Kentucky turkey season - Days 17, 18, 19 & 20

I didn't get out Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday due to work and some family & church commitments, so nothing to report on that end. My good friend and fellow "Poor Boy", Billie Crider, did manage to fill his second tag Wednesday morning while hunting with his daughter. That brings the total to 6 birds for Team Poorboys and we've only managed to get one of them on video! So, at this rate, we should be able to put together our first DVD around 2015...if we're lucky! Hopefully we can redeem ourselves these last four days of the season. Stay tuned, its not over yet!

Thursday - I finally got out this morning for the first time in four days. It was myself and Cory packing thundersticks and Billie behind the camera. After a little bit of a late start because someone overslept (not going to mention Billie's name), we were at the farm and ready to go. We slowly made our way to the back of the property, occasionally calling to try to elicite a gobble. When we had gone about as far as we could go, a bird finally responded to the Knight & Hale Glass Queen friction call.

After a little work getting the decoy and everyone set up, I started calling to the bird. He seemed pretty fired up and was answering about everything I threw at him, but he didn't seem to be getting any closer. Then, he decided to give us about a 10 minute dose of silent treatment before I finally coaxed another gobble out of him. When he went silent again, I began to think that he was with hens.

Another ten minutes of so had passed when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. It was the gobbler's head bobbing in the direction of the decoys about 60 yards out in front of us and just to our right. Then, almost as quickly as he appeared, he started clucking and made a hasty retreat. I didn't know what had happened, but I knew we were done with that bird!

After some discussion amongst the three of us, we finally figured out that Billie - not knowing that the turkey had popped up over the hill - had raised his face net to spit, and evidently, the tom saw that and spooked. We gave him a hard time about it, but the fact is it could have happened to any of us when a bird slips in silent like that. While I would have loved to seen another bird hit the ground, I'm not going to complain about an exciting close encounter like that. Another great day in God's great outdoors. I'll post a few pics from the hunt this evening, if I get a chance. Stay tuned... we got three days of hard hunting to go!!!