Saturday morning the alarm went off a few moments after I had awakened. Today is gonna be the day! I think I tell myself that every time I wake up for a hunt.
Arriving at the public hunting area, I found vehicles on the side of the road or in parking areas as I was heading towards "my area", so I knew I wasn't the first one to arrive this morning. Where I had been hunting, I still am yet to see another hunter parked or in the area, so I'm happy that no toes (mine or their's) are getting stepped on.
It was cold enough to see my breath in the headlight as I pulled on the base layers and hoisted my pack on and headed in. The field edge hasn't yet firmed up from the disc applied earlier this season, so walking felt a little more akin to wading as I made my way down to the lake's edge. Pausing every so often to hear the first songbirds awakening to the pre-dawn lightening skies, I pushed along the woods edge to get into position.
I was once again heading towards the opening in the woods that I had seen the flock on a strut zone on Easter Sunday morning, hoping that the flock would gather here once again. Clearing away the thorns of at the base of a larger locust tree, I placed my cushioned seat against the tree and checked the time. It was already legal shooting time, and I still was waiting for my first auditory hint that turkeys were nearby.
Out on the dry lake bed, the deer were up and feeding. Antler growth has commenced, with what appear to be decent sized bases forming on a couple of the bucks. Down on the shore line the Great Blue herons are croaking at each other, and when I glanced skyward, I saw the large forms of dozens of pelicans heading my direction. Flying directly overhead, they swung over the treeline and glided in for a landing. Half of them choosing water, half of them landing on the nearby dry lake bed.
A flotilla of pelicans paddling on the water is a sight to behold. They can really push water and move right along when they get going.
I checked to see if there is an official name for a large group of pelicans, and didn't find any source material for it, so I'm thinking that here today on HuntTalk, I'm gonna propose that henceforth, all large groups of pelicans be known as a "flotilla" of pelicans. I also learned that a hunting method employed by pelicans is to swim in formation to drive intended meals into the shallows where their quarry can be more easily captured and swallowed.
After the beauty of the pelican flotilla (SWIDT?) swept around the corner I pulled out my iPhone to cue up the recent podcast of
@Big Fin on the Reverend Hunter Podcast
(
https://www.hunttalk.com/threads/the-reverend-hunting-podcast.319132/).
Looking back up I saw that 5 deer on super stealth mode were right in front of me. The closest one was only 10 yards away. This buck was nibbling away on the green stuff (Kansas has green stuff????) without a care in the world. I turned my phone camera on an snapped a couple of candids. Reaching into my chest pack for my Nikon, he caught some sound and movement and decided to catch up to the rest of the deer that had already fed off into the woods.
A murder of crows (SWIDT?) sounded off on the adjacent ag field. One weak sauce gobble might have drifted along with the wind in response. Or did I imagine it?? A little while later a parliament of owls (SWIDT?) hooted up a storm, and asked who cooks for you all. Perhaps another squeaky gobble elicited. No gobbles in response to my most plaintive slate or mouth calls.
The day was warming, and I was getting drowsy. Standing up to water the bushes, I decided that today at the strut zone was going to be a bust, and I needed to try to make something happen. The two possible gobbles had come from north and east of the strut zone, so I headed that direction. Carefully working my way towards the ag field, I saw three turkeys working there way towards the middle of the field. Binoculars showed these to be older jakes, and I was going to have a go at one of them if I could swing them back to me.
Crawling thru some dense budding shrubs, I got to the edge of the field with these birds undisturbed, over 250 yards away and generally heading away from me. Scratching out some soft yelps, they all froze and turned to face me. Feeding on remnants of last years corn, they started swinging back to my side of the field, and I went about surveying my ambush spot. Using the shotgun barrel I knocked down some small twigs to clear a couple of shooting lanes towards the fields, and I also turned around to see what might happen if the birds came towards me on the hedgerow side.
Behind me there were dense undergrowth, and two downed trees with limbs splayed out randomly. 30-35 yards behind me were the very old trunks of Osage Orange trees planted as erosion prevention and to mark property boundaries. I could imagine two small windows to shoot through should the red headed boys decide to stroll through the woods towards the sweet seductive sounds I had made a short time before.
As I kept looking up the field edge, expecting to see a turkey shortly, I also kept my peripheral vision checking the trees behind me. The first turkey to come through in the trees was bent over pecking away at the ground as he went through both shooting windows. All I could see was the top of his back. I was on full alert, scanning with eyes only on the field's edge, and into the woods. Sounds of turkey feet on wettish leaves alerted me that the other two birds hadn't snuck by already.
My shotgun was pointing towards the field, and I had already worked out in my head that to swing the gun towards the shooting lanes behind me I would have to put the butt under my armpit, swivel and then advance the stock forward into the hole in the shrubs. I could hear the birds walking, and caught flashes of red heads, and heard the slightly frustrated "where are you?" clucks, just 10 yards away, but it was so thick with underbrush that there was no way for a shot, or to insure that any shot would be lethal, or not take out two for one.
They were looking right at me it seemed, but being the turkey ninja that I think I am, they were only seeing a big stump sitting in the middle of a thicket. Finally deciding that the underbrush was thick enough that an alternate route was needed to get closer to the ever seductive hen they had heard earlier, these two birds started to detour towards the woods and then they could continue further south.
As they were moving away, I was able to swivel body and gun towards the small gap in the woods. I found that this move and the hole required me to mount my gun at an angle so that the top of the rail was tipped at a 45 degree angle. The butt of the gun was not in my shoulder pocket but instead was against my upper bicep. I remember thinking...."this is gonna leave a mark".
