April is “Get (Back) Out There!” month on AllOutdoor.com. Winter’s over, spring has sprung, and it’s time to gear up and to back outside. All month long we’ll be sharing our outdoors adventures with you, so follow along on the #GetBackOutThere tag.
Earlier this month I visited South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for my first turkey hunt, and you can see from the picture above how it went: I’m smiling in between the two young toms I took down at about 30 yards with a single shot of 12 gauge Winchester Long Beard XR 3″ #6 turkey loads — the only shot I fired the whole trip. Also, the birds were on the run, and I was hustling after them when I took the shot.
I’ve since heard from my friends that this is not how one normally turkey hunts — charging over a ridge after a bunch of scared birds, blazing away with a shotgun, Call-of-Duty style. But I wasn’t about to let those birds get away, and the guides didn’t yell for me to stop…
But let me rewind a bit and tell you how I got worked up enough to charge a bunch of turkeys.
Turkeys Everywhere
Take a look at the picture below, all of those black dots out there in the field are turkeys — lots and lots and lots of turkeys. Only part of that flock of about 100 is visible in this shot, which was taken as we were driving away from the spot where we eventually gave up trying to lure the flock towards us.
We arrived on the far side of that field before dawn, near those trees you can see in the distance at the base of the hills. The ground slopes down to a creek, and this massive flock was roosted about 200 yards from where we put out a decoy and sat down to start calling.
The birds came down from the trees and began closing a little bit of distance, and I found myself thinking that if I just had my rifle I could easily pick off a few of them. But I was toting a borrowed Remington 870 Express Magnum, with an unknown choke that I hadn’t taken time to pattern before tossing it in the Pelican case and heading to the airport.
Using a decoy and a variety of calls, we tried to lure them within shotgun range. Unfortunately, the guide’s expert calls couldn’t compete with the very near-sounding coyote howls that erupted off to our left. When I heard the howling start, I thought to myself, “if I’m a turkey, I’m out of here right now.” And that’s exactly what happened — the birds began picking their way across our field of view from left to right without coming any closer.
We tried to creep in on them, but there were three whitetails stalking across the field into the midst of the flock who suddenly noticed us, and that sealed our fate.
So, we bailed for another part of the reservation, one much more hilly, with cliffs and creeks running in the hollows. Like our previous location, this spot was chock full of gobblers, so we began calling a few in.
This time, three large toms and a bunch of hens were working the creek down below us, and at one point the two toms were fanned and dead in my line of sight about 70 yards out. Yet again, I thought, “if only I had my rifle.” But the ornery birds moved on, responding to our calls but not actually making their way over.
Next, we made our way down the hill closer to the creek, and struck up a call-and-response with another gobbler in the woods across the hollow. We couldn’t see him, but it was the same story: he responded to our calls, but wouldn’t move any closer. So, we headed back in the direction of the other flock that had taken a pass on us earlier.
We did a bunch of walking and creek crossing, and then some climbing up very steep slopes to find another flock, this one with an exceptionally large tom who was, yet again, within an easy 70-yard rifle shot of my position. And again, we couldn’t call…
