https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv7Ku86CJzY
Fourth-grader killed gobbler on N.C.’s last day of Youth Season
Lilly Hammonds, 10, of Wadesboro, N.C., would have been happy with just about any gobbler if Lady Luck had been on her side this past Friday, April 10, on the final day of North Carolina’s week-long Youth Only turkey season.
Instead, she killed a bird that was certainly not just “any” gobbler — a six-bearded, 21-pound tom.
Hammonds, a fourth-grade student at Union Academy in Monroe, N.C., killed her first turkey last season. She may have a ways to go to better her second bird, however. This bird had 1-inch spurs and sported beards measuring 9 1/2, 6 3/4, 6 1/4, 6, 5 and 4 1/2 inches long.
She was hunting with her father, Mark, and a friend, Kyle Eudy of Wadesboro, last Friday morning.
“We went to a piece of property in Anson County that I can hunt, we we got out and listened,” Eudy said. “We heard one bird a ways off, and we waited. But we didn’t hear anything else. I crow-called; nothing. I yelped; nothing.
Six-bearded gobbler came in quick
“We finally went in the direction of that first bird, sat down and put out decoys.”
The decoys, a hen and a tom, were in a long, cleared lane. Apparently, one big gobbler was pretty close to the same lane.
“Mr. Kyle put the decoys out, and he sat down and started chirping, and he gobbled and came right to us,” Lilly Hammonds said. “It came really quick.”
Eudy estimated that the gobbler was within a hundred yards of the spot where they sat, and that “he came in on a string. She killed him at about 20 yards.”
Lilly Hammonds was using a 20-gauge Beretta shotgun loaded with 3-inch Remington Nitro Turkey loads of No. 5 shot. At the shot, the six-bearded gobbler dropped like a rock, within a few feet of the gobbler decoy.
It wasn’t until they examined the bird that they noticed the inch-long spurs and the strange arrangement of beards hanging from its chest: six totaling 38 inches.
“We didn’t know it had six beards when I shot it,” Lilly Hammonds said.
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