ORIGINAL: Matt / PA
Just got home this evening from the PA / NY whirlwind turkey tour. LOL
As Matt alluded to we got a spring bird on the ground! It wasn't the "Big Tom" thatwe thought he was (We both could see his beard making him easily a legal PA bird but through the brush it was hard to determine EXACTLY how old he was.) We were down to the wire in the last hour of the hunt Saturday and this puppy was about to bug out because a deer spooked right into him so we made the executive decision to send a 3 1/2" mag downrange. I believe the exact words in my ear were: "BIG TOM! if you have a clear shot KILL HIM!"
First time I fired a shotgun at a game animal in roughly 15yrs. FUN STUFF!
So Rj runs over to him and breaks the news that he's a "superjake" but I couldn't have cared less! He's my first spring bird and the hunt went down awesome (He's got a full 5" beard and little noogie sized spurs)
We just absolutely went ballistic with the calls on a lone hen we heard in an attempt to make her mad enough to come to us and man did we ever! cutting her off with every call she came trotting over to kick some butt.
She towed the unseen young tom right along with her.
The very end was interesting too as we were discussing the bird (head down eyes closed) and I was smoothing his feathers..........Out of nowhere he gets enough energy to raise his head and turn and look at me. [:-]
So after a minute of hand to hand combat (which I was looking forward to anyway
) I tapped him out and put the first bird in the book for me.
Some other highlights of the hunt were the 3 longbeards and 5 jakes earlier in the Am that we couldn't get to commit to the calls while dan filmed. We just couldn't get them to come around a pond and into gun range and we couldn't get a better angle on them because of property lines, but the roughly 200 gobbles on film made it sweet nontheless.
The haunted house, deflated air mattress, goat wrangling, and Froggy were also items of interest worth mentioning.
Many many thanks to Matt and Dan (andMatt's dad) for making me feel so welcome up there. You never know when you accept an invite to hunt if you are imposing or not and they couldn't have made me feel more welcome and it's so very appreciated. Thank you guys.
