Gobblers I Have Known. . .

From "Patience Pays Off . . . Big Time"

It was a calm morning so I began soft calling in hopes that one of the toms would hear me, but thirty minutes later it was obvious that both birds were too far to hear my clucks and purrs. I took out my old K&H box call and made a loud series of yelps. The bird in front of us answered me, so I thought it best to stay put and see how things might unfold. Over the next half hour, the bird answered me a few more times, but he didn’t get any closer. The bird behind us gobbled sporadically, but I thought he only answered me once. He didn’t seem to be a player.

Ryan and I both tried diaphragms, Slatek and aluminum calls along with my box, but the turkey in front just wouldn’t budge. By 7:00 AM I considered making a move on him, but the bird behind us gobbled a bit closer. He still sounded like he was more than 300 yards away, but I felt that he had moved up on the ridge with us. I switched the focus of my calling to him, but he never really gobbled back to us.

He never gobbled to our calls, but I think he was gobbling at us. By that I mean he would gobble 30 seconds to two minutes after we called. He also gobbled some on his own. I knew about where he was on our ridge, and there was no way to move closer to him without going back up the grassy road. I was sure that if we tried that, he would spot us and spook, and if we dropped over the hill and tried to move closer before coming back to the ridge top, we would have made a lot of noise. I like to get 100-150 yards from a bird to try calling him in, and being pinned down by a bird 300 yards away wasn’t my idea of an ideal situation.

The bird gobbled less frequently, still from the same spot, and finally he shut up. It was 7:30 AM, and I was confident that he had called up a hen or two. Ryan and I went back to clucking and purring occasionally, and my hopes plummeted. We were setup in a good spot, and since every bird within earshot, except Art’s blabbermouth, had gone quiet, I decided to stay put until ten o’clock.

About 8:00 AM I raised up a bit to reposition myself on my seat cushion, and "GOBBBLLLE"! A turkey sounded off from about fifty yards up the road, and my heart nearly jumped out of my chest. I slowly sat back down, and positioned myself to face the point where the road entered the field slightly uphill and to the left. Ryan was looking almost straight in the opposite direction with his back to me. I turned my head toward him and whispered, "This bird is dead."

Now that I have described a few of my character flaws, I am going to get on my soapbox and preach about one of my biggest pet peeves, bench hunters. For those of you who aren’t familiar with my term, let me describe it. A bench hunter in the most pure sense is one who does a lot of talking about hunting and very little, if any actual hunting. Turkey bench hunters are the worst.

Turkey hunting doesn’t lend itself to the leisure or lazy outdoorsman. You have to get up well before dawn, and if you have to travel very far to your hunting ground, this may be in the middle of the night. You often have to endure sudden spring rains, even if you didn’t choose to hunt rain or shine. In most cases, you have to do a lot of walking, and in my case that includes traversing up and down steep hills with a heavy vest on my shoulders. In the Deep South, you can add incessant mosquitoes to the mix. Again, if taken seriously, this isn’t a sport for the casual.

Starting about mid-February, most bench hunters I know start talking about turkeys. This usually happens after they have orated for two weeks on how waterfowl season was too early again. They will talk about the hatch of the last two springs and make expert predictions on how good the gobbling will be in the coming months. They will tell the stories of the few, if any, turkeys that they have ever killed over and over. They will talk guns and shells, calls and camo, but inevitably they talk about one subject more than any other, the gobblers that they almost killed.

I once knew a fellow who was as nice a guy as you could ever hope to meet. He always wanted to hear your hunting stories, but five minutes into your conversation, he felt compelled to tell you about the huge turkey that he had been hunting for three years. He would call it into range almost every day he hunted, but something always went wrong at the last second. Once his safety was on when he pulled the trigger, another time he forgot to load his gun, and it seemed like he missed the old tom two or three times a year.