After Jake Muehlbach took a few career bucks on his Chatham County hunting land last fall, he was ready to chase another dream — shooting a big tom turkey with his bow. And on the afternoon of April 18, a longbeard couldn’t resist the appeal of his Avian X hen decoy, making it easy for Muehlbach to check off that box on his bucket list.
Sandy Brady of Reidsville, N.C., has been bitten by an incurable bug over the past couple of years: the sling-bow bug.
For the average turkey hunter, a bearded hen is something you don’t see everyday — one with a beard long enough to rival a full-grown gobbler is pretty darn rare. Shoot it with a bow and arrow and you’ve got a real anomaly.
Stanley Farmer of Stoneville, N.C. was expecting to see a gobbler and probably get a shot when he headed to a series of connected food plots on a Rockingham County, N.C. farm shortly after lunch on April 17, but the long-time turkey hunter wasn’t prepared for either the show he was treated to, or the trophy turkey with seven beards he bagged around 1:30 p.m.
You could excuse Finn Pippin of Cope, S.C., for being a little too excited to shoot the first turkey gobbler that came within shotgun range this season.
Youth hunter Matt New killed his first turkey during the 2017 opening day of Youth Season with a bow, and he and his dad set out to make it two years in a row on April 7 of this year during a hunt in Northampton County. The weather forecast for that Saturday called for rain, but after a promising day of scouting on Friday, the two hunters decided to give it a chance anyway. It paid off.
Turkey hunters are always on the lookout for new places to hunt, and with land-management changes, good areas are always in flux.
Mention mouth calls to a turkey hunter, and diaphragm calls will come to most minds.
It has been said, and often, that a turkey would be nearly impossible to kill if its sense of smell was sharp as its keen eyesight and extra-sensory hearing.
Jason Snead of Manteo did something few wild turkey hunters have duplicated with odds close to one in a half-million.
Hugh McLaurin of Big Lake Outdoor Products has been making game calls out of a variety of woods for years, and he knows that dymond wood, a laminate that isn’t easy to come by, is one of the hardest, most-dense woods around, often used in the handles of custom knives. […]
For the six weeks or so, we won’t be at breakfast very often. We’ll fall asleep early, while you’re barely finished watching Jeopardy after supper. Our fingers will be chalk-stained, and we’re not even teachers. We’ll have bags under the bags under our eyes. If we’re outside in the backyard during any daylight hours, you might find us looking for a big, thick tree truck to sit down against. Somebody from the office might call home to ask where we are and if we’re coming into work.
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