I will leave my kills off because most of them were largely uninteresting as I was mostly killing birds that were bugging out after Hunter missed them.
Here's the stick story:
Sunday afternoon Hunter, Darryl, and I were going to make an extremely long walk to a couple of roosts that n2deer and I found several years back. The little block of land is about a mile from where you park the truck but you have to follow the creek around because it's too deep to cross so you wind up walking at least three miles to get in there. I absolutely detest going in there because of the walk but killing a turkey is almost an automatic. Hunter and I were going to hunt this strip of hardwoods that borders a big CRP field and Darryl was going to go over the hill to sit on an old ancient oak tree that always has turkeys roosted in it. Driving in to our parking spot we ran into a hen and a gobbler and they just sort of eased into the bottom and never really spooked. Darryl decided he was going to hunt around the truck and see if he could get that bird to come back, instead of doing that long walk.
Long story short Hunter and I hunted on our strip of roost trees and worked some gobblers in the CRP field but they shut up and never came in there to us. Close to dark we got up and went over the hill where we could see the tree that Darryl was supposed to be sitting under and it was full of turkeys. I'm guessing there were at least 30 birds in that tree and at least 7 - 10 were longbeards.
I devised this plan to leave them alone the following morning and sneak in there like ninjas the next evening and catch them coming to roost. Darryl had not killed a turkey at this point and I was feeling some pressure to get him on a bird. I told him if he made that walk it was a done deal! I had been sick the whole trip and was having a problem with coughing when I got hot. I wanted Darryl and Hunter to go in there by themselves and Darryl wouldn't have none of it. He told me if I didn't hunt it he wasn't hunting it, so I reluctantly went in there with them and set up behind them so I could coach if need be. Now to get a better picture of how this thing unfolded, you have to have a general understanding of how the land lays. This roost tree is on a creek, and it's in the bottom of a huge pasture. It's downhill all the way to the tree. There are several small hills and once you sit within proximity of the tree you really can't see anything until it's on top of you. My vantage being behind them was a little bit higher which allowed me to see further. That allowed me to watch their back and make sure no turkeys came from behind and surprised them.
About an hour before flyup time, I saw a hen top the hill behind Hunter and Darryl and there were several birds that sounded like they were closing in, in front of them. I was watching for the birds in front of us and not doing my job watching our back and I glanced back and there was the hen I saw at about 60 yards and coming in fast. I told Darryl she was coming and asked if he wanted me to run her off. He told me to do whatever I thought I needed to do. She keep closing the distance and finally I pick up a stick and toss it towards her. She immediately goes into alert mode and I see her head drop into the grass. A second later a head pops up out of the grass at like 15 yards and it's a gobblers head. At that point in the hunt I had already killed a bird and as Darryl mentioned I didn't even plan on killing one until if and when him and Hunter had tagged out. So I'm sitting here and this gobbler has no clue we are in the world but his hen is leaving and he follows her. I refrain from shooting him because I just know he is going to loop around to get to his tree and will give one of them an opportunity. Wrong! He went back across the pasture and pitched up in a tree. The other birds we were waiting on roosted where Hunter and I were at the evening before. So my speech about a "sure thing" made me look like an idiot because I decided to throw a stick at a hen.
Smooth move huh?
