By Richard Seale
April in North Carolina is a month with many things on the move. New leaves
are sprouting on everything. First light and sunrise are getting earlier. Mosquitoes
and other bugs emerge in growing numbers. Farmers are putting in long hours
discing, cultivating and seeding fields. And, as previously written, the NC 2022
Wild Turkey seasons open.
In the preseason, turkeys were being seen on our Beaufort County farm daily so
I figured I would hunt that property first. Several gobblers were sounding off after
first light, indicating they stiU were in their overnight roosting trees but before fly-
down. Gobblers do this to start their day of seeking hens with which to mate. Wild
turkeys have the unusual protocol that gobblers sound off to tell the hens where
they are, and hens are supposed to respond with yelping and then move toward
the gobblers. A pre-fly-down gobble that generates a hen’s yelp response gives the
gobbler a pretty accurate idea from which direction and distance a receptive hen
should be coming to him.
Wild turkeys seem to have an unusually good sense of echolocation. When a
gobbler gets a hens yelp response, he often flies down to ground in that general
direction. Sometimes he starts to move toward where he thinks the hen is. To par
take in aU this pre-dawn turkey talk is a key element of turkey hunting. However,
it requires being in the woods well before first light of any kind. So my days started
with a 4 a.m. alarm and walk to my hunting site in the dark. Besides great hearing,
wild turkeys have exceptionally keen vision. Since they are up in trees overnight,
they have the advantage of long distance surveillance when first light starts to
occur. In the first few weeks of the NC season, sunrise is around 6:15 a.m., so first
light is about 5:45. That means you are walking at least 300 yards to your hunting
site. You will be toting a fair collection of weighty and bulky gear and a gun. The
turkey’s sharp eyesight predicates this be done with no flashlight. Your walk and
setup need to be finished, and you need to be ready to hunt by no later than 5:30
a.m.
In the first two morning hunts, I did have hens respond to my yelps and walk
through my decoys—so that was fun. I did hear gobblers call, but only from very
far off. I did try to yelp back to gobbles but it was windy so I guess my replies were
lost in the other sounds of the wakening day. The fact was no gobblers were com
ing to my calls nor getting within my preferred shotgun range of 50 yards or less.
At last, on April 13, a gobbler started communicating with me 15 minutes
before sunrise. The wind was dead calm so his gobbles carried and so did my slate
call hen yelp replies. My yelps to his gobbles made him gobble back every time, so
we had an active conversation going on. This is certainly the most exciting aspect
of hunting wild turkeys.
The best I could teU, his gobbles were coming from a patch of woods more than
600 yards to the north of me. Between us was a 25-acre, recently plowed and wide
open field. Getting him to cross that open field would not be easy.
Turkeys know they are targets for predators out in such open conditions. Re
member, the gobbler is expecting the hen to be coming to him. His echolocation
skills have provided him with a very good sense of place where he ought to physi
cally see the hen. His keen eyesight aids in that. Any movement on a hunter’s part
is usually detected by the already suspicious gobbler. Gobblers are notorious at
“hanging up” at about 80 yards from where a hunter is, but where there is no real
hen for him to see. My calling would have to be reasonably good for a long time to
get him across that open field and into gun range. My expectation was for a long
morning hunt with a high probability the gobbler would manage to find other
hens of interest before reaching me. The good news was he still was answering my
yelps with gobbles. More importantly, the sounds seemed to be coming closer and
crossing the field. His route was obscured from my vision by a bunch of vines and
small trees along a ditch. Seeing him was impossible and any movement on my
part was not a good idea.
At about quarter to 7, he was sounding ever closer, but he then ceased gobbling.
Banking on past hunting experiences, I hoped he had decided to check put my
decoys and was coming at a run. I got my gun ready and watched the area around
the decoys. All was quiet. From my right, suddenly he quietly burst into my lim
ited view and then into gun range. He was headed for the jake decoy for a battle to
teach this interloper to stay clear of his harem of hens.
His track was right between me and the decoy, making a shot impossible since
it would destroy the decoy. He gobbled and strutted as a warning to the jake. Anx
iously, I had my gun follow his motion. I knew my movements risked detection.
My concern was he would somehow smell a rat and zoom off. Long seconds ticked
by slowly. After a quick fly-up attack at the jake with his spurs slashing the decoy
and making very audible sounds, he made a running circle to the left of the decoy.
He was ready for another attack—but his change in position gave me a clear shot
relative to the decoy, which I took. The single shot to his head and neck put him
motionless on the ground, where he stayed.
As I retrieved him, I saw his head and feather colors were spectacular. The white
top of his head contrasted sharply with the vibrant blue of the sides of his head
and the red of his neck. The morning sun made his body feathers iridescent green,
orange and bronze. A successful turkey hunt so soon after my meeting with Tom
Kelly the week before made this a special turkey harvest to me. On future evenings
in front of a fire I will relive this hunt many times over. It qualifies as a great April
2022 memory.
Black bears routinely share the farm with us. For reasons unknown, they love
to destroy fabric blinds. Being that they are nocturnal, we seldom go eyeball to
eyeball with these crit
ters; however, I have
taken daytime photos
of them. Mostly we
know we are not alone
due to fresh paw tracks
in fields and muddy
paw prints on wooden
blind doors.
A couple of days
after the hunt above,
my plan was to himt a
fabric blind I had put
up. Due to previous
bear problems, I usu
ally surround a fabric
blind with a circle of
two-foot by four-foot
Fabric turkey blind destroyed by bears in Beaufort County, NC
—Photo by Richard Seale
(Continued on page 29)
10 The Shoreline I June 2022