Well, looks like my season is rolling to a slow stop. I tagged by second and final NC bird this morning. This has been one of the weirdest, toughest, and most confusing seasons ever. The breeding phases are all out of whack with some hens having laid all their eggs while others are still being bread. Even though all the hens should be nesting by now, gobblers are still strutting with hens at all hours of the day. Being that the gobblers have had hens with them 24/7 for the past two months, they aren't desperate and fired up like they should be. They half-heartedly answer the calls and getting them to leave whatever they are doing is nothing but an exercise in futility. I've heard of very few gobblers that were killed responding to the call. Most are ambush victims, were killed right off the roost before they met their hens, or were killed by sheer luck.
Bird one for me was killed on April 20th. I was hunting on my buddy's club and we got on a couple longbeards mid morning that were answering the call good. These were the first birds I had worked all year. They came pretty quick, but instead of coming straight in, they circled around us in a little bottom and eventually smelled a rat and exited out the opposite side. We decided to make a move on them and got there in time to watch them cross the path a hundred yards ahead of us. My buddy went straight after them and I circled around them to cut them off on a fire break. About 15 minutes after I set up I saw a gobbler coming around the path. I yelped softly and his head filled with color. He stood up straight and I could see the top six inches of his beard hanging down and saw another gobbler coming up behind him. I decided these were my birds and shot the front one. As I approached him I realized it was a case of mistaken identity. He was big for a jake with a thick 6.5 inch beard. If I had known he was a jake I would have passed, but it was meat on the table and a monkey off the back.
The following weekend a couple buddies and I had permits to hunt on one of the local National Wildlife Refuges in the area. This tract was known to hold a lot of birds and I had had good success in the past on the same tract of land that we had drawn. We had saved our tags for this hunt knowing that we would get on some birds. Two solid days of walking, calling, walking, calling, walking, sitting and waiting, and more walking yielded less than ten gobbles between the three of us and not even so much as a sighting of a longbeard. We were quite deflated. We didn't even hunt on the refuge the last day and instead hunted around the house which only supplied us with more of the same dull action.
When they aren't gobbling, you have to change your tactics!
It was hard to keep after them with such poor action on the turkeys' part, but the season is only so long, and you only get a few in your lifetime.
This morning I headed out to some public land where I knew some birds were roosting. I just so happened to get setup between the gobbler and his hens and was able to coax him into my lap not ten minutes after he flew down. To say I was thankful for this bird is a gross understatement. I have never had to work so hard to fill my tags. They say luck is where preparation meets opportunity, and that was certainly the case this morning. There are a whole slough of things that must go right for you to kill a bird at first light and often it leads to head scratching and lots of dirt kicking and hat throwing, but when it works out it sure is a nice change of pace.
This afternoon I hunted with a friend of mine that I don't get to hunt with often. It was back to the same tough hunting we had experienced for the past three weeks. We bumped a hen off her nest around lunch time, but still saw plenty of hens with gobblers in the afternoon. We got back to my club and there were four longbeards strutting with five hens out in the field, on April 30, at 5:30pm, that's ridiculous.
One of the biggest pluses so far has been an over abundance of jakes. They are everywhere. Next year should be a lot of fun with loads of lovesick two year olds running around.
Hope everyone else is having a fun and safe season, regardless of how productive it has been.
- Garrett
