Opening Day Turkey Season

It’s also hard to forecast success rates this spring, considering the terrible nesting season we had last year. Spring 2009 had far too much rain, diminishing hatching success and chick survival.  Second-year jakes — males born last year — could be in shorter supply, though, making the hunt far more challenging.  Wild Turkeys need a relatively dry nesting season for optimum reproduction. Hopefully they’ll get that this spring. Enough said!

I had my doubts about the spring season as well, listening to everyone make their predictions of this spring’s wild turkey population. I was hearing a good amount of early morning gobbling. This past Monday morning I put the accusations to rest as daylight approached and started to set up on a roosted gobbling tom. Before I ever set up  I received a text from a friend who had a big bird on the ground already(21lbs). Less than 5 minutes after that another text, this one from one of my sons he too had a long beard on the ground(22lbs) .

I continued to my setup zone and got ready to call. The first call I made the big bird answered along with several hens cutting back at me. Less than 15 minutes later he and the hens were standing in range of my 870 and my hunt was over(24lbs).

I than sent out my own text of a successful hunt to my buddies and started to pack my bird out of the woods when received another text from my hunting partner hunting the same farm I was on, he had just dropped a big Missouri long beard sporting 5 beards. This bird would have probably been close to record book scoring but it had no Spurs!! What is up with this I thought? He just never grew any spurs, but he did weigh over 25 1/2lbs.

I guess mother nature wasn’t that bad on the Wild Turkey flock in our part of Missouri. We headed to the house, boiled the water,  sharpened up the knives and butchered all of the birds.