The Blind Squirrel Gets Ambushed -- A Pre-Season Tale

I got to thinking about things as I was walking out this morning. This is still a week before the Opener here in Kentucky. You're not allowed to use calls. Of course, you can't carry a gun either. Still, this is getting to be one of my favorite times of season. It becomes a matter of "by woodsmanship alone" that a hunter gets in close to turkeys. For some of y'all, that might be anathema, but there are a lot of facets to this sport that are not to everyone's taste.



In the pre-season, one of the keys is that you have to do a lot of listening. The gobblers and hens are doing all the talking. It is a great refresher course in calling, and you end up being schooled by the masters themselves. This morning, for instance, you could hear that the gobblers were not walking on the hens. They did not seem all that hot to get down and breed. However, that was not the case. I was situated such that I could hear a lot of hens. There was at least one in every bunch that was getting hot, but the gobblers themselves seemed to be more interested in gobbling to each other. It turned out that the action was a lot hotter than I would have expected, but the gobblers and hens were all sort of negotiating who was going to come to whom and the result was a compromise. They kind of met in the middle, and the middle just happened to be where I was sitting.

I do not claim to be a master woodsman. I prefer to think of myself as a "blind squirrel" sort of hunter. If you stay at it, eventually you get a few nuts. Today was one of them. I honestly had not expected that much. I went out in brown duck bibs and an old camo M-65 jacket. I was not expecting close encounters. I just wanted to listen, maybe glass a few turkeys ,and go home. The overnight low had dipped down below freezing, and usually that shuts them up good.

I had fun listening to the gobblers come awake. I was at one of my early morning listening posts without much cover, just leaning against a tree and sitting on a boat cushion. Some of the flocks did not call at all before flying down. Some gobblers only gobbled on the roost. One only got to cranking after he hit the ground. By sunrise +:15 it had all pretty well gone dead, and I laid back a little and poured myself some coffee out of the thermos. I was leaning way over to my left to try and catch a listen to some hens that had plopped down on a hillside about 50 yards into the woods when I spied what looked like a bushel basket out in the little clover plot a hundred yards away. I could barely make anything out through the sun, but sure enough there was a gobbler. Then another bushel basket rolled in and then another. Shortly a flock of a half-dozen hens came down from the nearby knob and were making their way towards the clover, when the gobblers all ran out and chased them down into Dead Skunk Hollow.

What the Australian TV dudes all say: "But wait. There's more!" A gobbler came up on my left less than 20 yards out and started cranking. In short order, the gobblers down in Dead Skunk got tired of chasing the girls and came back up on my right and started parading right in front of me. Less than 10 yards out, I had hot steaming gobblers strutting and spitting. I had no face mask. I still had the thermos in my hand. All I could do was stay still and try not to breathe heavy. Next came the hens, including a ( they're not piebald, and they're not albino, what do you call them?) white hen. The gobblers made short work of chasing them away again.

Then I realized what I was seeing. It was the gay gobbler herd from last year! Instead of jakes, they're now 2-year-olds. But they still like each other's company more than anything, and I was getting the full floor show. I suspect the big-guy, the mature gobbler that sort of acted as their ring leader last year was the one just down the hill that I never quite saw. He was the only one gobbling. The rest were all just spitting and drumming. By the time it had all peaked, I had three groups of three gobblers and the ring leader all out there in front of me. They then adjourned to the clover field for a little bit of strutting. One gobbler must have gotten pecked on or something, because I saw him take off and fly down into the creek bottom. Eventually it all started to fade, except for the hens that had now decided to come back out of hiding and feed.

All this took close to an hour to unfold, and I had hardly moved a muscle in all this time. That's a little dangerous at 52, and by the time I could finally move on the boat cushion my one leg had thoroughly gone to sleep. I crawled off in pain trying to get some blood flowing in the leg again and probably sent the hens scurrrying, but at this point I was well past caring.

So what did I bring back from sitting with the Masters? Lots. For one thing, I am ever more convinced that there is something to this idea I keep having that turkeys do a lot of subtle negotiations about who is going to go where after flydown. I wish I knew more about what they're saying, but it seems to go way beyond a simple declaration of each other's relative level of horniness. Second I am flat out amazed that the pattern I described last Spring-- this single sex grouping of gobblers persists now for its second season. I suspect it was the glut of surviving males from the cicada infestation in 2008 that caused it. What I find interesting is that the gay gobblers are still as gay and flamboyant as ever.

I'm sure this is not really what is really going on; I mean they're not really queer. However, I think there is a dynamic here worthy of note. Turkey harvests had been kind declining here locally, and then 2008 came and the turkey numbers exploded. For some reason, they seem to be clinging to these same-sex groupings a lot more than I have ever seen. There is probably a link.

Lastly, I am amazed at how I could just be sitting out in the open in old school camo-- no headnet and holding a shiny thermos of coffee-- and have these birds put on such a show at such close range. I know they saw me, saw the steam coming out of my nose and off the coffee, but for some of the show, they seemed to be actually displaying at me. I've been at this for close to 30 years, but today was something very new.