To me the measure of a trophy is the hunt itself
successful or not!
iv been turkey hunting for 13 yrs and seen an awful lot of birds in the bag. but the story most often repeated is as follows.
a good friend of mine gained access to his gf's dads property and invited me along to hunt there w him. he is new to turkey hunting and this property had extreme potential. no one else hunted it and surrounding properties saw there fair share of pressure.
the next morning at 1st light my buddy my daughter and i all hung on the edge of an overgrown field till a gang of jakes started gobbling their fool heads off. we sunk back into the hemlocks a ways and thats when i realized that the piece of woods we were in had a creek running threw it in kind of an L shape that seperated us from the birds. i threw a soft series of yelps at them young gobblers and let me tell you i thought i was going to go deaf w all the birds gobbling. there were the jakes off to our right across the creek and there was also a flock of mature birds gobbling across the creek in front of us. we found ourselves in a perfect situation.
i told my buddy where to sit as my daughter and i scrambled n got setup, she sat between my legs and i set the tripod off to my left. once i knew the birds had hit the ground i let em have it, the gobbling was like surround sound, jakes on the right, long beards coming in from in front of us and once they hit the creek they hung up as expected. the jakes shut down but the long beards were double gobbling and cuttting me off everytime but werent budging......i used my hat to make the best flying turkey sounds i could muster up, after a brief pause, a few yelps from the diaphram cut off w a gobble from the shaker and all i heard was feathers flappin. those toms all flew across the creek immediatly and right into our setup. 1 2 3 4. single file. this was the 1st time i had called in 4 longbeards at once. and there they were at 20yds. as they eventually lost interest and started walking off i slowly turned towards my buddys location to try n figure why in gods name there was not a jellyhead flopping around. well......being that he is a grade A dipshit and an incredibly inexperienced turkey hunter he decided against my choice of tree selection and decided to lay on his belly down in this little depression and place is gun between two small trees. he never had a shot and never even saw them.
that day i learned the importance and effectivness of calling location based on hunting pressure and i think he learned to do as he's told and that he is truly a moron.
that was 3 springs ago and ill never let him live that one down. my daughter brings it up all the time whenever turkey hunting stories start getting tossed around.
to date he has saved the lives of 8 longbeards.
