I took the day off of work to do some turkey hunting. I have had a gobbler roosted off of the field that I hunt several days now and I have never been able to get him to give me a shot. I got to the woods in plenty of time to get set up before daybreak but I ran into some problems on the walk in. My decoy bag got hung on a fence and the flood waters had come back up and made my journey take longer than normal. Since I was late, I had a good idea that the birds were roosting about 75 yards from where I was setting up. I decided not to risk them seeing me setting up, so I left the decoys in the bag and sat down and got comfortable. Around 6:15, I saw a hen making it's way toward me. It fed around me for a while, feeding only 15 yards away from me. As it wandered away, I heard some hens making noise behind me so I did some light calling. I then saw another turkey making its way toward me. All I could see was the head over the hill. As it moved around the hill in the field, I had another hen land around 20 yards in front of me and begin to feed. Shortly after, I had another turkey making all kinds of racket as it flew down and landed next to the hen. This is the exact location that the big tom landed on Friday (never got a shot at him). I immediately noticed that it had a pretty decent beard. I decided to be patient and see if any of the other birds over the hill would come over and hopefully the boss gobbler was one of them. Well, the birds over the hill started to make all kinds of racket and these two birds started moving toward them. I decided that it was now or never and I shot my bird. It flopped around and the others scattered but didn't immediately fly away. They moved over the hill and eventually just left. I waited a couple of minutes and went to claim my prize. When I got up to it, I looked for the spurs, but there were no spurs. I got worried that I had screwed up until I turned it over and just like I thought, it had a pretty nice beard. The beard measures a little over 9". I've only been turkey hunting for three years now and I am really excited that I have killed such a rarity. My dad has been turkey hunting for 40 years and has killed one bearded hen. I checked the MDC website and out of over 31,000 birds checked this year, only 411 have been bearded hens. Pretty cool.
