The 2008 Spring Turkey Season started off looking like a quick finish. Man was I wrong! The first week of Season “A” was one day after another of fighting henned up Gobblers. On the fourth week when Season “A” started again it looked like the same thing all over again and the excitement was quickly waning with every morning getting up at 3:00am. I was starting to have visions of taking my shotgun down to Hannaford's, going into the store, and blowing away a Butterball turkey in the cooler!
Finally on Thursday, May 22nd God was very kind to me despite all my mistakes at turkey hunting that morning. I got up at 3:00am as usual and drove down the road about a mile to a local farm. I had to cross a huge field approximately ¾ mile long in the cover of darkness, thick rain clouds, and drizzle. Tina gave me a boost to go out one more time to get the big bad boy because I was ready to give up on my hunt. We had scouted a small group of turkeys the evening before and watched fly-up at about 8:00pm. We came up with a strategy for me to cross the huge fields by following the fence line where no trees were available for cover except darkness. Unfortunately, the turkeys decided to relocate during the night about 200 yards away and on a different side of the field which turned out to be my planned set-up position for May 22nd!
I reached my set-up point at about 4:00am being perfectly quite, but apparently under the watchful eyes of my feathered prey overhead. A little rain was falling during my travels up the field to the set-up. I laid my shotgun down and took my turkey hunting vest off at the tree line. I had two hen decoys and one jake decoy to stake up and attach fishing line to the decoys to make them move. I carried two hen decoys out about 10 yards from the tree line and as I started to set the second decoy I heard a turkey above me making soft alarm putts, so I quickly froze and hoped the turkey would shut up. When I determined the turkey was going to get more upset I slowly backed up and headed to the tree line which then caused two turkeys to blow the roost and head out into the woods making a whole lot of racket. At that point I thought my hunt was already over.
Now I'm sitting just inside the tree line and hurried to set-up a position to hide hoping that more turkeys were in the position that I watched them fly-up into the evening before. Forget the jake decoy and the fishing line! At 4:45am the rain had stopped, but I still had not heard a single gobble anywhere. I decided to make some light yelping and nothing happened, so I yelped a little louder and that's when everything broke loose. Off to my left about 20 yards where the other turkeys spotted me a big Tom flew down about 40 yards in front of me and then off to my right about 20 yards another big Tom flew down and landed by the first Tom. As the second Tom hit the ground I started purring and both Toms went into full strut!
When the Toms seemed to concentrate on the decoys I was able to take the safety off and raise the shotgun. Soon as the first Tom raised his head out of the strut I punched his ticket with a 12 gauge Remington 870 using 3” magnums #4 shot! He piled up at 40 yards and his buddy blew the scene along with all the other turkeys left in the tree above from the “wake-up call”.
I rushed out to the bird and discovered quickly that it was going to be the biggest bird I ever harvested. At the tagging station at Libby's in Benton, the turkey weighed in at 21 pounds with a 10” beard and 1” spurs on each leg. What was funny is I'm 5'-4” tall and when I held the turkey up it looked like it could beat me up in a fair fight!