Who's the real Turkey?

Well, it was back to the grind this week. After two hard days of hunting and 4:30 AM wake-ups, Ryan and I stand at a 50% success rate for ND spring gobbler season.

More often than not, hunting boils down to being in the right place, at the right time. Opening turkey weekend was a great example of exactly that.



Dead body or is Wayne snoozing...



Between being oblivious to birds coming in from behind me on full strut and being on the wrong side of a wood lot drive, I just could not string  two right moves together. Also mix in that our Sunday of hunting was met with diving temps and cold spring rain and you can see I was rolling some pretty cold dice over the opener. It is a good thing I wasnt in Vegas!

One giant positive from the hunt is that Ryan and I were able to successfully call in our first group of birds to a Tom/Hen decoy set. A group of Jake's came tottering in on a string to our setup and as two of them broke off from the pack, I thought we were looking at a double. But as luck would have it, one of the birds hung up as the other committed. Ryan dumped him with a terrific shot through some brush. I pursued the shocked birds on foot, but let's face it, I am not nearly as fast as I used to be...



66" 5 point shed



Another built in bonus that goes hand in hand with spring hunting turkey is the opportunity to run across shed antlers. The trip was not 100% from the filled tag standpoint, but it was by far my most successful shed hunting excursion. We found about 14 sheds combined, and we truely weren't even looking that hard. The largest shed of the group was a 66" 5 point.

We also came across a tremendous 6 point (3x3 in ND speak) buck that appeared to have fallen to mother nature. With 21 inch main beams, it was the largest six pointer I have ever seen in the flesh. It is just too bad someone did not get a chance to put their tag on this very unique and mature buck.

Big '3'

Eventhough the winter was a hard one, overall, we saw a lot of deer moving around. Combine that with some of the quality sheds we found and there should be some very nice bucks roaming the river bottoms come hunting season.

As I type this, I am pinning my hopes on the slim chance my schedule permits a return trip to the Missouri river bottoms before the season ends. Hopefully I can even the score and not eat Turkey Tag Soup for the 3rd year in a row, but even if I cannot make it work, it was another memorable trip with a good friend!