Why?

[FullChoke]

By being here, you show and admit that you have an interest in hunting turkeys. You might be in it much deeper than just having an interest. You might love it. You might be obsessed with it. It might consume you and define who you are in a major way. At this level, turkey hunting is not a casual pastime.

Whether it is because you love the spring woods, or the sound of a rattling gobble in the morning fog, or if it's a deeper spiritual awakening in your core, there is a reason why you hunt turkeys.

Why do you?

FC

[TKE921]

I didn't get started in this game until much later.  I was @ the end of my pharmacy school career when I met my current wife and her father.  He was a big time spring gobbler hunter and took me my first time.  Until that point, deer hunting was my obsession and got nearly all of my attention.  From the first time a gobbler came in absolutely hammering at every yelp and cut it was all over.

At this point I just dabble in deer hunting, mostly because the wife loves jerky.  Turkey hunting has become my absolute love.  "Playing the game" with a gobbler is far more fun to me than just sitting there waiting on a deer to happen by.  Many springs I find myself having much more fun calling for a friend.  The pressure of worrying about the gun and all that goes into making the shot is gone so I can just sit 20 yards behind and focus solely on working the bird.

[3bailey3]

every thing you mentioned Norman covers it for me!

[FullChoke]

I hunt turkeys because of a combination of reasons. I started hunting when I was in college and there were few places that I had access to that held any population of any size. The idea of shooting this mythical wizard of the spring woods endowed with powers far beyond those of mortal men became an obsession, long before Mossy Oak thought they invented it. When I finally found myself on that clear morning standing over a flopping longbeard in a logging road and feeling that hot flash of adrenaline with the realization that HE WAS NOT GETTING UP, I was hooked.

I read everything that I could lay my hands on about turkeys. I sponged up any information, right or wrong, about these audacious masters in an attempt to gain a trick or insight.

At this point in my long education, I now drink deeply of a larger esoteric watershed that the gobbling turkey dominates. The whitetail fawns, crisp clear mornings, foggy humid mornings, the green budding woods, the wild azaleas, the strategic maneuvering of both the hunter and hunted, the times that my soul takes to carefully rearrange itself, the distant sound of drumming growing louder and louder, that bittersweet moment when you know that he has entered the Red Zone and that the final moments of his life now rest entirely in your hands and I now find myself once again on a clear morning kneeling next to and placing my hand gently on the slowly deflating warm body of a longbeard in a hardwood creek bottom and feeling that old friend of adrenaline with the realization that he is not getting up, I am left humbled and silent.

That's why I hunt turkeys.

FullChoke

[harleytom]

As Colonel Kelly says, I don't hunt them because I want to, I hunt them because I have to.

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk

[xarcher]

I hunt turkeys as an excuse to meet people on the internet.