SPONSORED BY: Team Struttn Ruttn & Reeln, Freddie Bear Sports, Sticks N Limbs Camouflage, Bowhunting.net, Grim Reaper Broadheads & ThermaCELL
Back in the turkey woods again. After Fred’s hunt it took me 3 days to work up and post on Bowhunting.net the pics and details of our wild turkey encounters and other happenings. But I’m in the woods this afternoon. I’ve been waiting an hour but haven’t heard or seen anything … yet.
Today I brought two important things with me, one a staple and the other something new. The staple is a ThermaCELL. Nothing chases off mosquitoes and other bugs like a ThermaCELL. And the bright sun this afternoon had the mosquitoe herd out and about everywhere.
Item number two, the new gizmo, is a pop up ground blind, the Ghillie Blind. I didn’t want to set it up in the hot afternoon sun so I erected it in the shade of some trees. Once I had the blind up and the Ghillie cover over it I got inside.
An hour turned into two hours and still no wild turkey encounters. Later in the afternoon, when the sun looked low enough, but not too low, I took a new Doug Crabtree mouth call out of the box, stuck it in my mouth and yelped loudly.
Immediately, two gobblers answered from a long way off to the west. I waited one minute and yelped again. They gobbled again.
Every time they gobbled I yelped, or cut, or clucked, depending on how they were answering … and they came closer and closer. Movement in the trees 80 yards from me let me know where they were. They moved to the edge of a clump of trees and stopped. I took their picture as they looked over the area as we continued to talk back and forth.
Soon the two gobblers decided to move over closer and have a look for the retarded sounding hen they were gobbling at.
The lead gobbler, a very big jake, walked up close enough I could shoot. However, my focus was on the second one, a more mature gobbler.
He stopped 14 yards away. But the run down fence between us was in the way of a safe shot. I looked back at the big jake and he had ducked under the fence and was standing 10 yards from me. But I waited anyway.
And all three of us waited. The first to move was the mature gobbler, he casually moved on to other parts. And the other one followed.
A few more gobbles sounded from different areas as it got closer to roost time. In the morning I’m gonna return here. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
The 2012 Bowhunting.net Grand Slam Bowhunt is sponsored by:
ThermaCELL
It runs off biting insects, period. Mosquitoes and blackflies will never ruin your hunts again.
Grim Reaper Broadheads
Designed for enhanced penetration. Watch ‘Em Drop with Grim Reaper’s tough and accurate mechanical and fixed blade broadheads.
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