Landers: Turkey hunter sometimes eats crow

I had a rafter of wild turkeys scoped out late Tuesday afternoon just 12 hours before the opening of the spring gobbler hunting season.

The situation was right out of the Successful Sportsman’s Textbook:

A tom with an 8-inch beard and inch-long spurs was nearly scorching the ponderosa pines with its smoldering hormones. It strutted like bull rider landing feet-first after a full 8-second ride.

This is every turkey hunter’s dream scenario: putting a ripe gobbler to roost the night before the hunt.

Unfortunately, that tom was practicing safe sex – courting hens on Spokane’s South Hill.

On Wednesday morning I had to leave the trophy bird to play out his Sex in the City role in the no-shooting zone of a sleeping neighborhood.

“If you get hit by a UPS truck, you deserve it, Longbeard,” I thought, driving out of town through the dark, empty streets.

At 4 a.m., I was headed to the foothills of Mount Spokane where the gobblers are fair game.

Bagging wild turkeys may be the cruelest of all hunting sports – and I’m not talking about the quarry. Most of the birds get away unscathed, and those that don’t have the benefit of a painless demise: Lights out as quickly as flipping a switch from field to dinner table. Not a bad way to go for a turkey.

The turkey hunter, on the other hand, is taking a huge gamble with at least two hazards, including a head-on crash with despair.

Wild turkeys – the kind that live in the wild – are extremely wary and capable of using keen hearing and eyesight to make an experienced hunter look like a rookie.

By the time legal hunting had opened at 5:31 a.m., I’d already been sitting on my stand for 20 minutes, back against a big ponderosa pine, looking out over my hen decoy toward a small meadow. A wood-cutting two-track and a couple of old fences formed turkey boulevards angling toward my shooting lanes.

Toms had been gobbling since the first hint of daylight. At least six were in my vicinity.

I’ve killed a half dozen gobblers from this spot over the years, thanks to the graciousness of private landowners. Wednesday morning was sounding like another feather in Rich’s cap.

I worked my box call with a few gentle yelps. A pair of toms behind me gobbled enthusiastically. Another few cool yelps and clucks had those gobblers going wild, along with two or more in the distance at 9 o’clock and some at 2 o’clock. None of them was in sight, but all were within 200 yards.

Surrounded by turkeys, I adjusted my camouflage face net, pressed off my safety and got comfortable with the forearm of my 12-gauge resting on my knee.

The gobblers soon went quiet. The hunt was on.

Every one of my senses was on high alert. Even my taste buds were trying to pick out a gobbler sneaking through the understory of wild rose and snowberry.

Birds suddenly started flocking in, but they weren’t turkeys. A riot of more than a dozen ravens flew into the area, making all sorts of squawks, clucks, croaks and other sounds, no two of which seemed to be the same.

Several of the big black birds made a pit stop in the trees above me. They seemed to be scoping out my hen decoy, perhaps hoping she would lead them to a ground nest of eggs for breakfast.

A flicker began hammering on the tree next to me while a pileated woodpecker’s Tarzan-like call echoed through the woods.

Nuthatches, chickadees and robins were singing.

The place seemed to be celebrating some sort of avian holiday, and at least several gobblers hinted that they were on their way. I called. They gobbled – close!

I eased the butt of the shotgun to my shoulder just as a whitetail doe appeared in my peripheral vision 20 yards to the left. She scoped out my fully camouflaged form for several minutes, inching her way downwind for a sniff to verify what her eyes couldn’t.

I could see the heads of turkeys across the meadow in the distance. A couple of longbeards were henned up. I called. They gobbled, but continued to follow the hens away.

The doe crept slowly out of sight and began making loud, wheezy snorts just as two yearling whitetails spooked by something else came running directly toward me out of the brush from another direction. One kept going. The other froze 10 yards away as though it were in a game of Red Light Green Light, its eyes riveted to mine.

The deer eased away in slow motion as though it were trying to walk on eggs without breaking the shells. It bolted when its head was behind trees to my right, giving me a chance to relax, for exactly two seconds.

Pffft! The sound of an umbrella being snapped open was directly behind my left shoulder.

I wheeled my eyeballs to the left trying to look through my skull. I saw red. A tom was fully fanned out and strutting beside my tree as it showed off for my decoy.

I stayed still, but it seemed as though I could have swung my gun barrel and pinned its neck to the pine tree I was leaning against.

The tom probably would have kept going toward the fake hen and unwittingly into my sights except for the neighbor’s dogs got there first. Down the wood-cutting road they trotted on a little morning romp.

When they saw the decoy, fur flared on their backs and they charged. My gobbler took off. My decoy got stomped and sniffed.

I packed my bags and came back to town, fulfilled for the day and knowing that hunting for gobblers gets even better later in the season.

Back at home, I sneaked into the garage like a thief as I tried to avoid the second major hazard of turkey hunting.

The last thing I wanted to encounter was neighbors who’d just shooed a rafter of turkeys out of their driveways and have to explain what’s so difficult about hunting a tom.

Contact Rich Landers at (509) 459-5508 or email richl@spokesman.com.