Missouri "Jake"

corey

I had never tried roosting a bird before, so Sunday evening, 4-18-04, I went out to the farm and tried it. I didn’t hear anything fly up so I started walking around and “owling” in an effort to get a shock gobble. Sure enough, I did… as a matter of fact, I got 2 different birds to respond. My daughter and I were in the right place at 5:15 a.m. on Monday. At 6:00, the woods were getting light but I hadn’t heard any gobbling so I started calling and immediately got 3 answers. 2 were SW of us and close, and 1 was SE of us. 1 of the SW birds got together with the SE bird almost due south of us and we quit hearing from the other SW bird. After a while I tried really hitting them with hard, excited calling and it did the trick. Soon, 2 long beards strolled into sight from the south and my daughter was lined up perfectly. They hung up at 40 yards and milled around and finally the subdominant bird decided he didn’t like the situation and he started to leave so my daughter shot the strutter but barely cut any feathers. We went to look for him, just in case, and saw 5 more stutters and flushed 2 droves of hens. I had to leave to take her to school, but I went back out.
I wanted to hunt along the creek since that’s where ALL the turkeys were, but my my father-in-law just recently had a stent put in, so I wanted to leave those birds for him, just in case he went out. I went to the Far East side of the property. I soon had 2 gobblers off the property to the east gobbling and another one going to the west. This was at 9:00 a.m. I didn’t hear the 2 east birds after 9:30, so at 10:00 I decided to go south and then west towards the other turkey that had been gobbling. I decided to stop before I had planned to originally, due to the wind, and when I yelped, I got an answer straight north of me, about 75 yards. I worked him for a little while, moved up about 15 yards, and worked him some more. I thought I heard him drumming to the front right of me but then saw movement to the front left and it was HE…in full strut. He drifted to my right, went behind some trees, and I moved my gun. He stood there for a LONG time then finally stepped out continuing to the right and I shot him at 30 yards and he didn’t even flop. 10:36 a.m., 24.5 lbs, 10.25” beard, left spur was 1 5/16” and right spur was 1 3/16” long. Total score is 70.3
Thanks
Corey