After a year of waiting it is finally here! I had to drive three hours to get there and it is always worth every second of it when I am sitting in the woods waiting on a turkey to gobble. The lower part of the State of South Carolina always opens their turkey season a couple of weeks ahead of the upstate on March 15th. This year it happened to be on a Monday and my buddy Robert and I couldn’t get down there until Thursday night, but we did get there in time to try and roost some birds before dark.
Usually this place where we hunt is covered up with birds and we always have good hunts whether it ends with a kill or not. This year we were as excited as ever as we made our way to what we call the hill stand to give a couple of hoots on the owl call to see if we could get a response from a gobbler. This place isn’t actually what you would classify as a hill but it is the highest point on this piece of property and it borders a swamp where the turkeys normally roost. Also if a turkey gobbles anywhere on or around the piece of property we are hunting you will be able to hear him from there. That Thursday afternoon the wind was calm and the weather had been perfect all day but we waited out there until it was completely dark and never heard a single gobble.
We have had days when they didn’t gobble in the afternoons so it didn’t bother us that we didn’t hear anything. We were still just as pumped up for the next morning’s hunt as we ever were. The next morning we were back at the hill stand well before daylight hoping the birds were going to be a little more vocal on this day. The next thing we knew, the clock was pointing to a little after nine and we had yet to hear a gobble. A couple times we heard a dog barking in the distance which got a lot of our attention and we tried to convince ourselves that it was a turkey but in the back of minds we knew better. For the rest of the day we hunted and never got a response out of a bird that we know of.
Saturday morning we hit the ground just as fired up as we were the day before, but again after a couple of hours of nothing our enthusiasm was starting to dwindle. Saturday ended up just like Friday with nothing to show for it. We did see some turkey sign while we were hunting and I know the birds are around somewhere but they just weren’t there when I was. Everybody is saying that they are running a couple of weeks behind this year and I tend to agree, but after hunting hard for a few days you would think a guy get just one bird to gobble.
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