,...and further investigation revealed that not a single feather was to be found where he was standing! 

There are only two explanations.  Either the TSS load I shot had no pellets in it,...or I had just not gotten down on the stock tight and had shot over his head.  I would like to claim that the load was "pellet-less", but at some point I will have to accept the fact that I had managed to blow what should have been two easy "turkey shoots" in a row!  Talk about being down on oneself!  Distraught does not adequately describe my state of mind at that moment!

Later, I went back to pick up my buddy to find he was also gobbler-less.  The bird he had worked gobbled continuously for an hour and a half (he said the tom gobbled at least three hundred times).  However, as was what continued to be the recurring theme of our hunt, that gobbler stayed on the private land and would not leave it.  (I am quite certain many of these folks were feeding these turkeys and they were conditioned to stay close by).

Nothing else of note on day two in SD, but roosted one more gobbler at dark that evening with a plan of attack for the next morning.

[GobbleNut]

May 16th:  Hunting partner and I head for gobbler roosted the night before well before first light.  This bird (actually, there were two gobblers here), was on private ground, but we had concluded that they would be able to hear us from the property boundary where we had decided to set up.  Our conclusion of such was in error in that we could not hear any gobbling from where we though they were,...and they could apparently not hear our calling, as well, because we never got a response and eventually gave up and went looking for other birds,...of which we found ZERO!

Nothing of note happened the rest of the day, EXCEPT I roosted another gobbler that evening in a location that, even though it was near some houses on private land, appeared to have potential for a successful roost hunt.  We made plans to go to this bird the next morning! 

[GobbleNut]

May 17th:  We head to roosted gobbler in the dark.  I had heard him from half-a-mile away the night before and had taken a guess as to where he was, so we moved into the area in the dark and then waited,...and waited,...and waited for him to gobble.  We had about given up hope when a gobble rang out 75 yards down-slope below us,...and instantly, another gobbler rang out fifty yards above us!  As it turned out, we had been standing and waiting for birds to gobble that were almost within shooting range on either side of us!

Unfortunately, the closer bird,...although he continued to gobble, was also showing evidence that he was aware of something being out-of-sorts by putting mildly with some regularity.  The further bird never gobbled again, but continued coarse yelping made us conclude that it was a jake.  The close gobbler eventually flew out of the tree and glided down-canyon to the bottom near the houses (which again made us think the owners had been feeding them). 

There were a number of hens there, as well, and we eventually were able to call in hens three different times there, but neither gobbler ever showed up with them.  Occasional gobbling from the private land below us indicated that the gobblers were still in the area, but we could never get their interest in coming to our calling. 

The skies were darkening and it soon began to drizzle, which shut down everything, as well as getting us pretty well soaked, so we bagged it and went back to eat breakfast and wait out the rain at our cabin.  That evening, I went back into the same area to roost the birds for another try the next morning.  The property owners were outside and apparently having a party based on all the commotion there,...and although I heard some turkeys fly up to roost and heard hens yelping on the roost, I never heard any gobbling.  I left with some level of concern that the gobblers might have moved off from the area, but they probably were there and just were quiet because of all the human activity.

Dana (eggshell) had located multiple gobblers in the area he had been hunting and graciously invited us to hunt some birds he had seen that morning that he felt he was not going to hunt.  We quickly accepted the invitation based on situation we were in.

[GobbleNut]

May 18th:  We headed for the gobblers Dana had located well before daylight and got to the waypoint he had given us as the skies began to lighten.  A quick locator from the spot confirmed that a gobbler was there,...but again was on private ground near houses (as usual).  We assessed the property boundaries and concluded that we could likely get close enough to make contact by climbing a gawd-awful hill covered with blown-down timber from a past fire.  It is an understatement to say that climbing up the hill through that mess was an ordeal in itself.

Nonetheless, we eventually made the top and soon heard the gobbler.  We were in a good location to set-up along the property boundary and had some level of confidence that the gobbler might come up to take a look, although he was a couple of hundred yards away on the roost.  He gobbled for a while, and at flydown, we gave him some soft hen talk, which he earnestly responded to, increasing our optimism that he might come.  Not only that, but in the meantime, several other gobblers had started up in the draw below us (Dana had indicated that he had seen six mature gobblers in that location from the road). 

Despite our optimism that we were in an excellent set-up, all the birds, the gobblers and some hens, gathered in the draw below us a few hundred yards away where we could not approach.  They answered every call we made for a bit, but eventually started drifting off further into the private ground until we could no longer hear them.  We changed positioning a bit trying to strike them again, but the ball game was over.  We said "uncle". 

Our stay at the rental cabin was up, so we decided to move further south into new territory for the next couple of days,...possibly.  We loaded up and headed that way, but a call from my partner's wife that he was needed back at home came through along the way.  We made quick loop through the new area,...which looked good,..but could not raise a response.  We discussed our options and both of us concluded that we had had enough of hunting landlocked gobblers and decided to head south to the house.  A day and a half later,...we are back at home empty-handed and with tails tucked firmly between our legs.   

PostScript:  Although we were unsuccessful in our adventure, we had a great time meeting up with Dana (eggshell) and Nick (Happy).  They are first-class fellows and Old Gobbler is fortunate to have them as participating members here.  I am sure they will add their commentary on how things transpired in South Dakota! 

As for me, I am done hunting for the spring of 2022.  The ending was kind of a bummer in terms of my own failure to seal the deals when the opportunities arose, but I now have an entire year to contemplate things.  Good Lord willing, I will be able to make amends in 2023!  I'm sure I will stop losing sleep over my misses this spring in another ten months or so.  One thing for sure, I will not be making any comments about my shooting abilities in the coming months! 

The End.... 

[JeffC]

Great read and thanks for "taking us along". Sounds like it was a great trip. No pictures to share?