I hit the woods on opening day with a friend of mine, over at Liberty reservoir to hopefully get the opportunity to harvest a turkey. Got there early, saw some other cars and trucks, but never did see anyone else hunting. The gobblers just didn't seem to be talking at all on opening morning. After walking, and walking, I managed to spook some turkeys that were just coming up on a ridge top as I had no clue they were there. After that we were able to get one bird to gobble once. We headed in his direction and just kept trying to get him to talk, never did happen but around 7am, we walked right up on a tom and jake. They somehow didn't seem to know we were there and went about what they were doing. We spent the next 4 hours playing cat and mouse with these turkeys. We did get the tom to gobble 2 more times later in the morning, but they just didn't want to come. We never could get them close enough to shoot with a bow, they always seemed to be just out of reach. Finally, around 10:30 we were able to get them in range, the down side was they were over a hill and sitting on the ground I could not see them to shoot. I had the tom at about 25 yards and the jake at 15 yards and knew they were there, but could not get a shot. Just my luck to have them that close and couldn't do a thing. Second year in a row something like this has happened to me. We finally watched as the turkeys including a hen which we saw for the first time at this point walked about down into the thicket and we decided at 11am that they had won on that day. We had walked miles, over 6 hours and decided to call it quits. Another day I will get my chance on those very hard to harvest birds.
Awesome day in the woods, great time with a friend, and a great learning experience as I still view myself very much as novice turkey hunter.
I hope everyone else had a good opening day of turkey season and even more so I hope you were able to harvest a bird!
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