Woke up to a beautiful morning. Calm and a bit of frost. I'm lucky to have access to a great turkey property where I can be in my blind 20 minutes after leaving the driveway.
My uncle and I were in the blind by 5:15. It's set up on the edge of a field at the base of a treed ridge where you can almost count on there being birds roosted every opening morning. He came along as an observer and wanted to video the shot but as it turned out it all happened too fast.
We heard the first gobbles by 5:30, it sounded like at least 3 different birds. Closer to 6 a hen started yelping like crazy. For a few minutes I thought it was a trespasser on a box call. Real turkeys are the worst callers...haha. Once the hen got going the gobbling was constant, I've never heard anything quite like it.
Every time she would call I would yelp on the mouth call to cut her off and get her agitated. Eventually she flew down right across the front of the blind, yelping and cutting the whole way. She landed about 100 yards down the field from us just out of sight and continued to vocalize. I kept up with the vocal sparring.
Within a minute or two of the hen flying down a train of turkeys came walking out from the base of the ridge. It took a couple of seconds to see the beards but they were all jakes, 4 in total. I put the bead on the head of the leader and he went down at just under 40 yards. My uncle never even got the camera up.
After pulling the trigger, the other jakes milled around for a minute and there was still more gobbling on the ridge. I'll have to get my second tag!
It was a bit weird just punching holes in a paper tag and then putting it back in my pack but I guess we'll get used to it.
Here are a couple of pics, hopefully they work, I use Tapatalk. I'm in the turkey contest here but a 2.5" beard and nubs aren't going to count for much. I'll try to wait for a Tom for tag #2.
Hopefully everyone that got out this morning enjoyed the weather and the hunt. Good luck to those who had to wait for the weekend.
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