Dustin(age 14) got his first turkey last spring when I guided him on a Rio hunt in Texas, but he's never taken an Eastern here at home, so we set out with high hopes for the Youth Hunt here in North Louisiana.
Friday night a hail storm came through and as I figured the birds were alittle flustered the next morn. We heard one faint gobble in the distance and throughout the morning we managed to see a flock of 15 hens and one other single hen, but despite covering a few miles, never located a tom. I figured with the pretty weather Saturday evening they would rattle the woods this morn. We arrived before light to get the decoys set in a large clearing where we saw the large flock of hens Saturday and sure enough we started to hear some gobbles around 7:10am. One bird was roosted about 200 yards from us and only gobbled one time. When they started flying down I found out quickly why; he had found that large flock of hens and I knew we didn't stand a chance. There were 2-3 in the distance gobbling a good bit, so we covered some ground to close the distance. Once we set up everything seemed great until some guy started blowing a sick hoot owl(8 am) and sounding like a sick hen on what I assume was a box. I heard one putt and one fly and knew that whole set was blown. We waited a while never hearing any of those birds again, so I came up with a plan to try and sneak to a dirt road near the large flock and just hope they'd come by at some point during the day, but while coming up with a strategy one gobbled in the distance in a small clear-cut. We made the trek to them and eased close to the edge of the clearing in the timber hoping I could coax him over. After calling for a while, no dice. I wasn't 100% sure that's where he gobbled, but I knew he had to have been in that area. After a while I decided to sneak up behind a large pine and do some glassing in the 40acre clearing. I glassed for a while and never saw anything, but just as I was about to ease back to Dustin I caught movement behind some brush only about 40 yards out and sure enough red heads were coming through the brush just under the hill from me and Dustin is 20 yards behind me! I waited until they went behind some brush and sank to my knees out of their sight and crawled down the hill out of their view and headed straight to Dustin. I hadn't sat down for 30 seconds and there they were. Talk about timing! They had heard me crawling in the leaves and were coming to investigate. Dustin had his gun on my shooting sticks pointed out into the clearing, but the birds had come right to where I was glassing in the woods to our right. I could tell it was several jakes and even though I'd heard a gobbler somewhere near earlier, we were definitely going to take the first opportunity. Two of the jakes lost interest and started to walk away, but the closest of the three was standing like a statue. I told Dustin to ease his gun very slowly to the right when the two started to walk away. He eased around and POW!, his first Eastern was on tha ground. 4 to 5 flew at the shot, I'm pretty sure most of them were jakes. I would have liked for him to get a long beard, but we hunted hard and it was coming to an end, so I'm really tickled he got one. He was excited as can be and that's all that matters.
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I'm sure he'll never forget that hunt.
The gun was a 11-87 Rem 20ga with a factory full choke shooting Win 3" 1-1/4oz #5s, range about 25 yards.
Ya'll have a good one,
Reloader7RM
