Just returned from Vermont this evening. I couldn't get out hunting until this weekend and I normally get there for the May 1st opener. This morning I had a gobbler yelling his authority all over the scrubapple hillside but the trouble is that he was nearly a half mile away and with the beaver pond studded creek between us it just wasn't going to work. I gave him a short series of yelps and he clammed up and never spoke another word. I guess the hens are all 'nested up' now and a yelping hen is just out of place now.
I hiked back to camp and Jamie and I had some breakfast but we were keeping an eye on a tom and a hen diagonally across a 40 acre cornfield. The hen was in the harrowed cornfiels (too wet to plant yet) and the tom was in the timothy grass adjacent to the cornfield. They were about 30 yards apart. I decided to sneak down the gravel road bordering the upper side of the field and then cut down across the cornfield hoping to catch them in one of the low-lying spots where they were hidden from me.
I pulled off the sneak pretty flawlessly except when I got down to the bottom the turkeys were gone. I decided to try the knee deep timothy in case they were hunkered down waiting for me to pass by. So I zig-zagged through the timothy and I could see their fresh trails in the still dewy grass but I about gave up after a while. I was just about to head beck to camp when I decided to try a section about forty yards farther on. Suddenly the tom flushes like a cock pheasant from 25 yards away... I felt like yelling "ROOSTER"!! It was a right to left quartering shot. I could see he had about a six-inch beard so I swung through and fired the right barrel (full choke just like the left one) and missed. I led hum too much in my excitement... I hastily fired the left barrel and shot right over top of him and that's the way my turkey hunt went this year
05-21-2011, 06:12 AM
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