Hurricane Michael really tore our area up. So many downed trees and root balls in the woods, it has made every trip through the woods take twice as long due to walking around the downed limbs and trees. There are still birds around of course, but past locations of roosting are so torn up in places, the birds have moved away from them - fine for large tract public hunting, but tough on the small farms we hunt.
Has saved the life of two toms so far this year. The first was called up to about 30 yards and the bird would just never clear the downed trees for my SIL to get a clear shot. Proud of him for holding off, it was slam dunk range, but there were two converging downed trunks he would not go around and he would not walk 20 yards around them. He knew he should be able to see a hen and eventually they showed up to his strutting and gobbling and led him away.
Yesterday, we got tight on a bird that we knew was in the area, had heard him 3 days before and struck him on the wrong side of the river. So we got on the correct side and he gobbled his head off. We moved in the creek bottom, which was hard to a)be quiet due to all the downed limbs and b)get close due to the downed trees. As we got near him on the roost in the creek bottom we saw we had two options: 1)set up closer than we wanted to, due to three very large oaks that had fallen in a triangle pattern-walking around them was an option, but would have put us too close to where he was roosted. 2) set up a little farther away than we liked, but where we could cover both ends of the area he needed to walk around. We chose option 2 to not bump the bird. Of course, he flies down and heads to us and just absolutely refused to come around the downed trees. He gobbled his head off, a little to our calls (which we did very sparingly since we were on public land) and a lot to any other sound in the woods. He was fired up but would not come any closer around the snags. After forever plus 30 minutes, we heard the end of the story - a clucking hen came by us and went to him and ended the game. We walked our legs off to get in front of them, but never heard him again.
It will be a long time before the woods look the same again - these are areas we have hunted for 20 years and we have to relearn where we can get to and set up. These large downed trees have made some pretty strut zones in the bottoms by taking out the smaller trees as they fell, but getting to them has been a challenge.
