5-year-old’s dad scouted, called turkeys in range
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.
The gobbler was tearing up a jake decoy that his father, Johnny, had put out to help lure in a tom turkey earlier this season.
And Finn Pippin is all of 5 years old, a K5 student at St. Paul’s School in Orangeburg.
“He got so excited, he couldn’t shoot,” Johnny Pippin said.
The second time around, things went much better. On Saturday, April 14, Johnny Pippin, his son and a friend, Kyle Hardison, caught up to some turkeys.
‘I had been scouting these turkeys for a couple of days, and I had ‘em about hemmed up into one field,” Johnny Pippin said. “We were slipping around about 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and I spotted these three birds in the field.
“The field has a ditch running all the way around it, and we got in the ditch,” he said. “I had a Scoot and Shoot decoy, a turkey fan, and I crawled out into the edge of the field, and those three turkeys came right in to about 15 yards.
“Kyle had to settle Finn down a little, but he killed two of them with one shot at 15 yards.”
Finn Pippin was shooting a 20-gauge shotgun and 3-inch magnum shells.
“He killed them both graveyard dead,” Johnny Pippin said. “He got to ‘em first. I was about five yards in front of them, at an angle. They were back to my right, hiding in the tall grass.”
The two birds were both jakes, one sporting a 6-inch beard.
“These were his first turkeys; he didn’t care what he got,” Johnny Pippin said.
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