Hunting with Mike

Sometimes you call the turkey and sometimes the turkey calls you.  I love to hunt turkeys and have called more than a few within shotgun, and even bow range.  The above bird is one of the biggest I’ve ever harvested, but didn’t respond to my “expert” calling.  I don’t use a diaphragm call, as my gag- reflex is very sensitive, so I use a box or slate call.

The birds had shut down, because of unusually cold weather, and except for hearing them on the roost, things were pretty silent.  It usually doesn’t take more than two days to fill my tag, but I was going on my third day when I got this bird.  I was camping with my 4 year old son,  and was awakened one morning by several distinct “gobbles!”  The sun was shining through our canvas tent walls, and I realised we had overslept.  The gobbles sounded like they were within 100 yards of our camp, so I hurriedly dressed and grabbed my shotgun.  I told my son to sit tight I’d be back in a minute.  About 200 yards into my stalk I could see that the birds were further away than I originally thought.  I went back and got my son and together we followed the echoes of some springtime Tom’s.

They ended up being close to 1/2 mile away, but the crisp, cool, windless morning made the sound travel a long way.  There were three of them sunning in a valley strutting and gobbling for a few distant hens.  I was able to low crawl through some high weeds on the ridge above them.  As I parted the weeds with the barrel of my 870 they caught my movement and headed for cover.  I swung on the biggest bird, and a 40 yard shot put meat on the table, and a full strut mount in my family room.  This bird had a 11 inch beard and spurs in excess of 1 inch.  Sometimes a stalk works when all the lovesick calls in the world won’t.

Mike

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.