- By Rich Miller
After the first couple of productive days of hunting with Burns and his buddies at the Lodge Rod Petit, Mick Bowman and I headed back to Mick’s house to start killing some birds for ourselves. When we got back that afternoon, Mick and I headed out to where he had seen a couple of birds strutting one afternoon earlier in the week and set up a blind to try and get them in bow range. Rod went to check out another spot to see if he could find anything for the following morning. My uncle, Jimmy, was still chasing the same bird he had been after the two previous days while the other three of us had been hunting with Burns. None of us got a tag on anything that afternoon but we all had been around birds that afternoon and had a good feeling for the following morning.
My uncle Jimmy had been chasing this old field turkey around for the last two mornings and was complaining to us about him not wanting to cooperate with him. He said all the turkey would do is gobble his head off and when he flew down he would go straight to the middle of a huge bean field and gobble till the hens all came to him. He said he was going to give up on him and try another place in the morning. Now Jimmy is so tight that he squeaks when he walks and for years he has seen us consistently use Pretty Boy to kill turkeys and he still has not gotten himself one. We told him, “Don’t give up just yet and try the old bird one more time. Take my Pretty Boy with you in the morning and stick it out in the field and see what happens.” Since Mick and I were hunting together we didn’t need but one and he could use mine. Well, you can imagine what happened the next morning; he set the decoy out in the field before daylight and well before seven a.m. the big gobbler came running in on him and he killed him at twelve yards. Then, the next morning, he used it again and killed his second bird the same way. Needless to say, all he could talk about was how that Pretty Boy decoy works and how everyone should have one! Before we left, I caught him trying to give some of the guys at the corner gas station a seminar about how well Pretty Boy works on those turkeys. Rod also got a bird that same morning using the Pretty Boy decoy. I am sure Mick and I would have had the same luck, but we put our decoys out on the wrong side of the point in the field we were hunting and the birds couldn’t see them from where they were.
The next morning we wised up a little and moved the blind to the back of the field where the birds had been the two previous days. We left the bows at home and grabbed our shotguns that morning because the wind was blowing somewhere around forty mph. Since those birds had been giving us the slip the last two days, we were ready to get even. Sure enough the two big toms came into the field just like clockwork and when they saw the decoy it was on! They started slowly walking that way at first and when the wind turned the decoy and made him move they broke into a dead run straight at us. They got to about twenty yards and on the count of three there was a blast of two shots that rang out. If you didn’t know there were two of us you would have only thought it was one shot. That quick and I was done in Kansas!
We left a couple of days later after five days of awesome hunting with come great friends and everyone ended up taking some real nice birds this year. The only bad part was I had a sixteen-hour ride home listening to Jimmy tell me how to use the Pretty Boy decoy. It just brought back memories of when we talked him into using the Carry-Lite deer decoy, because he was the same way then. Oh yeah, and after killing a deer every year with the deer decoy, he still hasn’t bought one - he uses mine or Mick’s every time. I bet he will be the same way with Pretty Boy!
For more information on the Pretty Boy Turkey Decoy and other great hunting decoys, visit the Carry-Lite website.
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