BECKLEY —
I have it bad this year. To be perfectly honest, I get it bad every year but I tend to forget how bad I had it until it rears its ugly head again.
For those of you who are not cursed — the lucky ones — you might not have known this past week was the first week of spring gobbler season. For the cursed — the walking-dead brethren — it was a week of getting up in the middle of the night to give chase at first light to a critter who enjoys humiliating humans to the point of breaking and returning them to the normal world in a sleep-deprived state. Some afflicted hunters try to go to work after hunting, while others simply stumble through the rest of the day until they fall asleep in their chairs at dinner.
The name of the critter is Tom turkey, and his contagious illness is becoming addicted to spring turkey hunting.
To add spice to the dish, the weather was on Tom’s side for most of the week, including a day of snow, two days of high winds and, of course, a washout day. You might ask a perfectly sane question like, “If it is rainy and cold, why didn’t you wait until a nicer day to go hunting?” The insane spring turkey hunter’s reply is generally some brilliant, crafty, well-educated response like, “Duh, it’s the first week of the season. You gotta go!”
Perhaps a personal example from yours truly will shed some light on the topic of spring turkey hunting insanity. This past Thursday, I made good on an invitation to hunt a small hillside farm that a friend said was full of turkeys. According to him, they wake his children up every morning with their nonstop gobbling and the mailman is afraid to get out of his vehicle in fear of a gobbler spurring him to death. He stated the woods were raked so clean by the turkey’s scratching, I should be able to slip up on them real quiet-like. And the real deal sealer, I was the only turkey hunter he gave permission to hunt the farm.
He was certain I would be taking a gobbler for a ride in the back of my truck shortly after daybreak.
The hunting day started with a radio alarm waking me from my nap. A thunderstorm that night had kept me from continuous sleep, and it was still raining. Since the farm was more than an hour-and-a-half from my house, and to ensure I had plenty of time to get high on the ridge at first light, I had to leave three hours before sunrise.
Nothing is more fun than walking straight uphill in a pitch-black rainstorm. With rain dripping from the bill of my hat, I walked miles around the farm calling into the deafening silence of the spring woods. There might have been turkeys there, but I never heard or saw one. I did, however, manage to get plenty of exercise and field test some of the latest-greatest raingear that was great at letting streams of ice cold water run down my back.
After several soggy hours of hiking around, I returned to my office for an afternoon of staring at my computer through bloodshot eyes, hoping no one would ask me to do something that required intelligence.
With week one of turkey season behind us — and, of course, a day of rest — the spring turkey hunting brethren will once again hit the woods this coming week with renewed vigor to match wits with the finest of game birds. We turkey hunters define it as the craziness of spring gobbler season.
Others just call it insanity.
Outdoors
Spring turkey hunt addiction
- Outdoors
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Hunting has become more mainstream
As sportsmen, we live by an ethical code of conduct. We are taught by our mentors not to take our way of life for granted and to be aware of our actions as not to cause offense to others. In short, we are taught to behave in a manner as to not make a non-hunter into an anti-hunter.
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Birding among outdoor passions
If you love the outdoors, there are probably some activities you like better than others. Maybe it’s trout fishing or deer hunting. My passion is birds. I love the spring migration when new species return almost daily.
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Setting the record straight on rabbits
Thanks to cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny, the rabbits we see in our backyards, eastern cottontails, are familiar to almost everyone. And yet I suspect that most people think they are rodents. They are not. Rabbits and hares are lagomorphs, members of the mammalian order Lagomorpha.
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Fickle weather can wreck plans
Well, it’s officially spring. We have “sprung forward” into daylight saving time in hopes of long, sunny evenings to play and work outdoors in the glorious, warm rays of the sun. In return for our daily routines being altered by the time change, we are awarded with unpredictable weather and mud season — gee, thanks!
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Black deer among nature’s rarities
A few weeks ago, Joan Robinson contacted me after she noticed something out of the usual while driving along a Hampshire County backroad in the Eastern Panhandle. It was so unusual she even questioned herself at what her eyes were actually seeing.
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Male half of nesting eagle pair feared dead
One of southern West Virginia’s much-loved and only confirmed pair of nesting American Bald Eagles is suspected dead and the pair’s eggs located at the tip of Brooks Island off W.Va. 20 are in jeopardy.
Wendy Perrone, executive director of Three River Avian Center, said National Park Service Law Enforcement was notified that an Amtrak train hit the eagle Sunday around 10:30 a.m.
Since Sunday, the Park Service, Three Rivers and dedicated volunteers have scouted the track and surrounding area from Brooks Island to Sandstone Falls, but no one has recovered the bird. The male bird, affectionately called Whitey, has also not returned to the nest, leading experts to believe he was killed. -
There is help for anglers getting started
According to statistics from the National Surveys of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, which are published every five years, the number of anglers in the U.S. is in a steady decline. Over the last 20 years the number of anglers has dropped from 35.6 million in 1991 to 33.1 million in 2011.
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Beckley among places to ‘talk turkey’
This past week brought us snow and rain. Like my kids are fond of saying in a very sarcastic tone, “Really?” For the sportsmen in our area, the last couple of days of winter can be a downtime in the action. For those needing to scratch the hunting and fishing itch, I have a little news that might just do the trick.
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‘How do robins survive winter conditions?’
Winter must be winding down because I’m getting letters and e-mails about winter robins.
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Sequester impacting hunting, fishing industries
A news release from Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.) Communications came across my desk this week, and I felt the information was worth sharing.
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