Anticipation for the upcoming season

By Joel Walters

Every year when other guys are arguing over how to fill out their brackets for the NCAA tournament, I begin to get worked up over the imminent start of the Spring turkey season. In my state the season won’t begin for at least another month, but the process of getting ready builds slowly into its final fever pitch. At first you might catch a few minutes of a hunting show and watch a successful hunt, then you might flip through the new Cabela’s catalog, but before long, you are driving your spouse to drink with your nonstop attempt to recreate a NWTF calling championship in your basement. I probably spend at least 5 to 1 the number of hours practicing my calling, getting my gear together, and watching instructional turkey hunting videos than I do actually being able to hunt. When coworkers, people you might consider friends, jump into the men’s room in order to avoid you during April because they just can’t bring themselves to listen to you prattle on one more time about the different situations you might use a box call versus a slate call, you know you got it bad.

Another thing the other guys are missing out on is the memories you cherish of past experiences. One memory I think back on often was during a hunt a few years ago. I was hunting in Robertson County, KY on my uncle’s farm and got there just at first light. This part of Kentucky is characterized by large rolling hills. The tops of the hills are typically clear hayfields and the steeper hillsides are grown up into mixed hardwoods and cedars. I walked along the edge of one of these hayfields in the gathering light and blew my owl call into the nearby cedars. I got a couple of responses fairly close. The birds seemed to be down the hill about half way. I eased my way along the edge of the cedars with the hayfield on my left until I reached an opening in the trees. At this point the hayfield begins to wrap around in a large crescent shape along the top of the hill and forms a draw that is bush hogged clear every other year. As I looked down the draw, the tree line runs straight down an old fence line to my right ending in another tree line that runs up the opposite side of the draw. From the air, I imagine the open draw probably looks like somebody cut a piece out of a forest pie.

Looking down the tree line, I blew my owl call again and heard the birds in some trees below me on the edge of the draw. I decided to back up into the hayfield and get out of sight. I walked in the hayfield along the top of the hill, out of sight of the birds, and made my way around crescent shape to the opposite tree line along the open draw. Walking carefully in the dark along an ATV trail, I got to a bench area in the trees that was fairly open and visible to the roosted birds in the opposite tree line. I set my decoys out and set up against a large ash tree and began to make a few tree yelps. The birds responded immediately and with vigor. It seemed like a large flock with a couple of gobblers and a bunch of hens. Not wanting to call too much, I occasionally made a few soft clucks and yelps until it started to get light enough for the birds to see my decoys in the woods. I tried to perform my best fly down cackle, including using my hat to imitate a hen pitching down from a nearby tree. Whatever I did, seemed to work because I could hear a couple of the flock start to pitch down too, then all of them started to fly in my direction. I could see them in the air, heading my way, when suddenly instead of landing, the birds angled back up and landed in the trees all around me. “Did they see me?”, I wondered. I got my answer soon enough when to my right the muzzle of a coyote became visible a few feet from me. The dog walked out in front of me and sat down looking up at the turkeys and then down at my decoys. He jogged down the hill and out of sight and at that all of the turkey pitched down the hill too but completely away from my setup. What a disappointment. If it were legal, I might have been able to shoot one of them when they were in the tree above me. I saw Michael Waddell do that once on his show when he was hunting in Tennessee and he called a gobbler to him from one tree to another. I wasn’t as confident in my ability to explain my situation to a wildlife officer, so I decided to pass on the shot.

I called for a few minutes more, but the distant gobbles down the hill only mocked me and my setup. Sitting, feeling dejected, I was suddenly sprung wide awake. The coyote had made a big circle around my setup and suddenly appeared at full speed trying to grab my decoy! By the time I had my shotgun on it, the coyote had grabbed the head of my hen and was heading down the hill. I imagine the taste of plastic was not what he was expecting, so he dropped the decoy halfway down the hill.

Some people would say that this was a completely busted hunt, and they would be right in one respect. But as the days start to get longer and we make our way to the last sleepless night of opening day, these are the types of memories that get us through the waiting.