4-20-13

This morning I hit the hills with Robert to try and bag a turkey. When we got to the ranch we were greeted by the North wind again! I have spent many spring days in the field chasing turkeys and I have never had much luck on windy days. As soon as it started to crack light I blew the locator calls and nothing responded, which is very unusual for the part of the ranch we were on. On a typical morning you hear 5-10 different tom's in the surrounding trees. Since the birds wouldn't talk we moved to another section of the ranch where I had been seeing turkeys and let out a call, again no response. We kept at it moving from place to place and calling but with the same results. As we moved further down the valley I let out a call and a tom answered, game on! We quickly got set up and waited about 10 minutes and gave another soft call. Again the tom answered and when he thundered off he couldn't have been more than 50 yards from us but still inside the trees. We sat patiently waiting as I figured any second he would appear in front of our decoy, but he never did. I let out a few more calls but the tom had gone silent! The only thing that I could figure is that he either had hens with him or ran across some while heading in our direction. We then picked up and tried several more set ups in other areas but all was silent. It was now noon and Robert and I decided to call it a day as the wind was taking a toll on us and the birds apparently did not like it either.

Casey