hunting blog 2015

May 16 2015

I have been turkey hunting for a while now and out of the hunts that I do, I find hunting these birds to be the most rewarding hunts. I find that they are very hard to get into gun range and when that Tom comes into your decoy spread that gets your heart beating and blood pumping.

I haven’t been successful in any hunts that I have been on and that just makes me work harder every season that I am out there. Figuring out where these birds are and where they are going throughout the morning hunt, makes this type of hunting very intriguing.

This year in particular I had put in a lot of time and finally started patterning the birds in my area and that started with the first hunt of this season. Unfortunately for the first day’s sit, I setup in a field that has had birds in the past and for cover they had just cut some salt marsh hay and had that piled on the field that allowed me to getting myself into that for concealment. Worked the area but this day was a bust and made me want this so much more.

There is a certain area that these birds roost and that is on private land but you are able to get them to come from there to the private land that I hunt on. This next hunt found me in a small clearing between deep big woods and open fields. The birds were very vocal this morning and there were two that would talk back and would keep moving towards my location. Problem that got into my way was in the end there was water between them and my location and that ended that mornings sit.

Upon seeing that previous location, moved more towards their direction and started the conversation on this day as well. They worked their way off the adjoining property and were making their way in my direction. There was two birds constantly gobbling as they came closer towards my calling and I was hoping that they could see the decoy spread down an old field road cutting. They worked their way onto the adjoining field and came into the woods in front of me but ended up getting on the opposite side of some marshy area and wouldn’t cross and walked off into the deep woods.

Today’s sit was to be on a small field next to the neighboring property that they were walking on the latest hunt. Didn’t take long to getting them going again this morning and as the conversation went along wasn’t long and two birds were off to my left. They walked down that previous open old field road and before they made that last turn to enter my field, they turned back around and went back to the other property.

They kept in communication as they gobbled back and forth behind me and kept walking down the fence line just out of sight. Between these two properties there is an old stone wall fence line that has some brush covering that they weren’t going to cross through into showing themselves to me and kept on walking on the wrong side and sounded like that they crossed this field on the opposite side of where I was.

So after each day’s hunt I reassess what had transpired for that particular day and decide my plan of attack for the next time out. I feel that I am honing into their daily patterns and it is a matter of time that we should meet on the field.

So it seems that they cross one end of the field more this season, so it was time to position myself down there. The owner had left a small area of trees and brush in this field and it was open enough that I could get myself in there and see my decoys clearly.

Wasn’t long and there were numbers of birds gobbling in many directions and was hoping that today was finally going to be that day. But, they did their same thing and stayed on the adjoining property and wouldn’t commit to coming through the property line to come and see what was going on over here.

At this point I was getting very frustrated as I could see that the box calls that I was using wasn’t convincing enough to bring them in. It was time to go find some diaphragm mouth calls and found some Zinc calls and was able to get a couple of different sounding birds and practiced until the next hunt.

Today’s hunt found me back in that natural ground blind and had the decoy set out at 16 yards and settled in as the morning light opened another day. Right at 5 AM the birds started sounding off once again and once it was light out enough for them to fly down, they always quiet down for half an hour. This is something that they do every day.

Unfortunately for this day there was no gobbles going on at all and I was getting a little frustrated that today was going to be a bust. I had all morning to hunt and had set a time that I would vacate this location and head back deeper in the woods if nothing was happening. You really start thinking about anything trying to keep yourself entertained while nothing is happening.

It was getting to about 45 more minutes and I was going to move locations as two in a half hours there hasn’t been one gobble back. I wasn’t using the box calls hardly at all and used the mouth diaphragm to give these same birds something different to hear.

I was getting fidgety that I wanted to move and there it was, two Tom’s started spewing off in the adjoining property and making their way towards me. I was lightly calling back to them and they kept gobbling back to me and were slowly making their way in my direction. They were following the exact same route as a few other times and I was starting to get frustrated a little as I was thinking at this point that they would just keep walking.

As they got parallel to my location, they went silent for a few brief moments and they were very close at this point from their last communication. Then there they were, two Tom’s popped out of the fencerow and were starting to head in my decoy direction. One of them was totally fluffed out, blaze red and white head and the other one was walking right next to him.

They moved slowly towards my decoys and they watched those very contently but, you could see that they were a bit confused. They looked at the decoys and then if I made a light call they would turn a bit and look in my direction. The bigger bird was locked into the decoy but the smaller bird was getting very edgy. They were out about 15 yards and figured it was time to shoot before they ran and when the shot was fired, the big Tom was flopping on the ground.

My heart was racing at this point as I went over and looked at my bird and the other bird was still walking on the side of the field gobbling. I was shaking so much with excitement and felt great to finally be able to put one of the big birds down. If it wasn’t for the mouth calls, they probably would have never came into this field and it is always nice having a few calls with you to offer a different sound.

Now the hard work starts and time to get the processing underway of my latest trophy. The bird weighed in at 22 pounds, had a 9.75 inch beard and 1 inch spurs. You could see that this was an older bird and shot placement was perfect with no shot in the breast. I have one more week left of this season and can harvest one more bird so I will be out there trying for one more.