By Richard Seale
An unusual realized success and a hopeful coming success
The North Carolina spring Wild Turkey season ended on May 8. As usual,
there are always new things to learn about techniques and the wildlife creatures
involved. This years “lessons” included hunting over winter wheat and the
innuendos of hunting wild turkeys with beards.
Eastern NC farmers seem to have trouble making a profit from crops of winter
wheat. I do not have all the details of this situation properly defined, but generally
the yield does not justify the effort and costs. Continuing poor results mean
farmers often skip, going for a two-year, three-crop rotation of soybeans, corn and
winter wheat. Up until this year, none of my turkey hunts have been at a winter
wheat field. My hunts have been in the woods, along the edges of cattle grazing
lands, fields left fallow or fields with corn or bean stubble.
Last fall, winter wheat was planted in the fields around which I have had good
hunting success in past years. I prepared blind sites at the edge of those fields. In
the early spring the wheat stayed low. In March, the farmer gave the wheat a stiff
shot of liquid nitrogen fertilizer. It is my guess the wet spring we had, combined
with the nitrogen, made the wheat stalks jump up significantly in height. When
regular turkey season opened on April 10,1 found that the wheat was tall enough
that turkeys that might have come into the field to feed on bugs were hidden in the
tall wheat foliage. My blind setup sites that had brought turkeys to me in the past
produced no turkeys—and my newly learned lesson was that tall winter wheat can
be a real problem for a successful turkey hunt.
In the last week of the season, I still had not had a gobbler come into range.
Three-quarters of the season had slipped by before I finally had a chance to set up
a blind on a farm lane away from the wheat fields. My calling did bring in some
hens, but long beard gobblers did not show up. The only gobbles I heard were very
far off, but it still was fun to have hens coming to decoys that were just five yards
from me. Sitting very still became a real challenge with a wary bird that nearby.
For a couple of days in a row, hens had come into the decoys and spent as much as
10 minutes feeding right next to the decoys, actually bumping bodies. I felt certain
a gobbler would show up.
I set a square blind at a 45-degree angle so the viewing/shooting windows had
good vision down both lane directions; however, the corner fabric created an area
of blocked view directly in front of me. This came into play a couple of mornings
later: I had been gently yelping for a while when a good-sized turkey jumped
across the drainage ditch and started walking down the lane to my decoys. Her
greyish head colors told me it was a hen. I let her walk toward me, hoping she
would be a live decoy and bring a nice gobbler to me. Since she was acting quite
skittish, I pulled my cap down low to my eyes and kept my head down. I could
occasionally see just the top of the bird’s head, and as it got right up to my hen
decoy it entered the right side of the blocked vision area. Nothing happened for
probably five minutes. I could hear the bird, but could see nothing. Suddenly, a
bird with a small beard came out of the left side of the blocked vision area. How
it got there, I had no idea. Since the season was running out on me, I figured I
would harvest this immature male, called a jake, based on the beard. At least that
Realistic decoys showing jake with beard and hen
coloration differences.—Photo by Richard Seale
would give me some good eating
turkey meals. Quickly, due to
the closeness of the bird, I aimed
and fired my shotgun with a
head/neck target point to prevent
damage to the turkey’s breast
meat. The bird flopped down out
of sight into a drainage ditch. I
had not noticed where the hen
had gone when I shot.
I got out of the blind and went
to where the bird had gone into
the ditch and reached down and
picked up the dead bird by its
legs. I immediately noted there
were no spurs on the legs. Male
birds have hard sharp spikes on
the back of their ankles that are
used as weapons against other
male birds in the mating rituals—
in effect, turkey “cock fights.”
Puzzled with this fact, I spread
out the fan of the tail feathers
and discovered the feathers were
much shorter than those of the gobblers I had harvested in past years. Further, the
shorter feathers made a concentric, evenly long feathered fan. Jakes have a tiered
tail feather pattern of four shorter feathers on each outer side and four to six longer
feathers in the middle of the tail fan. This analysis of facts led me to the conclusion
that I had harvested a bearded hen. I have never seen one before. After I sent cell
phone photos to several turkey experts, their responses confirmed I had indeed
harvested a legal “bearded hen.” So my turkey season had been successful but in a
most unusual way. It is my hope to find some accurate information about bearded
hen turkey biology.
Our local fishing family out on the osprey nest has been hunkered down for
almost four weeks as I write this. The change in the activities of the birds clearly
indicates they are tending eggs. We are hopeful their work will be successful and
soon osprey chicks wiU hatch. We should be able to discern when this happens
since the adult birds will again change their daily patterns.
Freedom is not free. As I write these articles, I am reminded of the many
American service personnel whose lives were lost or changed in conflicts aroimd
the world and through the years. I am saddened that they did not have the
opportunities for outdoor adventures with friends and family like I have had. With
a turn of my head, my eyes can see photos of my 19-year-old Uncle Roy Nilsen and
the ship he and 101 others went down with in less than a minute, the US Coast
Guard Cutter Escanaba. That happened off of Greenland on June 13,1943, while
on WWII convoy duty. He and his twin were the first members of my mother’s
Norwegian immigrant family siblings to be born in America. Memorial Day,
which kicks off the summer season, was approaching as I was writing this article.
Even though we will have passed that recognition day when you are reading this, I
invite you to still take a moment to give thanks for the blessings of our American
freedoms. And it’s always appropriate to take the opportunity to say a hearty
“Thanks!” to our fellow Americans who have preserved these freedoms for us with
their last full measures of devotion. Painfully and sadly, our freedoms are not free.
June 2021 I The Shoreline 13