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.