I am beginning to realize that there are two distinct types of turkeys. Not different subspecies, but punk urbanite pests and real live wild turkeys. This year I have seen maybe 15 of the first type roaming the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul in gangs smoking cigarettes, stealing hubcaps and terrorizing citizens. On the other hand the wild birds are real and cautious like they are everywhere else. I have no interest in the taunting urban delinquents.
The first hunting trip to a local WMA showed me that it indeed held a turkey population. I visited the WMA several times this week to get a better understanding of the birds habits and how they respond to calling, hearing gobbling every day. I found one candidate in particular who roosted in the same small block of woods and focused on learning him. Let's call him Boomer. Yesterday morning I moved into a spot before dawn that is opposite of the ridge he usually roosts on. When he gobbled, he shook my liver and was so close that I couldn't tell where he actually was. It turned out that the spot that I had chosen to sit that morning was 2 trees away from the one he was actually roosted in. He flew down right behind me and left without me ever getting sight of him. Later that morning, I returned to the block and came up with a scheme to get him.
This morning was cloudy and rather windy. I slipped into the spot I had prepared the day before and waited for the woods to wake up. The gobbler started rattling the woods early. He continued disturbing the peace for a couple of minutes. I finally decided to accelerate the situation and clucked several times and did a fly down imitation by flapping my hat against my leg. He double gobbled. I clucked a few more times and suddenly I hear a hen, with a voice like silk, start yelping about 40 yards behind my left shoulder. I yelped back at her with a little more emotion, She returned the calls, also getting louder. We exchanged escalating insults for a while with the gobbler absolutely losing his damned mind. Finally the gobbler flew down and went silent. I knew what this probably meant. I was looking down the barrel when I spotted a dark form coming down the trail I was sitting on. The problem of a gobbler coming straight to you is that you can not see a beard in low light. He finally stops at 24 yards and turns a little allowing me to see the outline of his beard. In an instant I placed the red dot onto the cherry cluster and let fly the TSS angry swarm. If my math is correct, .06545 seconds later the old boy was ushered into the loving arms of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is my first Minnesota turkey and was a handsome rascal. He weighed in at 19.84 pounds, carried a thick mooring line of a beard of 9.25" in length and wore a pair of sharp 1" conical spurs. I would place him in the 3 year old category.
As an interesting point, I had a doe start snorting at me after I had walked down, picked the gobbler up and went back to where I was sitting. She didn't seem too alarmed that I had just shot in her close vicinity. When I took the bird up to an open field to sit and fulfill the state tagging requirements, the hen that I had just been mouthing off to, walked up to within 5 yards of me before taking off flying right over my head. I realized why these animals had reacted so casually to shooting the way that they had. There is an active gun range adjacent to the WMA where these animals have heard close range gunfire their entire lives and it has never posed a threat to them. Conditioned response.
Cheers
FullChoke
