Another update from NM:
First off, congratulations to everybody on the team for their successes this spring.
Last we spoke, I was headed for Colorado with optimistic expectations. That optimism was unfounded again this year. After three years, I have concluded that public-land turkey hunting in southwest CO is less-than stellar. This was the first spring I was actually able to reach some of the places I felt certain would hold turkeys due to the annoying habit of the Forest Service in keeping a lot of the forest roads closed.
I covered a couple hundred miles of what appears to be ideal Merriam's turkey habitat. My conclusion: they are just not there in any (what I would consider to be) "huntable" numbers. The few gobblers I was able to locate acted like they never wanted to ever get close to anything resembling another turkey again in their lives.
Perhaps a more skilled and determined turkey hunter could have found a way,...but not this boy. I gave up rather quickly,...probably more quickly than I should have,...and came home.
Good news (for me) is that the "boss" (wife) has decided that she wants to see a part of Utah next week that coincidentally has turkeys to hunt,...so we're off in a couple of days to go explore UT again! I have no real expectations of success since we will only be there a couple of days,...but what the heck! Gonna give it a try!
As a postscript, I finally got around to measuring the largest of the two gobblers I killed here in NM, and to my surprise, he actually scored 58!,...a lunker for a NM Merriam's gobbler! If I had done my due diligence and recorded him properly, I might have actually cracked the bottom of our list this spring. Oh well, it looks like we are well on our way to another contest victory this year anyway...so no need to be concerned from the looks of it...
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