Turkey Lurkey Do

I drew out for a turkey tag along with my bro-in-law, Rocky, this year. Neither of us had ever hunted turkeys before and really had no clue what we were doing. But, we read and talked to people and tried to gain some clue into how to do it before the hunt started.

Friday morning we headed out for the hunt. We spent most of the day scouting a few areas. About sun-down, we heard some gobbling down in a canyon we were watching. We started to move down the canyon towards the sound, calling every so often so we could hear where they were. As it turned out, the turkeys were moving up the canyon towards us.

At one point, they gobble and I'm almost right on top of them, but I can't see them. I quickly sat down right in the trail to give myself some cover in the hopes I could see them before they saw me. As it turned out, where I sat down just happened to be under a huge Ponderosa Pine tree...the largest one in the entire canyon. Turkeys like to roost in the tops of large trees for the night for protection. So, I'm sitting there and I finally see some movement in the bushes. I get a quick glimpse of the turkeys and they were about 50 yards away. They moved back into the bushes, then I hear wings flapping and they fly into the top of the tree I'm sitting under.

Now I'm stuck. I can't shoot them out of the tree and I can't just get up and walk away because they'll see me and we'll lose our chance of getting them. I sat there for a while, with 3 male turkeys (toms) gobbling in the tree directly above me, trying to decide what to do. Eventually, I rolled over onto my belly and tried to crawl away as stealthily as possible. It took about 2 hours for my adrenaline to burn off.

We headed back to the area before daylight the next morning, and they were still in the tree. We set up our decoys and started calling. They are gobbling back, but then they fly out of the tree in nearly the opposite direction of where we were. Either they saw us, or they had probably seen me the night before and were a little nervous. Regardless, we had to start stalking them again.

We started working up the sidehill they'd flown to. I was working up the hill from underneath them, and Rocky worked his way from the side. We were getting close, but I still couldn't see them. Finally, I was crawling on my hands and knees up the hill for aobut the last 75 yards. Finally, I could see movement in the bushes. Then, a tom walks out about 30 yards away and looks at me and then walks back into the bushes. I'm in my camo, but I'm not sure whether he saw me or not. I was kind of waiting to see if Rocky was going to shoot because he was even a little closer than I was. The tom walked out again and looked at me and started moving down the hill a little bit towards me. I decided that if one of us didn't shoot that they were going to see me and take off. The tom moved behind a bush and I raised my shotgun while he couldn't see the movement. When he walked out again, I shot and got my first turkey!

It was one of the funnest hunts I've ever done. I can see how guys get addicted to turkey hunting.