Wild Turkey Gobblers - Part II

 

Seven bearded gobbler

         About ten years ago I killed a wild gobbler that had seven beards, all of them longer than five inches, and some guy at the check station just went crazy about it.  He said it would be in the top five in the record book, as heavy as it was and as long as the spurs were.  He couldn’t believe I just took it home and ate it.  I tried to explain to him that the bigger a wild turkey is, the more likely it is to have a tame gobbler somewhere in its ancestry.  True genetics in wild gobblers produce smaller, darker birds than we see in the Ozarks. Those pure wild Eastern gobblers seldom weighed more than 18 or 19 pounds.  

         If I ever take my grandson turkey hunting, and I will someday when he is older (he is only five now) he will not learn that a wild creature is a trophy, and he will enjoy everything else about it just as much as the actual killing, or I will be a darn poor teacher and grandfather.  To go along with that, I thought some of you might enjoy something I wrote a few years ago for a magazine, concerning turkey hunting….as follows….

         ….I have decided that turkey hunting and life in general have a great number of similarities.  For instance, sometimes in life, striving for the goal is more enjoyable than reaching it and accomplishing it.  When you have pulled the trigger and the great bird is down, flopping around in his death throes, don’t you feel a little bit of sadness down deep inside?  Don’t you wish he had been a little slower and gobbled a lot more and strutted longer in the direct beams of the early morning sun?

         See, it’s a lot the same way you feel when you’ve finally bought that new pickup you always wanted and you drive it home and you know it’s going to be a mess in a month.  Driving it out of the driveway at home will never be as great as it was driving it off the dealer’s lot.  It’s much the same way you feel when you’ve been married a month and suddenly you see your wife in curlers and you realize she looks a lot like her mother.  If she would have agreed to marry you on the first date, you’d have missed all the enjoyment of being told “no” so often.

         A dead gobbler isn’t the reward of the hunt.  He is the reason for it, but he isn’t the reward.  If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you might be greenhorn.  But it’ll come to you someday.

         Life is a series of rare successes, great and small, occurring between numerous failures.  That’s what turkey hunting is.  If you hunt turkeys, you can deal with life’s failures, because you know there will be another gobbler, another day.  You know that the wind and the rain and the cold only goes on so long and eventually you are going to have that beautiful spring day when it is calm and sunny and warm, and some gobbler just can’t stop gobbling.  You know that one time or another each season, there’s going to be one that comes like he’s on a string, like he hasn’t seen a hen since the end of last summer.  And that’s when you forget that there have been a dozen or so that got spooked, went the wrong way, found a hen, or put food above romance.

Turkey hunting has taught me to be patient and persevere and be thankful for every minute whether the sun is warm or the rain is cold.  Turkey hunting has taught me that sooner or later, every hog finds an acorn, every novice learns the ropes, every hard-luck-Harry gets a break.  You just don’t quit.  But in time, the reward isn’t just a dead turkey, it’s the trying and the failing and trying again, knowing if you don’t quit, you’ll have your time.

         You can find treasure in the difficulties, and you can have a great life just finding occasional rewards here and there amongst the failure.  Just don’t ever forget, in your day-to-day life, that quite often, the turkeys win.

         I got a good laugh out of an article a friend sent to me on turkey hunting written by a lady in the Ozarks largest newspaper, out of Springfield, Missouri.  She wrote, “…wear hunting clothing in blaze orange, this is not a natural color in the outdoors and hunters will recognize this and not mistake it for wildlife.  Attire yourself in camouflage clothing, head to toe including face mask and gloves, and wear blaze orange over the full camo.”  She says the experts say to shoot at the base of the neck, right where the feathers begin.  

         Let me advise this…do not shoot at the base of the neck of a gobbler, shoot at the head and nothing else.  Shooting at the base of the neck will fill your bird’s breast with shot, and allow some to get away, mortally crippled.  And as for the blaze orange over the camo…I can only say, I don’t recommend it. Gobblers may shy away from you in such garb.  The outdoor page in that paper is occasionally sent to me by a friend who says it is some of the funniest reading you can imagine.