And a Good Time was Had By All

There is not a whole lot you can complain about when you finish off a season like this one.  Angus had a good time.  I had a good time.  The turkeys had a good time.  Nobody got hurt.

I am starting to count down the number of KY Yute Seasons I'll be hunting.  Angus, soon to be 12, is my youngest.  You can only hunt as a Yute until 15.  #2 son, Moose, turns 18 this year and has to sit on the sidelines with the rest of the grown-ups, waiting for the adult  Opener.  Every year we go out.  Every year we get our butts whipped. Most years we freeze, but we keep coming.

This would have been warm, even for  midway through the adult's season.  The Saturday Opener was up in the mid-60's at  first light.  Our early pre-season   scouting forays had been dismal-- nothing but far off gobbles way down in the bottoms.  However, there had been a few stray gobblers showing up the past few days leading up to the Yute Opener on Saturday.

Saturday was the first normal day of turkey activity we had seen.  It was subdued, but well within what we would expect. Almost overnight, the gobblers had come up on the ridge, the hens had come up, they had regrouped into normal Spring flocks.  The gobblers all seemed henned up, and generally unresponsive, but it was nice to see things back to normal.  At 0845 a gobbler  came out to strut in the field in front of us, but for 20 minutes we could not get him closer than 30 yards.  Angus was shooting a 20 GA that patterned well out to 20, but that was about it.  Finally the hens at the other end of the field started to move off, and he followed.   We followed too.

We caught up to the gobblers and hens at one of our food plots.  A week ago, just our butts moving in the leaves had brought in one of the gobs to SuperCore.  Now, doing things right and for real,  we could not move two gobblers away from 4 hens munching clover on the other side of the plot.  After an hour of fruitless effort we gave up.  The weather was starting to turn, and they had been talking high wind and storms.  We got back to the porch just before the first of the rain hit.  By Noon, we were taking 35MPH sustained winds and rain squalls.

By 5 that afternoon, I woke up from a nap and found a nice fat gob out in the back, about 200 yards from the house, following a wholly uninterested hen.  They stayed around for the better part of a half hour.

Sunday  was an absolute zoo.  I have never heard so many gobblers at once up on our ridge.  The place where we set up was smack in the middle of a dozen gobblers, but they were almost all roosting with hens.  When the hens flopped down and wandered off, so did the gobblers. There was one half-hearted gobble to our North, but again nothing seemed interested in honoring our calls.

Along about 0915, Angus decided he needed to pee. I knew we had turkeys probably within 80 yards of us at the time.  It was going to be dicey, but some things just have to be done.   I turned my attention away from the fields and talked him through handing me the shotgun and then crawling on his knees over to a spot that looked reasonable where he could get the job done without standing up.  Angus forgot to pass the shotgun down low and raised the barrel vertical.  With that, I heard a noise and turned.  There was a gobbler that had just come over the top of the hill to our North and was bearing down on us about 15 yards away at a dead run.  He did an about-face and ran back the way he came like we'd tried to set his tail on fire. Oh well.

That was it.  Nothing else showed up.  We tried a couple other places, including a long wait at the food plot we'd been at the day before.  It was getting late, and the kid had to go back for Easter. Angus is still the best young caller I've ever seen.  Normally he can call them right to the end of his gun. He'll be back out with me when the adults take to the field in two weeks.