Last week I had just enough time to get in two days’ worth of turkey hunting before I had to submit my weekly homework. It was just enough time to deal with a few birds and to get sidetracked by picking a bunch of fiddleheads. I could have come home with a boatload, but I stumbled into a bunch of dead elms and spent the rest of the morning looking for morels but that’s a story for another day. Today is about how my long-awaited turkey season ended.

On the third day of my hunt, I slipped into a spot that historically holds birds. Turns out that there were birds in my county, just not in my township. That’s another way to say that I wasn’t really close to any birds. Armed with up-to-date intel, the next morning I got up earlier than usual and moved much closer to where the birds had gobbled the previous morning. 

As I walked towards what I hoped would be my new, all-time favorite turkey hunting spot, I couldn’t help but notice the tequila sunrise and the Morning Star, Venus. I even took a picture thinking that if I could ever paint like that, I wouldn’t be going turkey hunting right now. I slipped quietly into a spot on the corner of some pines that had some new brush in front for a good enough natural blind, provided I didn’t make any sudden movements.  

In order to speed this up, I’ll skip to 5:40 a.m. which is when I saw a tom turkey fly down. It was game on. I had locked into a tom turkey lottery win. I could hear six different toms gobbling and my guess was the furthest one was probably a couple hundred yards away, with the closest one being half that. I really started to get excited when two of the toms gobbled and I could tell that they were closing in on me. A couple of minutes later they both strutted into view. Now I’ve been in this position more than a couple of times before, but you’d have thought it was my first time. On the outside I was cool, calm and collected but on the inside, I was 6 years old on Christmas morning. The closer the birds got, the more excited I got.

The birds were at 10 yards and taking turns strutting, trying to look more impressive than the other. My shooting lanes were limited and without any decoys out to hold the birds’ focus there was a chance they could slip by me unscathed. That was when the first tom stopped, broke strut, and stretched his neck and head high to look over the brush in order to find the hen that I was pretending to be. That is the exact pose that turkey hunting targets are patterned after. That is also the exact moment that my hunt ended.  

My wait was finally over and it had certainly been worth it. I had called in not one, but two big toms and had an up close and personal encounter with them. Before my season began all I could do was complain about how long I had to wait to hunt. I guess now my complaint is that it’s over. I wonder, are there any more leftover tags?

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