Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Requiem for Turkey Season 2011

So it was roughly the same temperature in Southern Ontario today as it was in Tampa, Florida, and knowing that information in advance I should have not gotten up and gone turkey hunting.  But as you know, I’m an addict (from a hunting perspective) and it was closing morning, so I had to give it one last go.

A sign that I was making a mistake?  No other vehicles at the parking area in the Halton Region forest I was set stalk.  Obviously every other turkey hunter has tagged out or is smarter than I am (or both…likely both).  Still I pressed car doors quietly shut, loaded my 870 one last time this turkey season, got to a nice green spot, and scraped away on my pot call.

One note about my pot call: it has surpassed my mouth diaphragms this year as my go-to call.  I’m not sure if I did an extra good job of conditioning and maintaining it this year, or if all that maniacal off-season practice was actually worth anything, but to my ears and in a tribute to Quaker Boy for the call and Primos for the strikers, it was just the sweetest sounding call in the vest all season.   They are highly recommended by this avid (but failed) turkey hunter.

Of course, to the turkey’s ears (if any were even listening) my purrs, clucks, yelps, and cutting were just not quite sweet enough to elicit even a single distant gobble this morning and all I got was sweaty and mosquito-bitten.  Fine, whatever.

So this chapter of the 2011 hunting agenda comes to a close (at least around my parts) and now I begin the long lay-off between now and early-season goose hunting.  The good part for me?  Well, I have lots of opinions, stories, and general thoughts on goose hunting, goose calls, and the vast morass of merchandise that passes for goose hunting equipment so look for plenty of brain-dump on this topic from me over the next three months.

I’ve also had some recent epiphanies about the nature of the hunting tradition and the direction it is heading in, so more Taboo of the Day is in the offing.  If you like those sorts of things (some of you do and based on the emails I get, some of you vehemently do not) I’m happy to please or disappoint you as your opinion of me and my thoughts wishes.  I’m going to write them anyways.

Still it would have been nice to shoot a gobbler this year.  Good job to all those who connected on their bird(s) during the 2011 spring turkey hunt, if you’ve got a story you’d like to contribute here, flip me an email here.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Murphy and His Law Win Again

A long weekend just came and went in Ontario this month, and I had visions of spending early mornings in the woods and afternoons trekking cross country looking to strike up a gobbler.  My hopes were set on eyeing a big bird down the rail of my 870 and sending a mess of lead screaming in the direction of his head and neck.

Instead I spent the majority of the weekend (and most of this week) vomiting and racing to the bathroom.  I don’t know if it’s the flu, food poisoning, an infection, or a parasite but things went very wrong for me this last week in big way.  Suffice it to say, I have had very little to blog about…my thanks to those who have hung in there as subscribers; this feed is not dead, it’s just had the trots for five or six days.

Which brings us to the here and now of today.  Four  days of the season remain, and of those only a few a presenting opportunities for me to actually get out and go after a gobbler.  If there is any positive to be taken in this late season scramble, it is that most people have given up by now…either because they can’t stand the mosquitoes or because they (unlike me) are not abject failures in the sport of turkey hunting.

So, weather permitting, I’ll be wrangling my gear up for one last push into the Halton forests (work and family commitments won’t allow one last epic road trip) and I hope that my luck there is good.

I’ll keep you all posted

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Springtime Blues

So this weather is officially ruining me.  In my neck of the woods, there’s no forecast for a let up in this ungodly rain until at least next Tuesday.

I might consider building an ark...finding two of every animal would probably be easy, with the exception of any damn wild turkeys, because since my encounter just over a week ago it appears that they have all migrated to sunnier (and drier) climes.  I’m not even seeing hens, and I seem to be a hen-calling expert for God’s sake.

Yep, drizzle and thundershowers off an on all the way through the Victoria Day long weekend=hard slogging for those hunting wild turkeys.  Of course this may all change, but it probably won’t.

Everyone I know is telling me not to put too much stock in the forecasts because “no one can really predict the weather”…ohhhh, I beg to disagree.  When it comes to predicting the kind of weather that makes turkey hunting a baffling ordeal, these weathermen (or women, I’m an equal opportunist in the blame game) have my number.  Sure they’re wrong all the time when I need a warm sunny evening for a soccer match, or if I need rain to help my lawn grow, but as soon as I want calm, dry, semi-mild days for turkey hunting their meteorological instincts miraculously become bang-on and all they see in their crystal balls and Doppler radars is rain, and wind, and more rain, and maybe some lightning to really make it interesting for those of us carrying around 28 inch steel gun-barrels.

Bastards.

And this is the best damn time for turkey hunting!!  Arrrgh!  The leaves are on just enough to help with hiding a hunter, but not quite dense enough to conceal the movement of an approaching turkey.  The weather is mild enough to make hunting with just shirtsleeves and vest comfortable, but not so hot and sticky that the blackflies and mosquitoes reign hell on the unsuspecting turkey hunter reclined against a tree. Best of all, a lot of hens have been bred and toms are out trolling for available jennies…at least the gobblers not fully educated by this point are out trolling.

And I here I sit in my dimly lit basement, playing my harmonicas and tapping listlessly away at a keyboard amidst a pile of turkey-hunting gear, pining to hit the woods but imprisoned by precipitation.  I can hear you hard-core guys (or at least more hard-core than I) scoffing at me now…

“Suck it up princess, a little rain never hurt anyone” they’ll say.  Others will crack out this gem…”You can’t shoot a turkey if you’re sitting on your couch” or my favourite “Turkeys don’t mind the rain, they’ll move around anyways.”

All this may be true…in fact I’m sure it is, but it is the crippling combination of cold, wind, and precipitation that has made this last week (and by the looks of things, next week) into such a hellish experience. 

If a turkey could hear me calling to him over the howling wind and driving rain, I certainly could not hear him gobbling back.  If a bird were out wandering in this morass of unpleasantness, I’d be so dang soaked and wind-bitten by the time I stumbled across him (again, because hearing a bird gobbling is a near-impossibility right now) that I’d be hard pressed to hold my gun level, what with my uncontrollable shivering.  And worst of all, after every hunt I have to take my 870 apart (admittedly still a better prospect than disassembling an autoloader) and dry/clean/lubricate the whole darn thing and then put it all back together…as I’ve said before I’m not what anyone would dub “mechanically-inclined” so this is really a comedy of errors for me…except a comedy is funny; this just makes me borderline suicidal.  For this reason, this last one is not an experience I relish doing more than two or three times a year…I’ve already done it four times this turkey season.  Bah.

Okay, I’m done complaining.  The weather has been bad, but I can’t control that.  Unless I can find a suitable one off day, I’ve made peace with being holed up in my basement watching turkey hunting videos…fair enough Mother Nature, fair enough.

The darkest hour is just before dawn, so they say so here’s hoping that this uhh…fecal…weather is just a blip and that it moves on before expected.  Maybe I’m just building up good karma in my cosmic ledger and I’ll be repaid with being able to shoot some kind of mutant 25lb tom turkey with four beards and 2-inch spurs on the last minute of the 2011 season.

That’s pretty unlikely, but hope is all I’ve got…hope and the unfortunate mental illness that is being an addicted turkey hunter.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Taboo of the Day: Does Language Correlate to Behaviour?

Readers that have been with Get Out & Go Hunting since the beginning may well remember an earlier reference made in the course of my pointless and esoteric blogging to “academic jerks”.  This reference at the time was made partially in a tongue in cheek fashion, since I do have some friends in the academic realm that are exceedingly polite and normal.  But this post is not about them.

Others in the academic sphere draw a fair amount of ire from me; self-styled “philosophers” in particular.  Generally it is their aloof, dogmatic, detachment from objective reality that I find especially maddening.  So it is with the inaugural edition of the Journal of Animal Ethics.  In the foreword to this scholarly journal, and by scholarly I mean based in academia…not that it is necessarily scholastically sound; that argument is best left to other self-important philosophers, one Oxford academic posited the notion that we, that is to say humanity at large (because why make small, incremental suggestions when you can righteously propose a paradigm shift for global society?) ought to rethink and adjust our terminology, or to use the oh-so fashionable academic term, our “discourse” when it comes to referring to our relationships with animals.

How you ask?  Here are some REAL EXAMPLES gleaned from the media reports and my actual perusal of the article.  My thoughts are an accompaniment in italics.

  • The word “pets” denotes a master/slave relationship and should be replaced with the term “companion animal”.  Imagine, a world where the structure of the relationship does not change (I don’t imagine pets will start buying owners anytime soon) nor will this squelch the market on roadside giveaways of free kittens…or should I say free companion felines?  Think of the costs and effort associated with renaming PetsMart to CompanionAnimalsMart.  No longer will you buy fish food…you’ll purchase chum for your icthyo-chum.  And so on…
  • The term “wild animal” will change to “free-living animal”.  They’ll need to change the constitution of a number of countries globally as well since this redefinition of the word “free” will take some getting used to…get the Webster’s people on adjusting their definitions of “free” as well.
  • All anthropocentric terms designed to cast animals in a lesser stature than humanity should be discarded including “dumb animal”, “beast”, “vermin”, and even “animal” at large to name a few.  These are considered “insulting” to non-humans by the animal ethicists as a group.  Yes…they actual refer to animals as “non-humans”…talk about reverse arrogance, why should animals be re-defined in nomenclature via a relation to their divergence from humanity?!  Are we the “standard”?!  Humanist clap-trap I say.

Some of my own independent thoughts on the matter?  Why yes,, here you go.  I suppose the term “Kingdom”, that is in its use as say ‘animal kingdom’ or ‘wild kingdom’ is phallocentric and most certainly denotes imperialism and class division within the animal community at large so I guess it ought to be discarded as well….Mutual of Omaha is going to have to re-brand a lot of old television shows.  I imagine they’ll be getting right on that.

What about our biblical sins?  Will we have to re-name the sloth?  I suggest freaky-assed looking tree mammal that does nothing all day long aside from existing.

Can I still call the unpleasant, offal consuming types of people in my life (lawyers, bankers, televangelists) vultures?  Mildly insulting to vultures I do admit but still apt.

On the plus side, my wife will have to stop calling me a pig.

This is the of course me taking this to the ad absurdum realm to show how silly this could become.  Yet, this is the proposal designed (I’m quoting the journal now) to “discipline ourselves to use more impartial nouns in our exploration of animals and our moral relations with them”.  Read: unless you think and speak the way we suggest you think and speak, you’ll be an outcast in our culture of defined language and philosophical boundaries.  I love how free-thinking academics can be when dealing with their realm of self-anointed expertise.

Basically, to my mind…and I’m not an animal ethicist so I’m sure my argument will be attacked for the locus from which it springs as opposed to any attack on its potential (and likely numerous) flaws…this journal sets out to do three things with this inaugural issue.

First it is looking to lay down a ground work of jargon, industry-speak if you will, that is intended to identify those who belong and ascribe to a set of beliefs from the infidels who do not, in this way asserting the group’s individualism and demonstrating just how dang superior they are morally and intellectually to you and I, the unwashed and unenlightened layman.  For some it will certainly make them seek this group’s approval and endorsement.

Second, instead of laying down a mission statement for the journal’s approach to the scholarly, legal, and social issues surrounding animal ethics, as a foreword ought to do, this is what we get.  This leads this (again completely outside-the-fold) reader to believe that this paradigm shift in the language of animal relations is their primary mission…in which case, our society is clearly doomed to inaction at the expense of quibbling over semantics.

Lastly, and this is the most likely, this foreword and the surrounding attention it has gathered (and admittedly not only am I late to this party, I’m just validating the sheer lunacy of it all) is really just a mechanism that serves the actual (i.e. cynically intended) purpose of generating attention for this movement and its adherents.  Which is not a pejorative statement in any way, after all we all need to make the rent somehow and speech is (for the most part) free, a principle which as a writer I endorse.

For the hunter?  Animal ethics are an important issue, in fact in my mind from a hunter’s perspective they are arguably the most important issue (although I’d also rank habitat conservation as at least equally important…perhaps a debate for a future Taboo of the Day?).

How we relate to animal life as active, visible consumers is a topic that for many reasons (guilt, ignorance, lack of interest, and so on) is given short shrift by the hunting community.  That death and a modicum of suffering is part and parcel to the hunting experience is not up for debate.  It is, period.  Justification is a good start, but it is not reconciliation.  I can justify my hunting activities in a way that satisfies myself and a good lot of others but for the most radical animal ethicists, vegans, and naturalists.  No, I won’t go into it here, but if anyone ever wants to have this debate in a civil, respectful way over a cold post-hunt beer, I’m not opposed at all to that.

Still, I fear that the introspection necessary to actually reconcile any and all harm caused at the hand of humans at large (and that includes hunters) to wild animals…I’m taking back the term…is sorely lacking.  Occasionally it is just flat-out ignored at the behest of defining our own cultural identity, but it is usually covered up in some sort of neo-Darwinian, survival of the fittest, law of the jungle argument that inevitably falls into the anthropocentric patterns that the likes of the Journal of Animal Ethics seems to be opposing.  Most of these arguments require heavy revision if the definition of “fittest” and “evolved” and would take up far, far more space than I could give them in this forum (even if I wrote a lifetime of these types of posts) so I’ll just close with this panacea of advice.

Everyone, from animal ethicists to hunters to the policy makers that inevitably are drawn into these debates ought to consider action and tangible improvements on the microcosmic scale before making far-reaching goals to shift the way people think, talk, and relate.  After all a law is much easier to change than a mind, and actions (in both the positive and negative camps) will always speak louder than any words…no matter who thinks the words are apt or not.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Simcoe County Bust

Nope, this is not a short note about a police take-down, or any other permutation of the term "bust" (use your imagination)...this is just a quick note to update on this past weekend's turkey trip to the Simcoe County region.

It was wet and I did not see or hear a turkey (neither did my Dad) in the Simcoe County Forests of the Springwater and Tiny Townships...nor did we have any luck at a private landowner's property where we have permission in the Oro area.  It was drizzly off and on for the whole of Saturday (and no Sunday gun hunting to boot!) and aside from a really excellent peameal bacon and cheese hamburger at Steeler's Restaurant & Pub in Elmvale there was not much good news to speak of.  I just got wet and so did all my gear.

I did see two birds that I'd never seen before (while turkey hunting or otherwise) which was cool.  One was a Baltimore Oriole...unmistakeable with its sharp orange and black plumage as it darted through the low shrubs.  The other was an American Bittern that flew in and perched in a tree not more than twenty yards from my setup and croaked and wheezed its characteristic call for about ten minutes before it flew with another of its kind.

Might be hitting the Bruce Peninsula again this coming weekend (which is a long weekend in Canada for those in parts beyond my nation's borders.

I have a very livid bone to pick with some animal ethicist articles I read over the weekend, but its late and I'm sleepy so I'll vent about those later this week in a "Taboo of the Day" post.

Nope…Nothing…Nada…Not Even Bigfoot

With a few exceptions, it has become a common theme in life that the act never lives up to the anticipation.  Such it was with this morning’s turkey hunt.

Yesterday I told you all of my run in with the chattiest gobbler I’ve ever come up against.  My hope was to return to the same spot today and hope to pull him across the 6th line of Nassageweya in to the Finney Forest Tract.

Arriving even earlier than I did yesterday I was nonplussed to find another vehicle parked at the Finney Forest’s entrance.  Not wanting to tread on another turkey hunter’s boots (especially in a tract as small as 20 acres) I went to my back up spot…the Acton Tract five minutes up the road.

The Acton Tract is about the same size as the Finney Tract, give or take five acres, and semi-famously was once the location of a Bigfoot sighting.  Based on the tracks I saw in the trail, equestrian pursuits are much more common than hominid-hunting.  Finding no other hunters (or menacing sasquatches sneaking around) to greet me at the gate, I suited up in the dark and stalked my way eastward into a dry, open bottom where I set up against a wide pine tree with a blown down pine top sitting in front of me to serve as a natural blind.

Once again, I was greeted by a still, calm, clear morning.  Unfortunately, no gobbling rang out to rouse me this morning, which I guess is only fair given the concert of turkey noise that I was privy to yesterday morning.  I went through my typical morning calling routine, cranking the volume up slightly just to reach any dozy, far-off tom turkeys.

At about 6:15am I heard the brief chirp of a car horn.  I recognized it as the sound of someone locking a vehicle with a keyless fob to the west of me.  I was almost certain that it was another public land turkey hunter, which is fine…I don’t mind sharing with someone else.  Sure enough about 10 minutes later, I heard some snapping branches and footfalls in the trail.  I saw my fellow huntsman and just as I was about to call out my position, he pulled his mask down and waved at me (maybe I wasn’t as well hidden as I thought I was).  I waved back, and with this silent acknowledgement, he turned down a trail to my left and I could see him no longer.  I heard him fire up his calls a short while later (he sounded pretty proficient) and in the stillness of the morning woods it became apparent that we were so closely situated that we would be competing for the same birds.  I had another spot lined up in the Acton Tract in case of just such an emergency, so I got up and walked straight away from the other turkey hunter  to a spot that was a little thicker, but also a bit quieter.  It was just about 6:35am.

About two minutes after I got situated I heard something running on the trail.  While I was not expecting a sasquatch, I had heard no other vehicles so I was curious about what to expect to see…I anticipated a deer.  What I saw was a pale yellow Labrador retriever…followed by a sight hound of some sort (likely a greyhound) followed by another yellow Lab.  All three stopped and looked pointedly in my direction (odds are they could smell by backtrail) and then, maddeningly, started to bark and howl at me.  I stood up and put my sling over my right shoulder, giving up my hunt for lost, and was only slightly surprised that with this movement all three dogs began snarling and sprinting at me.

I do enjoy dogs, just not three dogs that materialize out of nowhere and begin to chase you down aggressively.  I stood still and shouted “Get Lost!” or something at them, and they ran around me in circles, barking and growling aggressively but not really doing anything to worry me about being bitten.  At this time I saw their nominal “owner” on the trail and he began shouting as well.  A vague transcript follows:

Owner: “Peggy!  Hey!  Get over here!  Come…Come NOW!  Bad dog…Peggy?!  Listen!  COME HERE!  Down!  Leave him alone!  Come HERE NOW!  Peggy!”

Me: (slightly quieter) “Go On!  Git!  Git goin’ Peggy!  Get outta here!”

I don’t know why I talk like a 19th Century Klondikeman when I shout at dogs…congenital defect I guess.

At one point the smaller of the two Labs jumped at my back and gave me slight shove.  This man never came within 25 yards of where his dogs were harassing me…I’m still at a loss for an explanation why he just stood there and shouted.  Finally giving up on his shouting I began to walk towards him.  The dogs barked and growled louder, but as I expected they ran to encircle their owner and stare and bark angrily at me.  Eventually he began to walk away down the trail and the three canines followed him along the trail.

This man never said “sorry” or “how are you?” or anything else.  I wasn’t looking too closely but I never saw a lead or leash in the man’s hands either.

I won’t relate the quiet curses I laid at the doorstep of this man and his dogs, but a part of me did feel bad for this other turkey hunter in the Acton Tract…my friend if you’re reading this I hope you weren’t bothered by these dogs as well and I hope those mutts didn’t ruin your day like they ruined mine.

I trudged back to the car and took a moment to let the ironic rage wash over me when I read the Halton Forest signage indicating something like (I’m paraphrasing)

“All pets must be on a leash at all times.”

I was struck for a brief moment of the overwhelming futility that is sometimes associated with being a hunter, especially one in the private land sphere.  I, in order to practice my passion of hunting, must pass numerous tests and courses to hunt and possess firearms, I must renew and purchase licenses constantly (and at no little expense), to hunt in some public forests I must purchase special Conservation Authority permits and retain public liability insurance in the unlikely event of something terrible happening, while in other public areas I must submit to inspection of gear and game.  All this is fine by me; it is the small price one pays for the opportunity to hunt on generally excellent public facilities.

But by definition, “public” means that everyone should have equal access rights and show courtesy to other users of the property.  This was troubling because the individual out walking their dogs at 6:30 in the morning, off-leash & in violation of the “rules” posted at the entry to the property showed obviously no regard for the owners of the two (two!) vehicles that he most certainly had to see when he came onto the property.  It is possible (even likely) that this man didn’t care who he disturbed, but it does beg the question “why?”  Why should hunters be held to any stricter standard than other users of public forests?  Why should I be a saint when other users (judging by the occasional pop cans and empty fast-food and cigarette packages I observed at both the Finney and Acton tract entrances) are clearly sinners?  Why was the hunter I saw quiet, courteous and safe while the local dog owner (I say local because in the absence of a third vehicle I could only assume that this individual walked to the forest access) was reckless and rude?  Why does one person with limitless and unfettered access to the public forests seem to have a diminished obligation to follow the rules, while the regulated that use the area for brief, specific periods must observe those rules and many more?

I guess, and I may be way off, the answer is because most hunters (at least the majority that I’ve met, talked to, and participated with) treat their access to hunting grounds (both private, and in this case, public) as a privilege.  Most are also understanding of the fact that hunting, despite the millions in Canada, the USA, and worldwide that participate in the timeless traditions, is a considered a “fringe” activity by the decision and policy making public.

For those of you that hunt that don’t treat the land and access with respect, and that feel hunting on public land at large is still a “right” I may need to take up a contrary position to you.  Part of using “public access” is being a member of the “public”, and if you’re just as discourteous or (dare I say) flat out ignorant of your role as a member of the “public” when you’re hunting as the dog owner I ran into today was, then you’re not doing anything to help perpetuate fair access to public lands for hunting purposes.

So now that I’m done being all ranty, I’ll wrap up how the rest of the morning for today went down

I drove to three other tracts of public forest in Halton that allow hunting (and at $1.41/ltr for gas, this was an unintelligent and somewhat expensive exercise) and was pleased, yes pleased, to find that all three had at least a car or two parked in the access lots.  Galvanized with courteousness by the poor example set for me earlier in the Acton Tract, I disturbed not a single one of the spots…they were already being sufficiently worked by others.

So overall after two days I’m batting .500 on the “pleasant experience” meter for the Halton Forests, which frankly is better than I had anticipated so in all I can’t really complain about having the opportunity to get out there and chase gobblers in well-maintained, reasonably-sized, and most importantly, available, hunting areas.

Saturday (if the weather holds) I’ll be off rambling around Simcoe County and the Barrie area for gobblers with my Dad (ahh…the pastoral pleasures of a father/son hunting tour).  I’ll keep everyone updated.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Captain Conversation a.k.a. When Gobblers Won't Shut Up

I woke this morning at 4:25am and reminded myself that I’m an idiot.

A late shift at work tonight left me a window of opportunity to sleep in this morning.  But, as a symptom of the mental illness that is turkey hunting, I chose instead to trade sleep in a comfy, comfy bed for a twenty-five minute drive into the Halton Region Forest Tracts for a mid-week turkey hunt.  Where some see somnolence, I see opportunity!

As Cheap Trick’s Breakfast in America played briefly on my alarm clock, I thought for a second about just switching the blasted thing off and cuddling into the sheets, but I do that the other 300+ days a year, so feeling groggy but hopeful I went zombie-like through the ritual of putting on my hunting clothes.

I slammed back a bowl of Cheerios, grabbed my 870, and hit the road in the dingy pre-dawn.  I slid a mouth call betwixt cheek and gum and flipped on my Greatest Hits of The Animals CD….that’s right I still use CDs.

30 minutes later I pulled into the parking area of the Finney Tract.  The Finney Tract of Halton Forest is on the west side of the Nassagaweya 6th Line.  To the east side of the 6th line is a line of pasture and more forests; this area is strictly off-limits since I have no idea who owns them, and I lack the wherewithal and resources that would allow me to determine who I should contact to get permission to hunt there.  Thus, in this location I’m limited to the rectangle of forest that is the Finney Tract, which is fine because it is a perfectly serviceable little piece of hunting land.

Predominantly coniferous, but with some sparse hardwoods thrown in, the Finney resembles just about every piece of public hunting land I’ve ever tread on.  At first glance this could have been a spot in the Simcoe, Wellington, or Grey County forests respectively, but this spot has the added appeal of being less than 30 minutes from my front door.  I’d walked the area earlier this year and knew exactly where I wanted to get to, which was good because it was very dark when I softly pressed the doors shut on my vehicle, and even though the main trail is wide and the layout basic, I don’t particularly like fumbling around in a dark forest not knowing where “the spot” is.

In this case “the spot” is a nice shaded area at the base of a very broad, very old pine tree about 100 yards from the concession road.  The decades of fallen needles carpet the forest floor in a thick, boot-silencing layer of decaying vegetation, and the base of the old pine has an incline and width that affords a reasonable level of comfort (as tree bases go).  I was travelling light with just my shotgun, ammunition, and vest full of calls…the decoys didn’t make it out of the garage this morning.

Sitting under the tree I check my watch, and am somewhat shocked to find that it read 5:20 in the morning.  Sunrise is scheduled for 5:59am.  At 5:35 (just to be sure I was on the right side of the time) I slide three worn shotshells into the action of my gun.  These shells have been loaded and unloaded into my 870 so many times that the gun considers them to be old friends…I really would rather unload the gun the loud way, but it just hasn’t been that kind of turkey hunting for me these last two years.

Ten minutes later I am watching the thin band of blue that has become the eastern horizon morph into that pale magenta and pink hue of breaking dawn when to the east, almost right below the first sliver of glowing sun, a gobbler sounded off.

My first thought was not a happy one…in fact to quote my brain I believe it was “Shit…He’s across the road.”  As mentioned above, I can’t hunt across the road.

Now I’ve called to a lot of turkeys and carried on some pretty epic conversations with the occasional gobbler, but one thing I’ve never done is pull a gobbler across a roadway, at least not one that I knew of.

But this morning found me doing exactly that, and I went through the whole routine of soft tree talk, a couple of fly down cackles, and then some yelping and purring.  I even did a bit of spirited cutting on the raspiest, cutting-est mouth call I’ve got.  Despite being what I took for maybe 200 yards away, and with a intermittently busy concession road in between us, this old gobbler could hear me (thankfully it was ominously still this morning) and he answered all my tree talk, yelping, cutting, and even a couple of my purrs with throaty gobbles.

Then it got ridiculous.  He sat in his tree and kept gobbling.  At everything.

He gobbled at the crows, and then he gobbled at some geese as they brayed their way past.  He took time to holler at some blue jays, and he even got some shouts in at the cars as they whipped down the concession road in excess of 80km/h.  In between this he rang the treetops with hearty gobbling at every sound I made.  My push-pin call clucked when I shifted my weight and he even gobbled at that coincidental noise.  I’ve never doubted that a turkey can clearly hear you at distance out past a hundred yards so I wasn’t surprised at all at his noise, but I was surprised by the sheer mass of calling that this bird was doing; he gobbled non-stop for half an hour and at about 6:20am I heard the tone of his calls change.  They became more muffled but just as frequent: I knew he had flown down.

Still he gobbled on and on.  I can safely say that in all the time I talked to him he gobbled more than any turkey I’ve ever heard before.  That he was gobbling was good news, that he was getting closer and louder was great news.

Now, a quick time out for a word about calling frequency.  I tend to be of the "call often" philosophy, with a small caveat.  If a bird is answering, I’ll keep pouring on the coals.  I want to keep him as hot as I can for as long as I can.  I do this because it lets me keep tabs on his whereabouts, and I’ve found that it usually keeps them coming in even if small obstacles (blow-downs, puddles, low fences) intervene.  The caveat is that I’ll stop calling if the gobbler stops answering.  If I call and don’t get an answer then I switch over to a minute or so of soft purring, clucking, and scratching in the leaves before (if there is no response and I don’t see a gobbler sneaking in) I clam right up for about a half-hour.  Then I just call every so often, with occasional cutting thrown in, to see what the gobbler wants to do.  It is an inexact science that works as often as it fails, but I’m comfortable with it so I keep doing it.

But back to this loudmouth from this morning.  As I said, he was getting closer, and my heart was starting to pound a bit harder, but I knew there was still one thing that was going to queer this all up for me: the north-south line of page wire fence surrounding the private property on the wrong side of the concession road.

Sure enough, the tom turkey stopped approaching but he kept gobbling.  And he was getting mad.  Now I know some people that don’t believe turkeys get angry, and I know some that believe they do.  I’m in the “belief camp” and just to prove it to me this bird’s gobble changed.  He just started frantically gobbling, and even though I couldn’t see him I could tell by the way his gobble seemed to be moving back and forth that he was at the fence and likely running back and forth looking for an opening (as I’ve seen gobblers do many times before…don’t these damn birds know they can fly?!).  For one brief period his gobbling became so panicked that I thought he may have tried to leap the fence and gotten caught.

Now I’ll admit it.  A part of me really, really wanted to sneak closer and get look at this freaky bird, but given that I was on public land with the most vocal gobbler I’d ever been confronted, such a move seemed to just be asking for trouble.  I make it a point to follow all of the unbelievably important rules of turkey hunting, but above all else I try to abide most strictly by the turkey hunting commandment that states roughly “Thou shalt not stalk gobbling” for no other reason than that it seems to be the one most often overlooked, and the one that can most rapidly devolve into getting shot in the face.

This went on for about ten minutes when, inexplicably, he just left.  I knew he left because he never quit gobbling.  His gobbles just became softer, and he receded farther and farther back into the impenetrable acreage of land on which I had no ability to hunt.  Did he just get fed up with this persnickety hen that refused to meet him halfway?  Maybe someone slowed down to look at him on the road and he got spooked?  Who knows?  It is imminently pointless to try to deconstruct what a turkey is thinking about, because for all their wariness, cunning, and superbly evolved natural defense systems, they just don’t reason on a level that we can lower ourselves to.  Nothing has ever tried to make me food, so I can’t conceive the level of paranoia and instinctive flight response ingrained into the psyche of a wild turkey.

I can only say two things with any degree of certainty.

The first is that he just walked off and left me worse off than I was before.  Not only did I not have a turkey to hunt that day, but I had a goddamn apparition to chase after.  The second is that I’ll be right back there in the morning hoping to lure him to right side of the road.  Right for me that is.

To get my mind off the bird across the road from the Finney Tract, I went to my vehicle and cruised up to the Acton Tract to see if anything would answer my romantic hen turkey sounds there.  A vehicle was already parked in the lot, so I was about to leave when I saw the hunter coming up the trail.  We had a brief chat and he said he’d had no luck with the spot, which gave me no reason to go in and rattle around some calls to birds that either weren’t there or weren’t answering.  Besides I had to get home, get showered and changed for work, and write this post.

Maybe tomorrow night I’ll have a better story (and some pictures of a dead turkey to share with everyone).  As I've said before....who knows?

Monday, May 9, 2011

Frustration in Spades—Saturday, April 30th, 2011

When we last left off, I had mentioned that for the last three spring turkey seasons, I had managed to get a turkey to gobble at a location not far from the cabin that serves as home base during the November deer hunt.  Despite my best efforts in the past few years, I had been unable to close the deal on any gobblers there though, and had frankly never even laid eyes on a bird at that location.  I had seen tracks, heard gobbling, and spent many hours trying various strategies on the elusive birds in that area (calling a lot, calling a little, not calling at all, trolling the hardwoods for sign, etc) but to no avail.

My uncle had spoken recently with some members of the group that owns the property, and had secured permission for us to hunt the spot.  He had also confirmed that there was still a fair bit of gobbling going on at the cabin and in the surrounding area.  My uncle let me know that some of the owners of the property were going to be in the cabin over the weekend, so to avoid disturbing them in the early morning, I set my sights on a likely spot in a slightly overgrown field with a few promising ambush points.

Getting to this particular spot entailed a ten minute drive and a twenty minute walk, so I set the alarm for three-quarters of an hour earlier the night before.  When it went off at 4:20am, I was fairly certain that I was insane for doing this.  My hunting partner Lucas thought the same and let me know so.

There was a heavy frost on everything, but no wind blew, and no clouds obscured the stars of an early spring morning or the scimitar blade of the crescent moon.  It was the kind of still Zen-like quiet that turkey hunters (and perhaps all hunters for that matter) love.  We loaded the car and set off.

We parked on the two-track gravel trail and unloaded in silence.  With whispers that still seemed to echo in the still early morning air I ran down the plan.  We’d walk for about ten minutes back to the field and set up against the perimeter and call.  We set up with Otter Lake to our right and hardwoods that stretched to our left.  Three times before I’d had audio on turkeys here, and I felt like with an extra set of eyes and ears with me, we could get something good to happen.

After a leisurely but purposeful walk along the trails, we sat against a couple of trees and waited for dawn to break.  The air was empty of wind and man-made noise, and the distant yips and howls of coyotes floated across Otter Lake.  A short while later, still in the blues and greys of dawn, a loon called plaintively from the marshy lake and a more distant compatriot answered.  Softly at first but building to a raucous crescendo some Canada geese began to cluck and moan on the water.  Chickadees, sparrows, red-wing blackbirds and crows woke up around us, and a soft nearby rustling of leaves betrayed the movements of a small rabbit.  It is truly a rare experience, to have the wilderness wake up around you, and to dwell within it once only makes a person starve with longing to experience it again.  I almost didn’t care that the gobbling calls of turkeys failed to ring through the still morning.

As the blues and greys of morning became the vivid, gold-burnished shades of a sunrise in the woods, I slid my hickory striker across the roughed Pennsylvania slate of my pot call and was startled by the realistic clarity of the notes that rang out from the instrument and echoed through the stands of maple, ash, and beech.  Although a proficient caller, I’m convinced that the morning air improved the sounds of my calls more than anything attributable to practice or operator expertise.

Not getting an answer from any lovesick turkeys, I cranked the volume up steadily with each series for the next two hours.  Lucas pitched in as well with yelps and excited cutting on his box call, but this was all to no avail.  My foot had fallen fast asleep while we had sat there, and the tree against which I leaned was causing some complaints in my lower back (this getting old is hell, I tell ya’) so I decided to walk the country a bit.  I updated Lucas on where I was going and where I would turn up when I returned so as not to surprise him.

I walked out of the field and down along the edge of Otter Lake, spying ahead on the shoreline a pair of Sandhill cranes.  A raptor of some variety wheeled high and away out over the lake, and all I can be sure of is that is did not have the shallow “V” wing profile of a turkey vulture.  Aside from that, it could have been any kind of local raptor…in 2004 a bald eagle watched from a dead tree near the lake as we set up our deer camp, so there is even an outside chance that it was a descendant of that majestic bird.  Who knows?

As I walked, and as the feeling returned to my lower extremities, I looked closely for any signs of turkey activity, but also kept a sharp eye for whatever other creatures may have been stirring around that lovely morning.  I heard the far off drumming of a ruffed grouse, and as I walked it grew in volume.  In short order I spied the culprit.  He was standing, strutting, and drumming on the door frame in a skeleton of a cabin that was started but will never be completed.  I watched the little drummer and snuck to within twenty-five steps before he made me as a threat and blew off the door frame in a whirr of wings.  Continuing on I found the bill and fore-skull of a mallard, but not much else.  Clearly something had made a meal of this bird once, and this was all that remained.  Later, I stood and smiled up at a comical porcupine, one of the largest I’ve yet to observe, as it tried to make itself comfortable in the high crotch of a sickly looking tree.  He looked very healthy and seemed to pay no attention to me, instead remaining focused on finding a balanced spot up so high.  I moved on, leaving him relatively undisturbed.  If the buildings at the deer camp are ever being damaged by porcupines, I may have to answer for not shooting this specimen, but that morning I was after wild turkeys and since this fellow was a very fair distance as the porcupine waddles from the nearest useful deck plank or cabin wall, I saw no reason to harass him with anything more than a quiet giggle at his incongruous bulk as it perched high up in that spindly tree.

Every once in a while I’d sit down and yelp on my mouth call, waiting for a gobble to cut the morning air.  No such thing ever materialized.  Making my way back to the field I picked up Lucas and we began our walk to the car.  A hundred yards or so from where we had set up I saw a swath of turkey feathers on the ground.

Looking down at the frost covered feathers, all I could say was “Something or someone killed a turkey here recently.”  I picked up a feather and looked at it.  It was the feather of a male bird.  My heart sank a little bit.  A little further along, by the edge of the trail, I spied an unnaturally green, small object.  It was a 3 ½ inch Remington shotgun shell, that was once loaded with #5 shot.  Now I was certain that a turkey had died here, and it had died at the hand of a turkey hunter like me.  While I and my family and friends claim no exclusive rights to hunt the area, I was unaware of any other turkey hunters that would be frequenting the place, so I was a bit puzzled. 

When we came into sight of the cabin, I saw the dogs rambling around out front and noticed a couple of the guys were out front, so I sidled over and said a polite good morning.

As it turns out, one of the owners of the cabin was a turkey hunter (not really surprising) and that he had taken a tom out of a group of three that had come to the same field the evening before.  I was glad that my plan, in theory, was vindicated as potentially successful, but just a bit down that someone had beaten me to the punch.

That is not to say I begrudge anyone their success, far from it.  I am not one of those hunters that claim some kind of “ownership” of the turkeys I hunt.  If someone else, but especially the rightful owners of the property, shoots a gobbler there, I don’t feel that they’ve killed “my” bird.  I've met enough hunters who think that way, and I find them generally distasteful.  But still to quote Charles Elliott I can often say that I’ve listened “for the sound of the other’s gun—hoping all the while (I) won’t hear it.”   What really had me steamed was that neither of the two remaining gobblers in the vicinity had come to pay Lucas and I a visit.

I heard the story that the man told, we’ve hunted geese together once or twice and he is a sportsman of some renown and pedigree, and I congratulated him on his bird.  He told me of other spots he’d heard or seen gobblers, but I was in the mood for breakfast, as was Lucas I think.

Lucas’s cell-phone rang as we got back to the house, and it turned out that my cousin (also named Lukas…but spelled differently) had managed to connect on his first bird, a jake, that morning.  While we waited for them to arrive for some handshakes, story-telling, and photos, we enjoyed some bacon and eggs (again).  As we waited for what seemed like an inordinately long amount of time, I enjoyed a light, post-breakfast nap.

Finally the crew arrived with my cousin Lukas, his brother Dane, their brother-in-law Chris, and my friend Tack...“Tack” being short for Tackaberry, which happens to conveniently be his last name.  Lukas held his bird high, and lo and behold, Chris had a jake-bird in tow as well.  Seems they had gotten onto another bunch of jakes and had whittled one out of that flock as well.  The serialized stories of both these hunts will appear here in a near future edition of Get Out & Go Hunting.  For now here is a picture of the two happy huntsmen.

(L-R Lukas West, Chris Chatterson.  Chris's jake was marginally bigger.  Photo by Lucas Hunter.)

This was great for both of them and it put me in mind of my first turkey as well, so we chatted and dressed the birds out, and had grand old time telling lies and stories to each other.  With two turkeys down, the afternoon was going to have to be pretty productive to match the morning.  Overall, it was a bit of a bust.  We put some miles on running and gunning the Bruce Peninsula from Spry to Dyers Bay…frankly it was mostly “running” as the turkeys weren’t co-operating.

We saw some wildlife, including a good-sized bear and some hens, but we were coming up short in terms of the gobblers.  We stopped in to rattle off a few calls at a place where a mutual friend has some property, and found a hilariously ironic sign that I am yet to receive a photo of.  This gave us a good laugh.

Eventually, Dane and I got a visual on two good-sized birds at the distant end of a field we had permission to hunt, and attempted to sneak within calling range.  After being set up for a while with no response we got up and moved closer to their last sighted whereabouts, hoping to get a visual on where the birds had moved to.  As it turns out, they had just disappeared…gobblers sometimes do that.

We wrapped the day up, and I had to get back to Cambridge on Saturday evening, so we had a quick dinner of sausage on a bun, threw back a couple colas, cleaned the house up and hit the road.  It had been a frustrating weekend that had started with promise, but that had ended with Lucas and I getting skunked…and not even hearing a gobbler in the process.

But as we drove south down Highway #6 and looked to the east as we passed through Mar we saw a strutting gobbler and five or six hens, which made me think on the positive side.  After all, it was just the first weekend of what will be a few this turkey season, and I’m sure it won’t be long before I get on a gobbler.  When I do, I’m sure I won’t have any problem remembering the details to share with all you readers.

And hopefully those memories will be created tomorrow morning in the Halton County Forests.  We'll see.

Friday, May 6, 2011

Things Going On

To those who have emailed me about the follow up to the first part of my last weekend's hunting trip, I will be posting it with photos later this weekend.  I've been engaged in a couple of side projects (i.e. projects that pay and have pretty immediate deadlines) but I have not forgotten this blog, not by a long shot.  Stay tuned.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Bruce Peninsula Weekend in Review—Arrival and Friday, April 29th, 2011

So Wednesday’s hunt was a bust, since I didn’t even go what with 20mm of rain or so in the Halton area, so I took Friday off from my real job and following a soccer game that I was scheduled to play in, we headed north for the Bruce Peninsula with my friend Lucas “Squirrelly” Hunter.

It became pretty obvious when we broke out into the Ferndale Flats that conditions were not going to be ideal for turkey hunting.  Succinctly put, it was wet.  Really wet.  Parts of the Flats looked like sprawling lakes, and places that normally were relatively dry were bogged down in mud.  To boot, there was no sign of the rain stopping until mid-day on Friday, which put a damper on my plan to drive to a couple of likely places and troll for a shock-gobbling turkey.  So instead we got in, stoked the fire that my uncle had going in the house, and laid out our gear and hit our respective beds in advance of what promised to be a wet, hard morning of turkey hunting.

Four hours later Friday morning broke just the same way that Thursday night had ended; wet and windy.  In my sleep-deprived state I made my first bad decision of the 2011 turkey season.  I decided that we ought to walk to our stands through a few hundred metres of turned field (read: mud).  Now I am not a masochist or (too much of) an idiot, and there was method to my madness.  The only place to park near the spot I wanted to go (had we driven) was very close to where I wanted to set up and the sounds of the vehicle may have spooked any potential turkeys.  So we walked, because I thought that the person tilling that field would have left at least a metre or two of solid ground along the field edge.  I was wrong (and I really must commend Todd on his economical use of the entire area of the field) because the area was turned over right to the very edge of the forest.

Finally arriving at stand I was very sweaty and leg-sore from slogging through uneven, gooey mud.  My friend Lucas probably thought I was torturing him on purpose, but I swear I wasn’t.

I put Lucas down in a likely place to see a bird, and then took off myself for about a half-kilometre away in a hardwood bottom.  After a couple of hours with no gobbling, and although I thought I heard a very distant, very faint tom turkey right at 6:30am (which more than likely was just my mind playing tricks on me ) there was no action. The rain remained on to keep me company, and once I was thoroughly chilled and soaked, I got up to stretch my legs and cover some ground before looping back to pick up Lucas.  By the time I made it back to pick my friend up, the rain had basically subsided but the wind had stepped up a bit.  We trolled the immediate area for a turkey and with no gobbling to be heard and no visuals obtained, made for home and some breakfast.  The afternoon was improved from a weather perspective, and we picked up my cousin for a bit of a tour in the Dyer’s Bay/Cape Chin area.

With no answers to our gobbles and no interest in our set ups for the early part of the afternoon, we went to property that my cousin assured us held some gobblers.  We parked with the knowledge that we were the only hunters on the property at that time and set out for a stand that my cousin shot a turkey at last year.  As we approached a spot near a field edge that was to be our stand, the wet weather of the preceding week threw us another curve.  The path to the field edge was flooded to a depth that was well over all our boot-tops.  Not wanting to get wet feet, we first cut to the west in an attempt to get around the newly formed pond.  Finding that way also effectively blocked by deep water, we headed east through a cedar stand in an attempt to get around the water and into a good calling position.  Unfortunately the small stream feeding the aforementioned pond had expanded to a flowing river over six feet across.  It looked deep and I was in no mood to test the waters.

As we stood surveying our options to get across, I looked up and saw four red-heads bobbing curiously at us through the thick cedars and gads.  Turkeys…and they were within shotgun range.  It appeared as though we had interrupted a visit to the watering hole for the birds, and while none of the birds ever putted (or even ran) they knew we were not something they were used to seeing and they walked off to the northeast.

We backed quietly out of the cedar stand and took a big loop around in an attempt to set up on a dry spot and work the birds.  About an hour later, with a fair amount of calling but without a single gobble in response, we gave up on the birds that we had bumped and just headed back to the car.  We had a debate about what we had done wrong and if we should come back the next morning.  The answers were nothing and no.  Sometimes turkey hunting is just like that, and with other hunters that we knew likely to be exercising their permission to hunt the location the next day we used discretion as the better part of valour and rolled off for home again.  I was hungry and dinner beckoned.

After a meal of sautéed mushrooms, onions, and sweet peppers served with spicy pan-seared chicken thighs and pork chops washed down with a cold ale, we had some fellow turkey hunters over to watch some hockey, commiserate, and plan Saturday’s hunt.

The weather was boding well for Saturday with nothing but calm skies and sunshine on the docket, so I decided to make for a field near the deer-hunting camp that had for the least three turkey seasons held distant gobblers that refused to show themselves.  It promised to be an interesting spot, and it surely proved to be that as well.

But more on that tomorrow.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

And We're Back...For a Little While at Least

I'll be updating this blog today (or maybe tomorrow) with all the laughs, observations and success stories from the last three days, so please stay tuned here if you're interested in hearing about some of the ironies and silliness that is turkey hunting.

By way of spoiler alert, I can tell everyone that I remain turkey-less so far in 2011, but we came close.