Waking up with the Whippoorwills
One April Saturday morning, my husband Greg came rushing inside the house, hollering for me to come outside. He heard a turkey gobbling up in our woods. I hurried outside with him and within a couple of minutes, I heard an old tom gobbling his brains out up on our ridgetop just south of the house. I looked over at Greg and told him I would like to try and get that gobbler. He said that’s what we would do the next morning.
We got up extra early on Sunday to get into the woods while it was still nice and dark, so as not to bump that gobbler off his roost. Greg and I climbed into a box blind we we use with our granddaughters while deer hunting. It was 5:10 AM by the time I was settled in, and it was still very dark outside.
The morning was crisp and cool due to a weather front that passed through the night before. By 5:25 am, it was just light enough to make out the trees in front of us. A whippoorwill on a nearby branch began his relentless cries of loneliness. It startled me at first, then I realized he was just letting all the creatures of the forest know that morning was to begin.
It was 5:45 AM when I heard the first gobble. I could tell he was down deep in the hollow below us, but I was not sure how far away he was. A few minutes later, he gobbled again. Greg thought he was probably 150 yards away, but it was still hard to tell. We started a series of yelps and clucks to signal a lonely hen looking for her mate. He gobbled off and on over the next several minutes. We could tell he was getting closer, but he didn’t seem to be in any big hurry.
By 6:15 AM he was pretty close to us but still a good 75 to 100 yards away just over the horizon of the ridge. We continued to yelp and cluck our lonely pleas for his immediate attention. However, he just wouldn’t come out of those deep woods. Greg believed the gobbler may be with some other hens and didn’t want to leave them. We continued calling, and the gobbler continued to gobble but would not come any closer. I asked Greg if we should move to where he was, but Greg said we better stay where we were because the bird would see us long before we would see him.
Then low and behold, at about 6:40 AM, a lone hen stepped out of the woods into a clearing at the far side of where we were set up and from the ridge where we heard the gobbling. There was plenty of daylight now, and we could see her clearly. Greg reminded me to stay completely still, that the gobbler may follow her out. Only a couple minutes passed when Greg said, “Do you see him?” I quickly responded, “NO.” He guided me, “Look just passed her, and you can see the top of his fan as he’s getting ready to come up on the ridge.”
WOW! Sure enough, I saw the top of his strutting fan approaching. Greg was right. Both turkeys were at the farthest reaches of our shooting area when the hen began leading our ole tom back into the woods away from us. Greg reminded me only to shoot if I had a clear shot and only when his head was up, and to aim where the feathers met his neck skin. It was beginning to look like I would miss this opportunity with that hen leading my ole tom away. Greg whispered again, “Don’t shoot if you don’t have a shot. We will just come back and hunt him later.”
Only 30 seconds later, the Tom stepped out from behind a tree with his head stretched out. I took my shot. That gobbler went down right where he was standing. Greg was surprised and overjoyed with my shot. He said that was a 50-plus-yard shot I had made using a Mossberg 500 20 gauge that he bought last year. This would be my first true gobbler, as I had taken a jake a few years ago with our son in these very same woods. My success would come at 6:50 AM that Sunday morning. We determined the tom was a four- or five-year-old bird with a 9 1/2-inch beard and 1 1/16-inch spurs.
I was a pretty proud 68-year-old grandmother that Sunday morning!!!! – Tricia Jones, SCI Life Member