This year was DIFFERENT.
After hunting in KY and Indiana putting in untold hours hunting and chasing gobblers it all paid off yesterday. Up until then I had seen a total of three longbeards with the closest being 75 yards. They have been are few and far between. Tough season…
I couldn’t go yesterday morning as I had a church obligation at our food pantry That was done by 11am and I then went home and did some Honey Dos by planting the last of our flowers for the Spring.
By 2 pm I was done and told the wife I was going up to the country to put in a few hours turkey hunting.
It is at least 84 degrees here so I thought to heck with it I would drive down to the cable that protects a lane that goes into where we hunt. We usually park about 1 half mile away and walk in to try and keep traffic to a minimum…. But it was just too hot to walk that far.
I got to the blind and set up by 3:15. I had two hens and a jake decoy out in front of the blind at about 15 yards. As soon as settled in, I did a few clucks and a couple purrs to see if anything was close and got no answer. I didn’t want to call too loudly right off the bat.
I listened and waited for 15 minutes and thought I’d get more aggressive as clucks and purrs didn’t seem to get any interest going.
I hit a couple clucks and then went into a cutt. I had not even finished the cutt when a gobbler cut loose behind me. That was the way I had walked in, so it was possible he heard my original clucks and was already coming to me.
I laid the call down and started watching out the side windows waiting for him to pop out into the field. The blind is back up against a set of pines that are about 100 yards wide. It sounded like he was on the lane on the back side of the pines.
He cut lose again, only now he was closer. Maybe 60 or 70 yards straight behind the blind. I kept thinking… please don’t let this be that jake again. About that time I caught movement across the narrow field I was on and back in the woods about 40 yards. I could make out a turkey. I put the binoculars on him and could then tell he was a gobbler by his white head. I could not see a beard at that distance of about 125 yards.
I then picked out another bird with him and the only thing I could think of was the “two jakes” again. I kept watching out of the sides of the blind for the bird that was behind me to pop out in the field and trying to keep and eye on the two gobblers across the field and in the woods at the same time.
The two gobblers came out of the woods and crossed a ditch into the field. I had the binoculars on them and I picked out a LONGBEARD on the one on the right. The other was a jake though. Strange that they were paired up. They came into the field and started picking at seeds on the weeds that had grown up.
I had my attention on them fully as they were feeding my way. I still made sideways glances to see if the vocal gobbler was going to enter the field from behind me. I caught movement from the side that I expected the vocal gobbler to come from , but it was a hen entering the field very close to my decoys. She stopped a looked them over and then went to feeding.
Now I had three decoys and a live one on front of me. The longbeard and the jake kept feeding towards me. The longbeard would bust out in a strut every now and then and then drop back down to go back to feeding. When he got to that magical 40 yard mark the Diamond of the Simmons Pro-Diamond was on his head, but he was feeding and I didn’t want to shoot him head on feeding and mess up breast meat. He closed the gap to about 37 yards but kept his head down. He all of a sudden popped into a strut and I thought about shooting, but I had heard that shooting a gobbler head on in full strut head on was not a good idea…. so I held off.
He went right back into the head on feeding position,. At 30 yards I said to myself “please just pop that head up.” As if on cue he popped that head went up and BOOM, down he went.
Total elapsed time in the blind was 35 minutes.
Why is it s SO tough most times and then sometimes (but not often) it is SO easy?
He is a good bird that had 1 ½ inch spurs on both sides, a double beard that was 10” and 11 ¼” and weighed in at 20 pounds even. I thought the weight was slight but my taxidermist later told me birds that he had been checking in had been on the light side this year as they didn’t winter all that well… poor mast crop was partly to blame.
He also told me that the bird was probably 6 or 7 years old as they just don’t get 1 1/2 inch spurs in our area without quite a bit of age on them.
NWTF score is 20 + 15 + 15 + 22.5 = 72.5
Needless to say I am VERY happy …..
. Those are some nice spurs and a double beard is a bonus. Congratulations and a great story, with a happy ending 
.
