2015 turkey odyssey, hunting, turkey and turkey hunting

The Longest, Loneliest Mile & Other Metaphors Forced by the Desperate Turkey Hunter

April 29, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

There is a time in every person’s life when anticipation crosses over from simple forethought into obsession, and for me that time is now. Worse still, it is a recurring experience that happens at least four to five times a year.

Opening day has passed and I was not out there for it. I’m cooped up inside, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about. The exigencies of career and family often conspire to keep me home for several opening days a year, and this week it was the spring turkey season opener that I spent in a boardroom instead of nature’s amphitheatre.

We tell ourselves convenient lies meant to assuage our anxiety, and I’ve heard them many of them and told them pretty much every one.

“The hunting is better later in the season.” Says one hunter.

“Everyone is going to be out on opening day…it will be less crowded if I go later.” Opines another.

Yet another states assuredly that “It is too early in the year, so the birds won’t be responsive until it warms up.”

One frustrated individual cries that “Birds are still henned up in the first two weeks, if I give them time the hens will go to nest and the gobblers will be out searching for a mate.”

“Opening day is just a day like any other” mutters a disaffected miscreant in the corner.

Now most of those lies above contain a kernel of truth, and yes I have hunted early season days when birds are henned up, hunters are everywhere making all kids of racket, and gobblers are silent.

But to say that ‘opening day is just a day like any other’ is as blatant a fabrication as one can blaspheme in the springtime and in my humble opinion it has no basis in fact.

Opening days in general, but especially in spring turkey season, are a turning of a page, and a renaissance of the hunter’s spirit. After a long, grim winter (and we know more about that in my neck of the woods than many would care to admit) the oncoming verdure of the spring signals the renewal of life. If human existence could be said to be represented by the seasons, with autumn and winter embodying aging and ultimate death respectively, spring can only remind us of our childhoods and of salad days when we were carefree and full of youthful exuberance. Missing out on these moments shortens our proverbial ‘lifespan’ in the woods, and brings us closer to the moribund purgatory that is the off-season.

That dreaded off-season is a time that (although cyclical) is really just one of a virtual ‘hibernation’ if you will. Sure you might get out in the woods and hike around, maybe you look for shed deer antlers, or perhaps you go to the range and keep your shooting skills honed, but you’re really just fooling yourself into thinking that you are in some way connected to hunting. Because you see, if the off-season is a metaphor for a marathon, those winter days of idle busy work are the early miles of the race. As the off-season wanes, any delays in starting the season are really the equivalent of that last, long, final miles that we run in pain before breaching the threshold of a finish-line. And even though I can’t be alone in my ordeal, it feels like the most solitary and isolated mental state one can inhabit. I know there are others suffering with me, but nobody else quite understands what I’m going through. I’m limping to the end of this proverbial race all alone and only by virtue of endorphins and my own stubborn will.

I can see the finish line, but I’m not getting there fast enough. Story of my life.

But soon this will all resolve itself because in spite of my petty mental weakness and inability to escape the advance of my turkey hunting separation anxiety, the steady march of time plods onward. Eventually I’m going to walk out of my office and the only thing in front of me will be the drive to turkey camp. The music, the laughs, the early mornings and the rampant expectancy of a gobbling bird. The hits, perhaps the misses, and the celebratory meals and beverages. The stories that we’ve told over and over again, the repeated fabrications and lies, and the time spent under a tree on a bluebird spring afternoon.

I may even have a siesta in the May sunshine, which is a delight so pure and unadulterated that it borders on the illegal. The trials of career, world politics, and modern society will be far, far away.

And then maybe, just maybe, while I snooze with a soothing springtime breeze caressing my hair and a diaphragm mouth call wedged firmly betwixt cheek and gum, a tom turkey will fire off a distant gobble. I’ll methodically rise from my dreamlike state, and cradling my shotgun, I’ll seductively call back to him. With any luck, he’ll gobble harder and begin to head my way. He’ll winnow his way through the trees, or maybe he’ll break into the open from a field edge and the sun will make him glow in that iridescent purple, copper, and emerald way that only a spring afternoon can. He’ll strut and drum, before spinning his way into range, and the turkey gods willing, I’ll rest the front bead of my barrel on his red throat before launching a salvo downrange.

He’ll go down and I’ll soon get to lay my hands on him. I’ll hold his beard in one hand, and thumb his curved and keenly sharp spurs with the other. I’ll fan out his tail and smooth out any feathers that may have gotten mussed in the hunt. I’ll heft him up and feel the weight of his life, thinking about what his days were like before I was privileged enough to take him home to the roasting pan or the deep fryer. We’ll take pictures and I’ll smile in the giddy way that all turkey hunters ought to when they get a chance to put a tag on the red legs of such an animal.

It will be exceptional.

As you can see, I’ve got it bad folks, and getting my butt under a tree in the spring is the only cure.

Wish me luck.

hunting, turkey and turkey hunting

The Ruination of Fine Comedy

April 13, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

This past Saturday destroyed a perfectly good blog post for me.

I had drafted and nearly completed a masterpiece of self-deprecating satire, and I was just hours away from putting the finishing touches on it before releasing that pinnacle of comedy onto the world.

You see, up until just two days ago, all the signs of spring had been meaningless, primarily because I had not heard a gobbler, nor had I seen a strutting tom turkey to that point. I had a thesis that all the other signs of spring, such as the chirping birds, warming days, rainy afternoons, and the return of migrating waterfowl had all been illusions and trickery forged by Mother Nature herself given the remarkable absence of gobbling, strutting turkeys. Friday night I had almost pressed “Post” to put it on the site.

Instead I went to bed early, for the next morning I rose early. I drove out to pick up my brother, with the intention of an early morning scout in the retreating dark of a spring dawn. We drove for a while into Oro township before I pulled over and turned off the car. We sat for roughly five minutes before stealthily opening our doors and sneaking up to the gate of a property we frequently hunt. It was just breaking dawn, and a few crows were already making a racket. I blasted a few notes on a barred owl call and listened. Nothing. I called again, and as I craned an ear, I heard him far off in front and well to my left.

A turkey gobbled from a treetop.

I owled once more and he gobbled again. My brother whispered that he too had heard it in the distance and we backed out quietly. We drove a hundred yards up the road and once more stopped the car. Once again we sat in the car for a few minutes before slipping out; this time I barked on a crow call. My calling fired up other crows and with my second string of ‘caws’ I heard the same turkey again sound off from his roost. Once more we slipped easily back into the vehicle and moved on.

One spot to hunt, one gobbler. It was the first time I’d heard a tom since the end of May 2014, and it made me happy, much like hearing the voice of an old friend on the telephone would have.

We looped around in a country laneway, and made north up Highway 26 to a piece of Crown forest not far from the village of Midhurst. I had heard turkeys there in 2014, but had not made a visual at that time. As we approached the spot I planned to do some locator calls from, I looked left and saw a string of hens being trailed by a nice hefty gobbler in strut, all less than a hundred yards from the roadside. As I slowed slightly, the hens began to slide off into thicker woods so I drove onwards, not wanting to spook the scene.

Two spots, two gobblers. I had not seen a strutter since I shot one on the Victoria Day weekend of 2014. I was buzzing with excitement while lamenting the demise of well-composed blog post about not encountering birds yet in 2015.

We pressed onward into Springwater Township and walked into a massive tract of Crown forest I had scouted on top maps, but that I hadn’t yet put boots on the ground in. I crow called once more and for the first time on the morning I could not trigger a gobbler to sing. Another Crown forest near Clearview township yielded a similar result.

So we were batting .500 for the morning and I was in no mood to complain about it.

In truth, I don’t have exclusive use of any of the properties in question, and I’ll certainly have to compete with others on the Crown land sites, but all those logistic and scheduling conundrums meant nothing really, because I was back in the game with wild turkeys. Seeing and hearing birds helped with the anxiety I’d been having about my 2015 season prospects, and later messages from my cousin on the Bruce Peninsula confirmed that there was a line on gobblers up there as well. A picture of a half-dozen strutting toms that he texted my way whet my appetite for the upcoming hunts in late April and throughout all of May.

So the more I thought about, the more I was okay with having to pitch that other masterfully-crafted blog post. Because writing about hunting is all well and good, and it is in fact one of my only marketable skills.

But actually getting out there and experiencing the spring mornings and hearing the music of a world being reborn out of a coma-like winter beats the ‘tap-tap’ of a keyboard any day.

hunting, them crooked gobblers, turkey and turkey hunting

Them Crooked Gobblers, Part Four: Jakes

March 13, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

A misconception about me is that I’m some sort of old-timer, a man who has been chasing gobblers since he was old enough to walk, and one who has matched wits and resourcefulness against countless wary tom turkeys over several decades.

I frequently receive reader emails asking or asserting as much, so now it is confession time.

I’m a kid, relatively. Not even forty years old yet. In terms of my turkey hunting pedigree, I’m just safely beyond the realm of novice; not quite a veteran and definitely not a professional. The modern turkey hunting tradition in my home province of Ontario is not quite thirty years old, and I’ve only been after them for not even ten of those seasons. Rabbits, deer, grouse, and waterfowl dominated my early hunting experiences, and turkeys have become a recent, if all-consuming, addition.

And now that my credibility is shot to hell, let me tell you a secret.

I’ve still been whipped by birds, probably more often than most and most certainly as a direct result of my clumsy, neophyte bungling. I’ve jumped into turkey hunting with both feet and I’ve nearly drowned on several occasions. The birds do that to a man as susceptible to the sickness as I am.

The primary culprit in several of my misadventures are adolescent turkeys. Jakes. Jacksons. Shortbeards. Whatever you call them, those spur-deficient gobblers drive me nuts. You’ll see why.

The first bird I ever missed was a jake. To date it is the only bird I’ve ever missed, but I’m sure it won’t be the last. I was in my second season in 2008, and I already thought I was a hot-shot. I’d tag-teamed a hard-gobbling two-year old with my Dad in my first season, and in the summer of 2007 I walked on and finished second at a couple of turkey calling contests. By 2008, I was then focused on drilling my first solo bird and it was going badly. My calling was good and I was reaching out to birds, but I was spooking them like mad at the last minute, setting up in bad positions, and getting generally worn out by turkeys on the Bruce Peninsula and in Simcoe County.

I found myself in the former location one sunny May afternoon late in the season, and I was getting desperate. My uncle had harvested a bird from a spot just outside of Cape Chin, and he had said that a gang of jakes was running around the area. I just wanted to hang a tag on a bird by then, so my good friend Brian and I made the drive in and hopped over a corral into the property in question. We sorted out a plan before leaving the truck, and then we snuck in as quiet as ghosts. I saw a flash of red moving away and was sure we had been busted, but was relieved to see it was just the red face crest of a Sandhill Crane departing from the field edge. We made our way to a low copse of conifers and sat at the base of a broomed out cedar, facing opposite directions and hoping for a show.

We got one.

Brian scratched out some yelps on his slate, and I cut hard on a box call. A veritable chorus of choppy gobbles screamed back at us, and they weren’t that far away. I sawed on the box call again and they hollered back, much closer. I had no difficulty ascertaining that the birds were running our way, looking for the seductive hens they had heard. I faced the east and Brian basically to the west, and the birds of course showed up on our south side. Brian whispered, and I could tell the excitement in his voice.

“Jakes,” he hissed. “Two, no three…wait, four. Four jakes all in range!” My heart was hammering in my chest. “Can you turn?” he whispered?

“I’ll try” was all I could whisper back.

And with that I painstakingly inched my butt around the tree, until I had the bead of my 870 in an opening that they would have to cross. A few minor clucks came from the band of juvenile delinquents, but so far as I could tell the low limbs of the cedar masked most of my awkward fumbling, or maybe those birds were just young, horny, and dumb.

I’ve been there before myself.

For a few seconds, my bead hovered in openness, but eventually the jakes seemed to sense something was amiss. They starting filing out of there, and one of them was on a beeline for the opening I was covering. As he entered the opening with his head down to pick at the ground, I yelped softly on my mouth call, and he gave me a full-periscope shot. A shot which I promptly buggered up by sending a load of #6-sized lead shot over his head. I said a bad word and for a moment pandemonium reigned as turkeys putted, cackled and ran frantically about. For my part, I scrambled to my knees and sent another salvo downrange. It wasn’t even close.

I saved my third shell, while the gang of shortbeards re-consolidated and gobbled ludicrously. We tried to call them back, but perhaps they weren’t as dumb as I’d thought. I just sat there, flabbergasted at my poor shooting and thinking of a way to politely kill Brian so that this embarrassment wouldn’t get out.

The problem with jakes is that they are always in groups, it seems. Or at least in doubles. There are just that many more eyes and ears to beat…and they are always willing and lusty gobblers, with choppy ‘hee-haw’ gobbles exploding out of them every chance they get.

The hardest gobbling bird I ever encountered was a jake, and he seemed determined to steal all the air in the Simcoe County forest with his constant gargling. He sounded like a bunch of pebbles being rattled around in an old tin coffee can, and he hollered at every sound I made, as well as at every crow, blue jay, and car he heard. I sneezed once and he still gobbled, although after that he moved off. He was still loud-mouthed, even though he slowly faded from earshot.

In the last two seasons, I’ve had a couple of memorable run-ins with jakes, and while I closed the deal on one, I flailed and bungled the other.

The day after my mother died from cancer in 2013, my father and I went out for a ‘therapy hunt’ as I call it. A silly jake showed up, running with two longbeards. While the mature toms hung up well out of range, the subordinate jake made a surreptitious sneak on my decoy and I whipped his head around to his derriere with a well-placed load of Federals. It was special to get a bird that day given the emotions of the previous weeks and months.

Last year, I was working my tail off trying to get my buddy Lucas Hunter his first turkey. Lucas has done photo work for this blog in the past, and some great design work in the recent move to the new site, but we were friends and former coworkers from long before that.

We had hunted fruitlessly for almost two full days, with some pretty dim weather dogging us. Two hours before we planned to head home, we were around a block not far from the family farm property. Through binoculars we could see a group of five or six jakes milling in a field edge between two bush lots. We made a circle and parked before scrambling into our gear and stalking into position. I yelped on a mouth call and the jakes answered resoundingly. We tried to close just a little bit of ground on them and get into a position that would be reasonable for Lucas to get a shot from, but those pesky jakes were on a dead run in our direction. Like idiots, we bumped them as we tried to get into position. The gobbled in surprise and started bobbing along at a jog to the west side of the field. We cut through the mix of hardwoods and cedars and got to a spot that seemed to be promising. Now firmly set up and perfectly still I yelped again. Nothing. I cutt harder and put in some aggressive purring. Still nothing. We trudged back to the vehicle and drove the block once more, but all the activity was off the stage now. It was as though the birds had disintegrated into thin air.

For a second I wondered if they had ever been there at all, but that was jakes for you.

In a little over six weeks this is all going to start again in Ontario. Every season I hear friends or acquaintances that I share the turkey woods with tell me their disdain for jakes. How a gang of juveniles ran off a lone tom, or how they screw up hunts by gang-raping a hen decoy, or how these hunters somehow feel that dangling a tag from a jake bird’s leg is below their aristocratic standing as a turkey hunter.

But not me. Bring on the shortbeards. They gobble hard, run in eager, and taste great on my fork. I have a love/hate relationship with them sometimes, but I’m not above bearing down the rail of my shotgun at one if I’ve got a tag to fill. If it is legal where you hunt, hammer down I say. You may never have a more memorable hunt than when the jakes show up.

hunting, reflections

In Defense of Beagles

February 26, 2015 Shawn West Leave a comment

This past week, a beagle won the Westminster. That’s good.

I have a soft spot for beagles, and although I’d rather see one running low through the snow on the trail of a snowshoe hare as opposed to jauntily trotting around in a show-ring, I couldn’t help but smile to see the Best in Show ribbon next to the stately little canine.

I enjoy beagles. Real beagles. Working beagles. Not a Puggle (that wholly unnecessary Pug/Beagle cross), or a beagle/collie hybrid, or anything like that. Nope, for me it is a low, sleek, tri-colored beagle with stern eyes, a keen nose, and a stiff-flagging tail. Now there are many, many breeds of hounds and working, scent-tracking dogs, and they all have merits, but my affinity for beagles comes from the same place as my love of hunting at large, and that is from the earliest memories I have of the outdoors.

I was at a very young, impressionable age when I first got bundled up and ventured down the road with my father and Chum the beagle to ramble through snow covered cedars and bare winter hardwoods in search of snowshoe hares. I learned patience, perseverance, and early lessons in bushcraft all to the ringing music of a baying and tonguing beagle. The hare would make wide circles, through the hardwoods and cedar edges, and the persistent sing-song howls and “ba-rooo!” of Chum would grow ever closer. As the dog came nearer and nearer, Dad would move his .22 from a cradle carry to a two-handed ready position and his eyes would scan the snowy ground for the ghostly movements.

“Stand still” he’d softly hiss at me. I had a problem with that then, and I still do.

If I was lucky, stock-still, and attentive I’d pick up the prey first, but more often than not it was the smooth mount and swing of Dad shouldering his rifle that tipped me off to the approach of our quarry. Sometimes the rabbit would dodge and evade the volley, and Chum would run single-purposed after it as we moved to reposition ourselves, but often the crack of the .22 would be the last thing the hare would hear. When that happened Chum would run up and nose the lifeless animal, snuffing and whining, while Dad would pat the dog’s side and tell him he what a good job he did. I’d be tasked with carrying the rabbit, and before long we’d cut another track and Dad would give the command that Chum, and frankly I, loved hearing.

“Hunt ‘em up. Go on. Hunt ‘em up now…”

And we’d begin again, Chum tonguing and baying along, Dad and I trying to get ahead of the next loop that the rabbit would run, and the rabbit doing his best to get around both of us.Chum was high-strung and a typical beagle. He was single-minded when on the trail, and more than once he ran off and couldn’t be immediately brought back. He was rough around the edges and wasn’t the best with kids, but as soon as he had gone hunting with you, his personality turned around. He had snarled and barked at me more than once, but after I began joining him and my Dad in the field, things got better.

Some say that the beagle scores low on intelligence scales relative to other dogs, I’ve heard that beagles are temperamental, annoying, noisy, and prone to erratic behaviour. I’m not an animal psychologist and certainly not an expert on dogs, but the handful of beagles I’ve hunted with were sure happy to be running in the snow and that’s about all I’m really concerned about.

Chum was lost many years ago, while running deer in Central Ontario. It was never confirmed if he took an injury and couldn’t get home, or if he was picked up by other hunters, or maybe he ran afoul of wolves or coyotes. He was fairly old by that time, and I remember hearing about Chum being lost from Dad. It was sad, losing a hunting buddy, and for a few years we ran a mutual friend’s beagle, and although that dog was an eager runner, he was overweight and struggled to keep the levels of endurance that we had been spoiled with when Chum was on the chase. When that next beagle inevitably went on and died, no subsequent dog replaced him. With the loss of the beagles, came the loss of the earliest form of hunting I’d known. Winter weekends running snowshoe hares with a baying dog had been a sporadic holiday-season occurrence before, and with no dog they disappeared outright.

I made forays into the bush with a .20ga on a few December afternoons looking to jump ruffed grouse and track a rabbit on my own, and while the thrill of getting close to game was still there, something was missing.

It wasn’t long before I came to the realization that it was not just shooting rabbits that I enjoyed. Others before me had fallen under the spell of it, and I’m not the last to be drawn in by the howl ringing in the crisp, still winter air. There was a quiet joy in watching the icy blue skies of a late December afternoon slowly turn to red and purple to the soundtrack of Chum the beagle.

My current job and home situation precludes a beagle of my own, as I find an inherent cruelty in keeping a running dog like a beagle in a small backyard in the city, and my heavy travel schedule combined with the activities of two rambunctious young boys doesn’t leave much time for a recreational hunt after snowshoe hares.

But the day is coming, I can sense it like an inevitability. And then I’ll say “Hunt ‘em up” to a beagle and cradle a rifle while I watch the white-tip of a tail take off through the bush and I’ll hear the howling again. And it will be great.