Tuesday, April 24, 2007
A 3 day weekend is never long enough even when you leave early on Friday...
Hunters 1 Turkeys 0;
This will have some killing and a picture of a dead turkey, so if that makes you squeamish, leave now.
All gone? Well good. This last weekend I drove up to my Dads place which is further in the middle of nowhere then any place else, I still use his place as my main address because I don’t want to pay full price for my hunting and fishing licenses, and my car registration….makes everything way easier. Anyway I LOVE my Sirius radio, nothing like never losing reception while driving across the farmland that Kansas is.
But on to the killing. My cousin and his step son came out Saturday morning for some early morning turkey slaying, and for the first time in 10 years he was early, which through my whole schedule off, since I wasn’t ready yet. So I hurriedly dressed in my camo, threw the boots on and rushed out to my truck, (can you call a Ford Explorer a truck?) And we drove to the field. Now for you non hunters mst game animals are early risers, and you need to be in place before they get up to have any shot at killing them and filling your bellies, so this is all taking place at 5:30 am-6:15 am. So we park the trucks and start gathering all of our gear, guns, blinds, sack of fake turkeys, etc. and start walking to wear I thought we should set up, which is about a ½ mile. As we approach the turn in the road, my cousin grabs my arm and whispers, “There are three turkeys in the trees!”
I wasn’t paying attention to the trees yet I was just trying to get where we needed to be, since when we got out of the trucks I could hear the turkeys already up and awake chatting to each other. So I glance up and sure enough there were three birds that we could see.
Shit.
So we decide that we would just set up and try to call them to us when they decide to come out of the roost and start their morning of turkey-dom. We hurriedly set up the decoys and the blinds, and crawled in them to wait. We started to “talk” to them as well, we would call, and they would answer then they would call and we would answer, it was really a lot of fun. Then they decide to come out of the roost, and naturally they fly away from us…because apparently when we were talking to them with our turkey calls we must have said “Jesus!! You look like NGD” and that pissed them off . so we wait a few minutes and then head off into the creek to stalk them, and as most of you know I’m not a petite flower so my stalking is more like “controlled rampaging bear walking”, but this was a pretty easy stalk so I made it without creating too much noise.
So there we are sitting in the trees watching the turkeys 300 yards away, as they ate their fill of Farmer Dave’s wheat crop, something that is a problem in the farming communities, the wildlife eating all of the people food. So we start calling to them and they are calling back, but for some reason the ones we were talking to didn’t want to become more intimate with us and opted for a long distance relationship.
About this time I see a different flock of turkeys, in the opposite corner of the field and I tell cuz that I was going to sneak back to the blinds just in case those birds saw the decoys and wanted to come in for a chat and some dew. So I make my way back through the underbrush and across the creek and back into the blind without being seen, or I guess heard. So, as I try and strike up a conversation with the birds so far away from me, I see that they are way to interested in chasing the bugs, and whatever it was they were looking for to pay me any attention.
About 15 mins pass as I sit there trying to grab the attention of a turkey, ANY turkey at this time, when I hear the distinct sound of a shotgun going off…well two different ones actually..Bang followed by BOOM BOOM BOOM, which tells me that Cuz’s step son got the first shot off and then Cuz took down one of the neighbors, so I start to put my stuff away, unload the gun, and get out the camera.
As they walked around the tree line I could see the bird slung on the back of Cuzzin, and it looked HUGE, but then again all turkeys look big, they are basically medicine balls with wings. So when they got up to me I made JR take a couple of pictures, as it turns out Cuz had to stop the bird from running because “I didn’t feel like chasing it” Cuz said. He also mentioned that it’s spurs were GIANT, and that the beard was close to the one he shot last week.
After driving back to my Dad’s place to show him the bird, we took measurements, and sure enough the kid had beaten Dad in the big bird shootout, and I got skunked for the entire weekend.
This will have some killing and a picture of a dead turkey, so if that makes you squeamish, leave now.
All gone? Well good. This last weekend I drove up to my Dads place which is further in the middle of nowhere then any place else, I still use his place as my main address because I don’t want to pay full price for my hunting and fishing licenses, and my car registration….makes everything way easier. Anyway I LOVE my Sirius radio, nothing like never losing reception while driving across the farmland that Kansas is.
But on to the killing. My cousin and his step son came out Saturday morning for some early morning turkey slaying, and for the first time in 10 years he was early, which through my whole schedule off, since I wasn’t ready yet. So I hurriedly dressed in my camo, threw the boots on and rushed out to my truck, (can you call a Ford Explorer a truck?) And we drove to the field. Now for you non hunters mst game animals are early risers, and you need to be in place before they get up to have any shot at killing them and filling your bellies, so this is all taking place at 5:30 am-6:15 am. So we park the trucks and start gathering all of our gear, guns, blinds, sack of fake turkeys, etc. and start walking to wear I thought we should set up, which is about a ½ mile. As we approach the turn in the road, my cousin grabs my arm and whispers, “There are three turkeys in the trees!”
I wasn’t paying attention to the trees yet I was just trying to get where we needed to be, since when we got out of the trucks I could hear the turkeys already up and awake chatting to each other. So I glance up and sure enough there were three birds that we could see.
Shit.
So we decide that we would just set up and try to call them to us when they decide to come out of the roost and start their morning of turkey-dom. We hurriedly set up the decoys and the blinds, and crawled in them to wait. We started to “talk” to them as well, we would call, and they would answer then they would call and we would answer, it was really a lot of fun. Then they decide to come out of the roost, and naturally they fly away from us…because apparently when we were talking to them with our turkey calls we must have said “Jesus!! You look like NGD” and that pissed them off . so we wait a few minutes and then head off into the creek to stalk them, and as most of you know I’m not a petite flower so my stalking is more like “controlled rampaging bear walking”, but this was a pretty easy stalk so I made it without creating too much noise.
So there we are sitting in the trees watching the turkeys 300 yards away, as they ate their fill of Farmer Dave’s wheat crop, something that is a problem in the farming communities, the wildlife eating all of the people food. So we start calling to them and they are calling back, but for some reason the ones we were talking to didn’t want to become more intimate with us and opted for a long distance relationship.
About this time I see a different flock of turkeys, in the opposite corner of the field and I tell cuz that I was going to sneak back to the blinds just in case those birds saw the decoys and wanted to come in for a chat and some dew. So I make my way back through the underbrush and across the creek and back into the blind without being seen, or I guess heard. So, as I try and strike up a conversation with the birds so far away from me, I see that they are way to interested in chasing the bugs, and whatever it was they were looking for to pay me any attention.
About 15 mins pass as I sit there trying to grab the attention of a turkey, ANY turkey at this time, when I hear the distinct sound of a shotgun going off…well two different ones actually..Bang followed by BOOM BOOM BOOM, which tells me that Cuz’s step son got the first shot off and then Cuz took down one of the neighbors, so I start to put my stuff away, unload the gun, and get out the camera.
As they walked around the tree line I could see the bird slung on the back of Cuzzin, and it looked HUGE, but then again all turkeys look big, they are basically medicine balls with wings. So when they got up to me I made JR take a couple of pictures, as it turns out Cuz had to stop the bird from running because “I didn’t feel like chasing it” Cuz said. He also mentioned that it’s spurs were GIANT, and that the beard was close to the one he shot last week.
After driving back to my Dad’s place to show him the bird, we took measurements, and sure enough the kid had beaten Dad in the big bird shootout, and I got skunked for the entire weekend.
