Turkey Hunting Season is Upon Us!

First Turkey I took on the Estate. 25lb Tom with an 8.5 inch beard.

Spring in Michigan is a tumultuous time. The weather is unreliable, the temps swing up and down just for fun and the wind can be a lot to deal with. Throw in some random snow storms, a couple ice storms and the occasional power outage and you have the time from the end of February to around mid-May. Sometimes it feels like winter will never end and the weather will never shape up.

The grass begins to turn green, the maple sap starts to run and the flowers just peek their heads up. The birds who left in the Fall begin to return and the days get longer. As we start coming out of out SAD season, there are other signs that Spring is on its way. The big one for me is Turkeys. They would be everywhere in the Fall. During deer hunting, I would have them file by on their way to another part of the forest all the time. However, during the winter, they seem to completely disappear. Where do they go? Why don't we see them as often in the winter? Who knows, it might be a mystery that is never solved. But, in the Spring, they start to come back around. We see them on the trail cameras we have around the Estate. There might be only one or two, there might be a dozen, it's hard to say. The sight of them makes me happy.

One of my favorite hunting seasons is Spring Turkey. The are fun to call in, they are frustrating to hunt and they are exciting to watch as they respond to your calls. I've given up Turkey hunting nearly every season I've hunted them. After a few days of calling and calling and moving to few locations to be nearer where you could hear them with no results, I would tell my wife that Turkey hunting is one of the dumbest things you can do in the woods and I am never doing it again. Then, I would eventually talk myself back into it and away I would go. I hate it so much that I love it, if that makes sense.

The idea that this bird that might as well be a dinosaur, can outsmart you will drive you crazy. It will also drive you to try harder to prove that you are smarter than a bird by doing everything you know to get one of them close enough to bring home for dinner. I've been outsmarted by more Turkeys than I can count. It just makes me want to hunt more. My wife doesn't understand it and I'm not sure I really do either sometimes.

This year, my 13 year old nephew wants to try turkey hunting. I told him I will take him out and we will try to get him his first bird. When it comes to this, the focus will be on him, not me. I won't shoot a bird until he gets one. When teaching and mentoring a young hunter, the emphasis should always be on their success and their experience. If I take him out so he can watch me shoot a Turkey, he may not want to go again. But, if I take him out and use what I've learned and show him how to call one in, what to do when they start responding and explain what to do when we see a bird up close, he may build the desire to keep at it. If he is the one who shoots at the bird, even if he misses, the experience will be his. The stories he tells his friends will be his stories, not mine. This also means I may not get a bird of my own this year, and that is OK. As hunters, we need to keep the fire alive for the next generation. We need to help them build the interest in hunting and have the stories to tell their kids.

So, while Turkey hunting is one of my favorite things to do in the Spring, passing on the excitement to the next generation, will be just as fun. All of us hunters should not lose sight of that. The fun is in experiencing, not watching. In this age of 30 second video clips and scrolling through information at light speed, we need to show them that slowing down and spending time in the outdoors in the quiet is just as entertaining as the latest Tik-Tok fad.