Ani-Logics Outdoors

This spring I was invited to hunt turkeys with my battle buddy and fellow combat veteran Jeremiah Larson. He’s a member of the Lime Springs Chester Fish and Game Club, and they pair veterans with access to the great outdoors. The nice part about this hunt was that these birds were unpressured, which created a perfect circumstance of aggressive turkeys willing to come in and pick a fight with the decoy. 

When we scouted in the evening before the season started, we were able to get eyes on at least 7 toms within 500 yards of where our blind was set up. With that many toms in the area, I knew that using a jake decoy would likely entice the bigger birds to come out and assert their dominance over the younger jake. This strategy doesn’t always work because sometimes there are hordes of jakes that can overtake the toms in an area, but in this case, we didn’t have high jake numbers here. 

We got into the blind an hour before sunrise on opening morning and were greeted with Gale-force winds. Luckily, we had the blind tucked down into a river bottom, so the wind was only impacting our ability to hear as the tops of the trees roared back and forth. We didn’t hear a single tom gobble on the roost, but when it reached sunrise, I started letting out a few yelps on the Knight and Hale mouth call. With the high winds I wasn’t shy about trying to reach out and project very loud yelps out into the wind.

We heard a faint gobble after one calling sequence, then waited a few minutes. When I yelped loudly again, we were immediately answered by two gobbles that had cut the distance in half. Within another minute we could see two toms across the small CRP field where we were set up. The lead bird took a winding path to get to where he could see the decoys. There was a moment I thought they were going to skirt around us, but I gave them a few reassuring yelps which had them gobbling and charging the decoy in no time.

They knocked my jake decoy off the stake, but that didn’t seem to phase them whatsoever. I let the hammer down on the bird that gave me the best shot, and he dropped. In my excitement, I said, “YEA” and forgot Jeremiah also had a tag to fill. He lifted his gun to shoot the other tom but forgot the safety was still on, so the bird made a beeline for the trees as he let 2 rounds go at him running away. After that bird was gone, we took a moment to catch our breath and enjoy the moment that we had just witnessed two aggressive toms come right in. 

After taking care of my birds and getting pictures, we headed back down to the river to find Jeremiah a tom. We worked along the bank of the river trying to spot turkeys that we knew weren’t out in the open fields due to the high winds. Eventually he saw a hen up ahead of us 100 yards and we immediately dropped down. We were within 10 yards of a big oak tree, so we crawled up to it and set the lone hen decoy we brought along right behind us. I gave some soft yelps to try and bring the flock our direction. We stayed motionless for a solid 10 minutes and began to think it might be over with, but I looked up on the higher riverbank and there was a tom at 15 yards looking our direction. Luckly he was fixated on the hen decoy which allowed Jeremiah to slide his gun across the big tree and send that bird to the promised land.

Even though it wasn’t a bluebird day, within 5 hours of open season we had 2 big toms down. Mine bottomed out a 25 lb scale with 1.25” spurs and his was just shy of 24 lbs. It was a morning we won’t soon forget. Be sure to share your harvests with us on our social media pages! Good luck hunting this spring!