Well, my season has started out with some not so great luck. I had two morons come in on me on opening morning, a bird shot out from under me the second morning, missed a big longbeard on Friday and have dealt with several nasty henned up gobblers for the past three days. I guess that I can't complain too much though...I've messed with birds everytime I've been out so far.

I did manage to pull a pair of longbeards into range for my cousin Fri. morning. After hens took the 4 gobblers we were originally working away on our first set-up, we headed down below the road after a couple of gobblers that were pretty vocal on the roost. Finally, I got 'em fired up around 8:00 and the battle was on. They were across a small gulley about 100 yds. from us and gobbled their heads off for the next 30 minutes but wouldn't budge. I decided to back off about 60 yds. and proceeded to work them for another 10 minutes. They seemed to be slowly closing the distance on us when an agitated hen showed up on the scene. I started cranking on my mouthcall and struck up a heated conversation with her. After several minutes of this she finally had enough and flew across to our side of the gulley and was coming to lay a butt whopping on me. With this new live decoy on the scene, the two longbeards showed up strutting along the gulley bank right into the path of my cousin's 870 Super Mag and a fat 3-yr. old hit the dirt. It was a awesome hunt with some intense gobbling action.

Hopefully, the hens won't be such a pain next weekend and the gobblers will be a little more cooperative.