HOW DID YOU FARE

[grizzly]

well turkey season ended for me on monday . the hunting for me was awful i feel that i'm a decent turkey hunter but other then one jake i never got a tom with in 100 yards . i heard very little gobbleing of the roost in the morning but every evening i would have two toms just fireing up for an hour up on the hill next to the house and i go up the next morning and nothing . guys i talk to got there toms the first week and alot of them were jakes nothing wrong with that just saying there weren't alot of big boys this year . i really think N.Y. needs to look at a earlier start to the season. so i guess i can put on a pot of water and start boiling these tags for soup and start planning for the fall....wayne

[Mossberg835]

The turkeys were fired up the whole season near my house, but after i shot my first gobbler i lost my spot to a jealous neighbor. Almost every morning either the turkeys near my spot or down the road were rippin it. Worked turkeys 3 of the 6 days i went hunting and got a turkey so i cant complain too much, only that i could have filled my second tag if not for the fool up the road. Not trying to sound like i'm an authority on turkeys, but the turkeys up there have never been hunted and were hot all season. Hopefully next season this crap is all fixed up. Best season iv'e had so far but i hope we have a good hatch so we have more turkeys, cause the last 3 years around here have been HORRIBLE for poults, just HORRENDOUS!!!

[Limb Hanger]

It was a good year for hearing and seeing them, a bad year for closing the deal. I was working on getting a first bird for the landowner’s 15 yr old son. A couple times we'd think we had one coming in on a string, and the bird would evaporate. One morning we had a bird double and triple gobbling, he was getting closer and closer; he worked his way around a patch of wetland and through a hedge row, and then walked into a woods (gobbling the whole time) and popped out in our pasture only to look at our hen decoy and shut right down. The landowners son would go out to spread manure early in the afternoon and reported seeing 3 mature Toms strutting for some hens (several times) in the area where we had been set up in the morning. Go figure!

I wonder about outside pressure, and how many times those birds were played with by other hunters. There was an interesting article in Turkey Call about birds fitted with GPS tracking, and how they reacted to pressure... I wonder if they're getting wise to decoys... For years I'd position a Jake over a squatting hen, with a feeding hen close by; having turkeys sprint for 100 yards to beat the snot out of the Jake decoy. This year it seemed as though 1 decoy was 1 too many.

The above are reasons why turkey hunting is a passion for me, and why building calls in the off season helps to give me my turkey hunting "fix". If turkeys weighed 100 - 150 lbs, I'd never hunt deer again!

[Steve_In]

My trip down to southern In was a bust. There was very little sign and I did not hear any gobbles. The weather was hot and very humid and that could have been a factor in the lack of gobbles. The population is down according to the biologist but I still thought my chances would have been better than here in the northeast part of the state. My hunts in NE In were about the same as they have been. I was hunting the last week of the season and the turkeys had pressure every day before I hunted. I had interference by another hunter (coyote) once and could not seal the deal on another day.
Overall south appeared down, north about the same.

[retranger]

Short and sweet,,,,,nothing. I did not hear, smell, see tracks, scat, feathers or any other signs of turkey. The area is not pressured as it is private land. I have hunted these areas in the past and have always taken a bird off them. I do not know of many birds taken and the ones I do know of were jakes. We know the birds are around but no idea where they went for turkey season. Another year gone by but good excerise.