Photo sequence of wild gobbler mating with a decoy

 

Sequence of photos taken of wild gobbler mating with a turkey decoy

wild gobbler with missing tail feathers

Uh oh competition

The Declining Wild Gobbler

Wild Turkey Nest with 8 eggs

       I came across a wild turkey nest with 8 eggs in it in late April. I doubted it would have many more because the hen was sitting on the nest incubating them before I came along in mid-morning. When a hen is laying her eggs she mates with a mature gobbler early in the day and then lays one egg per day as a rule. She may miss a day or so if she doesn’t mate, and she may lay as many as 15 or 16 eggs if there is more than one mature gobbler. Or she may lay as few as 6 or 7. First year jakes do not usually mate with any hens and first year hens do not usually mate or make a nest. But with wildlife, you can never say never. Often, even mature hens do not bring off a clutch of eggs every year. 

        Years back, Arkansas’ turkey biologist, Mike Widner put radio transmitters on twenty-some hens in the Ouachita mountains, then followed them all through the spring season. He was surprised when he found that only about 15 or 20 percent of the mature hens nested that spring. With all ground nesting birds, the number of eggs laid is not indicative of the survival of poults. It is likely that with wild turkeys about half the eggs laid do not even hatch. If they do hatch during a cold rainy period, the young poults will likely die before they are a week old. I have observed that a hen turkey can delay the hatching of poults during adverse weather by controlling the incubation period of the eggs in some fashion. It seldom happens that eggs hatch in rainy weather. But surprisingly, many hens that have their nests destroyed or eggs eaten by predators will nest a second time. In the course of the spring and summer a hen turkey may lay twenty or thirty eggs just to be able to bring forth a few live surviving young. I would venture to guess that for every young turkey you see in the fall there have been perhaps 20 or 30 eggs laid in the spring. In most states in the Midwest, wild turkeys are at their lowest numbers now in a 10-or 15-year period. Biologists in Missouri, often young people just out of college, do not have enough knowledge of the wild turkey nor experience to really know why. But it is not “habitat loss”. It is hunting pressure and the fact that hunters are twice as many today as they were twenty years ago. Adjustments to the seasons and limits are needed, as fall hunting and early youth seasons continue to knock down gobbler numbers. But conservation departments revel in the increased money those high numbers bring in and don’t want to do anything in cutting back seasons or limits because they believe it will hurt revenue. I doubt we will ever see wild turkeys in the numbers I saw in the 80’s and 90’s, but like the quail, the declining gobblers will survive for another season. It is hard to see what there are today and then know what they could be if only decisions were made by the conservation departments that could make such a big difference. We will not know what this spring and summer hatch and survival will be until we begin seeing the late-winter flocks. In my lifetime, I have killed enough gobblers. I shoot them now with a camera and urge other hunters to do the same. We have got to reduce the number of wild gobblers killed now by hunters who have found ways to do it a lot easier than with a camouflage outfit and a turkey call. In a future article I will talk about a new way of hunting that seldom fails. In the meantime I will put the story and photos of a seven-bearded gobbler on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors… and with it photos of a gobbler mating with a decoy for more than an hour.

Lots of Water To Fish

 

                                          Norten Dablemont with a largemouth bass

Last week, I let the waters I normally fish recede, and fished some farm ponds.  And though they were all full, the bass didn’t seem to mind.  If you want to catch a good-sized bass from a pond or small lake in the    present situations, use big spinner bait, something with a 2- or 3-inch blade, a white or yellow skirt.  I used a 3/8ths-ounce spinner bait, with a big gold willow-leaf blade and a white skirt.  Bass were moving into the shallower end of the ponds, away from the deep water, even though they were not actually shallow.  I just let it sink down out of sight and retrieved it slowly enough to feel that blade vibrating, and the bass were nailing it.

You could catch a few on a shallow running crank-bait as well, but in most ponds, there’s so much algae on the bottom you can’t run a crank-bait very deep.  You can use a suspending rogue, and jerk it and catch bass that way. The muddier the pond however, the more I like a spinner bait.  I have fished ponds in April that were as muddy as they can get, and caught bass one after another on a spinner-bait as big as your fist.         One thing about an Ozark farm pond, some of them hold bass up to eight or nine pounds.  If it has the right combination of bluegills and minnows, a farm pond that isn’t large at all, and sometimes very muddy, can be the home of a monster bass or two.  There’s no better time to catch one than April and May.

Of course, the major Ozark reservoirs, has some April fishing that is spectacular as bass move up around submerged bushes and brush in murky water. Sometimes with these conditions, it is best to don some waders and leave your boat, walking the banks and trying to cast around water that is hard to reach otherwise.   Again, big spinner bait, or a suspending rogue is a good way to find big bass in that high and colored water.

For years I watched my late uncle, a lifelong Ozark fishing guide, walk the banks in early spring and catch huge bass.  Most of the bass he caught in the Ozarks over ten pounds, (and there were a total of six of them), were taken when he was out of the boat, wading and fishing high water.  One of those big fish he remembers still came from Greers Ferry Lake, and he talked about it in his book “Ridge-Runner”.

In the spring back in the 1970’s in he had two clients on a fishing trip to a lake in Texas, and it hadn’t been a good trip because of bad stormy weather they didn’t want to endure.  On the way back, he took them by Greers Ferry Lake in north Arkansas, and they checked into a little lakeside resort just as the front came through after the storm.  

It was getting late, and it was too blustery to take a boat out.  It was cold too, even though the lake itself had been warming nicely, and was high and murky. So with his clients looking for a good meal, my uncle grabbed his casting reel and a red Hauser Hell-diver, one of the first spinner-baits made, and headed for the lake in his waders.  He recalled there was a flooded bramble bush of some kind out in the water off point, and he kept casting into it and around it until he felt a hard jolt, the strike of a big, big bass.  

Uncle Norten didn’t fish for bass with light tackle, and he was accustomed to hauling them out of brush with 20-pound line.  But that evening, there must have been a nick in the line, because it broke, and he was left there wondering how big the fish might have been. 

The next morning dawned cold, somewhere in the 30’s.  His fishermen wanted to wait until it warmed up some, so just after daylight, my uncle returned to that same spot with a white Hauser hell-diver and after a few casts he hooked another big, big bass.  This time the line held, and a minute or so later he hefted a nine pound largemouth with two spinner baits in it’s jaw, one of them the red one from the night before.  Uncle Norten says he never saw that happen ever again.

 

 

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.         

 

 

Wild Turkey Gobblers-- Part 1

 

       My grandfather got his first breech-loader shotgun in 1911 by guiding turkey hunters in the fall and winter in north Texas County on his father’s land bordering a northern section of the Big Piney River.  He did so by scattering corn to feed them, then scaring turkeys off the roost during the night and waiting for them to come back to the bait and the roost the next morning at first light.  

       He saw big flocks of wild turkeys during his youth but he told me he saw wild turkeys decline in the late twenties and thirties to near extinction in the Ozarks because of three reasons.  First and foremost, diseases brought in by farm families in tame turkeys, primarily something called blackhead disease. Secondly were the free-ranging hogs, which decimated acorn crops before the years end making that food source unobtainable during the cold snowy months.  But the biggest decline wasn’t due to the predators that like to eat wild turkeys and destroy eggs, nor was it due to habitat loss.  It was due to hard times and the coming depression.

       “Country folks were hungry,” he told me. “Gettin’ enough for them big families to eat was hard and turkeys was danged easy to kill, so they got kilt and et more than anything else. In the depression time if’n you had a hog or cow you was rich!  Those who had chickens got ‘em stole or et by hoot owls!”

       “I was a trapper and hunter and fisherman from the time I was a boy,” he said. “You could eat fried muskrats and boiled possum, even a beaver er a bobcat. Wa’n’t no coons to be had after awhile but ever farm boy knew where turkeys roosted.  So they got cleaned out.  I use ta take a turkey er two up to Houston and sell one for a dime or a quarter.  By1930 you couldn’t find one. Nor a deer neither.”

       As I tape-recorded his recollections back in 1966, I understood how those problems eliminated the wild turkey a hundred years ago.  Today, much the same things are coming about.  There are too many predators, but men are the number one predator and there are more now than ever. Gobblers are too easy to kill.
       Like my grandfather, I guided turkey hunters in the 1970’s and 1980’s in Arkansas and Missouri, and one spring, even in Kansas.  I worked at calling turkey gobblers for men who were well off, doctors, surgeons and dentists who could afford to pay a lot of money for the experience the hunt provided. None were interested in just killing a gobbler.  Often a friend and I would set up a camp in the National Forest or on a river in the Ozarks. There were so many wild turkeys back in those times that anyone who could hunt three days had a very good chance to get a gobbler.  Most mornings at daylight we could hear 3 or 4   gobblers if not more. We almost never failed. 

       There were some years I spent more time trying to get a client a gobbler than I spent hunting by myself. In the years I guided hunters, nearly thirty-five clients killed more than sixty turkeys, which I called in.  And that was the key to it… they didn’t want to ambush one, or kill one off the roost or even use a decoy. It was old time turkey hunting at it’s very best.  

       Most of today’s young hunters don’t seem to care about that.  There are things today that were not thought of then.  Decoy’s, calls on smart phones, permanent blinds, and baiting are only a part of it. I’ll talk about some of that next week.

       I learned a lot of what I know about wild turkeys thru my grandfather and then turkey biologists working for the Missouri Conservation Commission back in the 1960’s. The Missouri Department of Conservation didn’t exist then and we’d be better off if it didn’t exist now in my opinion. I believe it is a corrupt agency with millions of dollars and agents who regularly break the law with no consequences, and no desire to bring back turkey numbers if it hurts revenue. 

       The ‘Department of Conservation’, established in 1982 after the1/8 cent conservation tax passed and money became plentiful for them, DID NOT EVER STOCK WILD TURKEY OR DEER. The “Conservation Commission” did that back in the 50’s and 60’s.  The latter agency we refer to today as the MDC, stocked some grouse and prairie chicken that have gone nowhere and the otter, which we watch decimate our streams and private ponds today.

       Wild turkeys now are at the lowest number I can remember since the 1960’s and in next weeks column I will tell you why and how landowners can bring them back.  In the meantime, you can read another story or two about wild turkey and some photos I have taken of them, on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.

       

       

I will mention again that I have finally gotten my spring magazine printed and mailed. If you are a subscriber you should get yours this week.  If you aren’t a subscriber, get to be one by calling our office, 417-777-5227.

TURKEY HUNTING PHOTOS FROM YEARS PAST

TURKEY HUNTING IN ARKANSAS

 

TWO TOMS IN CAMP

GOBBLER

ARKANSAS TURKEY CAMP

 SEVEN BEARDED GOBBLER

Wild Turkey Numbers Falling

  

        Dennis Whiteside is a float-fishing guide who travels down a dozen or more streams across the Ozarks of Missouri each year, through all seasons.  He also is someone very knowledgeable about wild turkeys and he reports on what he sees through a survey that he turns in regularly to the state’s Department of Conservation.

         “I’ve done it for about 15 years, “he says, “I turn in the results on the form they gave me and I wonder why I do it. They have never responded in any way. This past spring and summer was the lowest number of turkeys I have ever seen while floating rivers with dozens of clients. Ten to fifteen years ago I would see lots of turkeys and hear lots of gobblers as we floated,” he told me. “Last spring I saw one hen with three poults, and heard only a few gobblers.”

         Dennis also counts numbers of turkeys on hunting trips and during spring drives through the Ozarks. We talked about how years back you would see eight or ten strutting gobblers and hens in March and April back in the reaches of green fields along timber edges. You could drive Ozark back roads and count a hundred turkeys in a dozen fields or less. He agrees with me that now such a sight is seldom seen… the turkeys are mostly gone from those places.

         I follow turkey populations in the Ozarks too, in five different counties. But I count them in December and January when turkeys group together in flocks assembled in winter gatherings close to where I live. They gather in a few places from adjacent lands of three hundred acres or more. One place they gather is along the lower Pomme de Terre River bottom above Truman Lake. About 20 years or so ago that river bottom field of thirty or forty acres had more turkeys in it than I could count, easily seventy to eighty birds. Last year there were between fifteen to twenty turkeys coming to the field each evening to feed, flying from the deep woods across the hills beyond the river. The decline in their numbers was little by little over the years, but numbers never as low as what I counted last spring. If those numbers I have seen in years past are compared to what I saw last winter, many areas have only about 20 percent of the flocks we had 15 to 20 years ago. 

         The Department of Conservation doesn’t have any idea what we have when it come to wild turkeys. I interviewed the director, Jason Sumner, a couple of months ago and he sat there and told me that there was an increase in turkey numbers this past year. To have the director of the Department say such a thing is ridiculous.

         He is not going to ever be out there counting flocks like Dennis and I do. He and the turkey biologist, Nick Oakley, echo the same refrain… that the alarming drop in wild turkey numbers is due to habitat loss and predators. As for the predators…the number of bobcats, hawks, owls and raccoons have remained constant and high for these past 10 years.

         And the idea that habitat loss is a factor is easily proved to be false. The five thousand acres around me is exactly the same as it was 10 years ago. National forestland is much the same as it has always been in terms of good or bad turkey habitat. But numbers of turkeys on my neighboring land are getting scarce! I once heard eleven gobblers about 12 years back within a square mile of my home. You might hear one or two now on an April morning, but they grow silent in May, easy for hunters to find, call and kill.

         Ten years ago on my place I was feeding seven long-bearded gobblers behind my home. Now there are none! The last single gobbler to feed there was three years ago. None since! I quit hunting several years ago because there are too many of us out killing turkeys in the spring and fall.

         Several southern states have changed season lengths; bag limits have been reduced and regulations altered. Missouri has done nothing and it is making turkey numbers pretty lean. To help the wild turkey in my area I have changed from a gun to a camera and I encourage hunters in the Ozarks to do the same. As for my advice for the Departments of Conservation in any Midwest state… Let the flocks alone in the fall or allow a one-week season only in October. Change youth season to the back end of the regular season. Set the regular season back one week. Shorten it to only two weekends. Allow only one gobbler in the spring for two years along with all of the above, and you’ll see recovery in wild turkey numbers. But the Missouri Department would never option for any of that because it would cause them to lose money through the loss of turkey tags. Their main goal is not wild turkeys, it is the sale of  wild turkey tags!