Wisconsin Spring Turkey
Hunting turkeys has always seemed like a straight forward thing to me growing up, I didn’t know very many people who hunted them, and I didn’t know what really consisted of it. A couple years ago I decided to give it a shot, I started listening closer during podcasts and watching more videos on YouTube, I even went with one of my dads close friends to try and learn a little more. Needless to say, I didn’t seal the deal until this year.
I reached out to my friend, Mike, the week before my season opened to see if I could hunt a couple of his plots of land in the area, he was okay with it, and even gave me a lot of information on one of his pieces. He had a couple other buddies out there hunting the first two seasons and the birds were there consistently. I went out for my first sit on Friday, and sure enough, someone was still out there taking a shot at another bird with a new hunter, so I let them have the spot and moved on to try out some public land. Driving around and basically scouting trying to see if I could find where were birds coming down off the roost. It was a pretty good morning, I saw a lot of birds, and was slowly getting a game plan together for the rest of the weekend. Until I went out to Mike’s parents house and decided to check another plot of their land.
I got to Mikes second piece of land around 10am and went out to check the field, I came around the corner and there was a hen and 3 toms strutting around in the field. I quick tucked into the woods and gave a couple soft yelps, and the hen came running over to see who was trying to get with her boys, she hung out for a couple minutes and the toms hung up around 60 yards out, and then eventually worked away, I think the hen was a little spooked not seeing another hen when she came around the corner. Saturday morning rolls around and Mike decided he wanted to come with, we got out a little later than we wanted to and we didn’t hear a single gobble. We wandered back a little farther into the field and spotted some birds across the field, we tried to work around towards them sneaking through the woods but couldn’t get them to come across to us. We ended up calling it a day but knew we had a solid plan for the next morning.
Sunday morning comes and when I get to the shop Mike has the golf cart ready to rock, we take it all the way back to the field and end up being pretty early to get out there. It was nice to get set up and immediately start hearing gobbles light up the woods. We heard at least 4 different gobbles as the crows would “caw” and we knew we were right where we needed to be. Once the sun came up the gobbles died down, but not seeing where any birds came down I decided to throw a couple yelps out to see if we could find any action. The first two birds to come out were Jakes and I was pumped to see some of our work paying off, but after seeing a couple nice toms the days before I held back and held out for a nice bird. A few minutes later a hen comes from the other way to check out my Avian X hen decoy, she beat around it for a couple minutes and slowly kept working down the field, and about 5 minutes later here comes the tom. Full strut, gorgeous bird, strutting around my Jake decoy, I think I would’ve got a little bit of a show if I would’ve waited a couple minutes but I was so jacked to see a nice bird I blasted him, didn’t even flop! Mike and I celebrated and he was a little upset because he was just taking his phone out to video tape but I was way to excited to wait. The last couple years were tough hunting, not really knowing what I was doing, but this year it was all worth it. Even better getting to be out there with one of my good friends. I can’t thank Mike enough for hanging out with me and having such a memorable weekend. We celebrated with a few too many cocktails at our local distillery with some good guys. Thank you guys for reading!