It has been a trying season thus far. Two days before the opener, I was going over my gun making sure it was good to go and my ring for my red dot broke and no one had a replacement anywhere in town. I ended up having to go buy Williams Firesights and resight in the day before.
Opening day, I had a good bird come in and hang up at 60 yards and triple gobbled for several minutes before walking off the other direction. I have a really good pattern but it was around 20mph winds and I wasn't totally comfortable taking the shot with the new iron sights.
I spent probably 50 some hours on public land the past week and the birds were silent. I only saw 2 and one was in a coyotes mouth and the other was on adjacent private property.
I am really KICKING myself over an incident the other day. I had the same gobbler from day 1 run down a ridge directly in front of me, he stopped and gobbled at 55 yards but there were alot of saplings around him. He continued to about 45 yards but was directly to my left and I didn't think I could get turned without spooking him but he was looking straight at my decoys so I made the error of assuming he was going to continue coming in, so I didn't even try, and then.....he gobbled, went to half strut and headed straight to the field directly away from me another 75 yards expecting the hens to follow and gobbled out there for 20 mins before leaving the area, the wind picked up and the rest of the day was silent.
The Lord has blessed me in allowing me to spend so much time in his creation and it isn't over yet. I did find a bunch of mushrooms which was cool and the landowner was gracious enough to let me keep all that I found. It was approx 9lb's that day. Here are some pics:
