One fall hunting memory will last a long time with me, even though it happened six or seven years ago. It was mid-October and I moseyed off my ridgetop to an expanse of timber on a neighbor’s land sloping off down toward the river.
If you haven’t ever “moseyed” along, you need to know what it amounts to. You put a turkey call in your shirt pocket, sling your shotgun over your back and take three or four steps at a time, slow and quiet, then stand and think. It doesn’t matter what you think about, you just don’t think
It took them about 45 minutes to move a 100 yards down through the sloping field to the place where I sat against a big oak with gun raised. Down my ribbed 12-gauge gun barrel, I watched the one doing all the gobbling mosey some more, up to about 35 yards stopping to think about where that hen might be. I don’t think I have to describe the roar of that 12 gauge, and that one gobbler beating a retreat into the woods while his buddy flopped around in a pre-Thanksgiving dinner finale.
He had one long beard and three more shorter ones, and spurs like daggers, likely a 3 or 4-year-old, whose place would be taken in the spring by others like him. Today I am not so sure that a fall gobbler has that many left to replace him. So I won’t do that this year. I might get out and try to shoot one with my camera, and just have fried baloney for Thanksgiving! All of us who have hunted fall turkeys in the past might think more about how good the fishing is in October or try to remember the best way to skin squirrels, because young-of-the-year turkeys are declining, and the ones that are out there need to have an opportunity to rebuild dwindling flocks. Forty years ago, old time biologists who started out as farm boys or creek bottom muskrat trappers would already be on this problem of fewer and fewer spring gobblers. But it will take awhile today for young book-trained, suburb-raised biologists to see the problem that most of us grizzled old turkey hunters are already worried about.
I won’t stay home though. Aiming that camera lens is just as rewarding as looking down the ribbed barrel of my old shotgun. I will save that view for some mallards and geese in December.
Please write down this computer address and use it if you are a hunter: www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. That is where I will be printing the letter from a Missouri Department of Conservation enforcement officer who explains what the telecheck system is doing to victimize innocent hunters who kill large-antlered deer.
If you prefer you can still send me two stamps and your address, to get that same printed letter and another eight pages of scientific study considering the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy disease we refer to as chronic wasting disease in deer. It will answer many of your questions about whether or not the disease can be spread to humans who kill and eat deer and elk.