HuntingNet.com Forums - My dad got his first turkey on the last day!

The title says it all!

My dad wrote this story:

We have had a lot of rain lately so the hunting hasn't been very good. Mike and I went out this morning to try our luck. While we were driving up the road on the 4 wheeler 3 big turkeys crossed the road. One was a huge tom, the others were big but I'm not sure what they were. We continued to go up the mountain and once there we tried three or four places with no luck. We had one calling back but it kept moving away. So we went to the very end of the mountain and took an old logging trail down to the bottom where it opens up to some fields.We parked the 4 wheeler and tried walking to the field on the left of us searching for turkeys as we moved. We stayed there for a little bit with no luck so we walked to the far field to our right. We stayed there for a while and Mike did some calling. I said they just weren't answering us back today so lets work our way back to the house. As we neared the parked 4 wheeler I told Mike I wanted to re check the field on the left before we started back. I walked about 30 yards away from Mike and was nearing the field opening when I saw a turkey coming my way up the field from the bottom. I crouched down, Mike hadn't seen the bird yet but he was doing some calling while waiting on me.The bird immediately started calling back to Mike! The turkey was only 20-30 yards away from me but there was a big brush pile between us. Mike now heard the bird and kept up the calling. I couldn't tell if it was a hen or jake at this point because of the brush pile. The bird kept walking in a tight circle calling back and forth with Mike. Then after around 10 minutes of talking back and forth it started moving closer. I had a small opening for a shooting lane that I focused on if the bird ever got to it!When it did get to the opening something looked a little different with this bird.It's head didn't look like a jake but it had a beard! Once I saw the beard it was "ninja" time! Dropped it with the new Remington 12 guage (#5 shot).Mike came running over and we checked it out. It was a bearded hen! They are kind of rare Mike said.When we got home and looked it up on the internet we found out they represent 10% of the hen population.So the last day of the season I bagged my first turkey! It was a lot of fun. Can't wait until next year!