Outdoor - please tell us about yourself also.
I'm Tom, 49, a clinical pharmacist by education and training. I work now for a large pharmaceutical company in field medical affairs as a scientific director. I live in Jackson, Tennessee, a town between Nashville and Memphis. I am happily married for 20 years and have four children, two girls and two boys ages 17 to 4.
Hunting has always been a big part of my live from early childhood. My father and uncle ran a waterfowl guiding operation at Reelfoot Lake in NW Tennessee where I grew up. It is a "famous" lake on the Mississippi flyway created by a massive earthquake in 1811-1812. I guided and worked in the operation through high school, college, and pharmacy/post grad school. At that time we had no deer or turkeys to hunt.
2010 will be my 30th successive turkey season. I really can't believe it's been that long. The spring of 1981 marked my first turkey hunt to a wildlife management in E. Tennessee not far from Knoxville where I was an undergratuate student. In those days there were very few turkeys and even fewer hunters in our state. If you heard a couple of turkeys gobble you had a good season. In the subsequent years I hunted Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Missouri while our flock in TN grew from basically nothing to great turkey hunting all across the state. It didn't take long to become obsessed with turkey hunting, as I am still today. Now I only hunt Tennessee with a busy job and large family taking most of my time. With a 4 turkey bag limit I see no reason to venture across state lines anymore.
I hunted mostly with my father and a friend who was both a great friend and turkey hunter. My dad and I have spent many many memorable times together chasing these birds across Tennessee and Missouri, camping in the woods or getting up at a rediculous hour to get there before the first owl hoot. Now I am trying to live up to my responsibility to create those same memories with my son Peter (doall hunter) and eventually my 4 year old son Joseph. I must say that we are off to a pretty good start, but I'll let Peter tell you about some of those.
These days I love to hunt deer and coyotes (really getting into coyote hunting), ocassionally waterfowl. My passion, however, is and will always be, spring turkey hunting. Nothing gets my juices flowing than a crisp cool spring morning, waiting in the darkness for that first light, then hearing a gobble crack the silence. Game on.
Welcome to the team.
MC