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- By Brandon Wikman
This was my first introduction to the sacred place the northerners call “Upper Michigan” a.k.a. (Yooper Country). Jenn and I were still dumbfounded with the spur of our sour luck until we rolled into the palace of Maple Ridge Outfitter.
Mr. Gary Scarborough pulled into the driveway as both Jenn and I gawked at his beautiful wilderness creation. Our spirits were lifted to the roost as we entered the walkway to my dream cabin that appeared to be torn off the back of a rustic home magazine. At the porch, Gary introduced us to his son and chief guide, Sam. He was a character. Sam’s the type of person that you’d fall in love with at sight; a “bromance” if you will. His quirky ways and hilarious attitude boosted the atmosphere and made us feel humored beyond belief! The smiles were served, ice was broken, and now it was time to settle in.
As I opened the door, a blessed aroma of firewood filled my nostrils while my squinty eyes finally opened to something that simply amazed me. Gary decorated his hunting cabin with the only fitting décor, animals. He showcased giant moose, wicked caribou, and monstrous whitetail that were taken off properties only miles away. He even had a blown-up gobbler, which stood in strut casting dominance across the room. Great people, incredible accommodations, and the anticipation for Jenn’s first turkey soon charmed my dreadful evening.
After my awe-struck hour, it was time to get to business. The evening was swift. I dumped my bag of assortments on the floor and began picking through it like a vulture. My camouflage outerwear, clunky boots, and magical bag of Keystone turkey calls. I also yanked out the most important accessory, the video camera. These were my weapons to defeat the savvy “Yooper bird.” While I unpacked, Jenn did otherwise.
Jenn failed like a 3-year old eating spaghetti . She was working in ‘sleep town’ sawing logs as I sat down with Gary and Sam to go over the turkey agenda. These boys knocked the heads off some birds. We flipped through the trophy album blissfully grinning at photo after photo. There were a tremendous amount of successful hunts from only weeks ago. Now it was our time; the last week to hunt birds in Michigan, but the weather turning pale. The Weather Channel showcased a slow moving cold front engulf the northern part of Wisconsin and en route to the U.P. As fate would have it, we woke up to a gloomy morning. The temperature dropped significantly and a cold air mass system loomed over the roost trees. This was not what I had hoped for. This time the meteorologists were correct.
Jenn and I grabbed our goods and vanished with Sam into the dark. I threw on an extra layer of clothing, as did everyone, and ventured into the forest. The hunt began to feel like a November whitetail chase as temperatures plummeted. Silence grew as we nestled into shrubbery and cloaked our gear into nature. As mounds of dark clouds piled above the pines, bursts of sunlight were choked. The woods were silent. This was no weather to strike a chorus of gobbles. Hopes of killing a bird off the roost was soon washed away by droplets of rain. Before I could even begin to start pouting, the droplets turned into boulders and it was go time!
Over the next few days we watched as miserable weather damped the hopes of enchanting Jenn with a strutter. As I peered out the window hopelessly stressed, streaks of rain oozed down the glass likes tears. Although, this was no time to frown or drown emotions thanks to Mother Nature.
Gary and Sam entertained every beaten feeling of distress in us. Lavish homemade meals, several nail biting games of pool, and a toasty day nestled in the cabin relaxing and enjoying one’s company. This was what camaraderie and good people were all about.
Needless to say, Jenn wasn’t able to pull the trigger on a soggy feathered bird. In fact, after the first day of breaking down on the highway, getting towed, running late, and watching the weather burst our hopes of birds… I really didn’t care. The face of an enlightened girl enjoying every minute filled my soul with accomplishment. I ventured out of the holy land of “Yoopers” with new friends, a memorable experience, and another shot at wrangling Jenn her first turkey.
- 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.
Now is the perfect time to provide your deer with proper nutrition. Take advantage of
Hurry, offer ends June 22, 2010!
- By Rich Miller
After flying home from my Kansas weekend of hunting with my buddies from Code Blue and Bass Pro, I had to come home and work for three days. After three long days of working that I thought would never end, I had to leave on Wednesday afternoon and drive all night to get there in time to hunt Thursday morning.
After a long sixteen-hour drive I made it to the Woody Outfitters lodge in time for the hunt. I normally wouldn’t have made the turnaround that quick but the owner of the lodge, Burns, had done me a favor and I owed him one. He had some friends coming in and he needed us to help them kill some turkeys. I got there just in time to meet up with the guys and head to the woods. I got paired up with a guy from Missouri named Bob along with my buddy Mick. When I got there everyone was watching the radar and trying to figure out when the thunderstorms were going to get there and how long they would last. We loaded up in the truck and headed out to the piece of property that we were going hunt and take our chances. As you can imagine, when we pulled up there was lightning popping everywhere and the rain came as soon as we pulled through the gate. We waited out the storm in the truck and it finally cleared out about eight o’clock that morning. When we got out of the truck - about several hundred yards in the field behind us - there were several turkeys feeding. Before the rain had gotten too bad we stood outside the truck a few minutes and heard a few turkeys gobbling. So when we spotted the turkeys in the field we grabbed our gear and headed around to the other side of the field and set out our Pretty Boy decoy. As soon as we started calling, a gobbler cranked up and about thirty minutes later we had him strutting around the decoy at fifteen yards. Bob made a good shot and forty five minutes after we got out of the truck we were back at it with a bird in the back. While we were putting the bird in the truck we noticed another bird in the field behind us all by himself. So Bob and I crawled out to the only tree in the middle of the field and I put Pretty Boy back out and crawled back to the truck to watch the show. The bird worked in to about eighty yards and then started skirting around the field and Bob wasn’t going to be able to get a shot. I grabbed my shotgun out of the truck and crawled down the hill far enough so I could stand up and run around and try to get in front of the bird. Mick stayed at the truck and kept calling to slow the bird down because every time he called the bird would stop and strut. This gave me just enough time to get around and set up before he got to the back of the field. I didn’t have to do any more calling because the bird was headed straight to me so I just let him come. I ended up shooting my first bird at about twenty yards and had my first Kansas bird of the year and hadn’t been there but four hours. After getting back to the truck and all the high fives the rain and lightning started back and we headed back to the lodge.
When we arrived back at the lodge, most of the guys were back and there were several more guys that had been successful in the first morning. Some had gone back to bed that morning because they thought it was going to rain all day. But for the guys that braved the weather, we reaped the rewards.
Planting native grasses in your food plot provides many advantages to turkeys and other wildlife using your land. These hints from the NWTF's wildlife biologists will help you get the most out of your planting.
1. Don't mix native grasses with food crops. Instead, plant native grasses around the perimeter of a plot of food crops such as corn, sunflower and chufa, and run several grass strips through the center of the plot.
2. Food plots are not the only areas to plant native grasses. Utility rights-of-way, thinned pine stands and roadsides are excellent places to plant.
3. If weeds take over your food plots, mow the weeds growing in the food crops to allow sunlight to reach your plantings, but don't mow the strips of native grass until the third growing season after you plant them. If weeds start overtopping the grasses, go ahead and mow, but mow high enough so as not to cut the native grass below the weeds.
4. Save some of the seed and plant it in a flowerbed or garden. This will allow you to identify the native grasses in your food plots.
5. When mowing a field, mow strips in the field every other year to ensure cover is always 
available for turkeys and other wildlife.
6. Don't get discouraged. Keep in mind that you probably won't see much above-ground growth the first year you plant your native grass.
For more information on native grasses or other land management and habitat conservation topics, visit the NWTF's Land Management Tips web page.
To help you plant your food plots, view Moultrie's seed spreaders.
- By Brandon Wikman
Last week I made one of my most memorable hunting excursions of my life. Some of you would interpret that I lost my way into the wilderness of Alaska. Others would come to believe I hopped a flight to New Zealand to hunt the incredible red stag. Or maybe others would guess that I took a week to desolate myself into the wilderness of Yukon country in search for gigantic Bull Moose. I’d say simply this… you’re way off.
My 4-hour trip to the upper peninsula of Michigan, hunting a waddling feathered critter called a turkey, has left an everlasting memory with me. I was graced by the charm of a special someone, named Jenn Geissler, who is a recent Hunter’s Safety graduate. Although most people would think she’s a ripe 12-years old, which is the age most participants are, Jenn’s graduation day came much later in life. At 21-years old, she is a fresh face in the outdoor world that’s particularly savvy when it comes to the sport of hunting.
My ultimate mission was to film Jenn’s first turkey hunt on video, but also and much more importantly, share an enriching experience with her that’d bind two souls from the vines of nature. The location of choice was in Stephenson, Michigan, with Maple Ridge Outfitters (MapleRidgeOutfitter.com). Maple Ridge is an enchanting slice of heaven plopped down in the beautiful green meadows of Michigan. It’s an outdoor enthusiast’s dream come true. It’s a combination of great lodging, incredible meals, and unforgettable people. We left Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the late afternoon with big dreams and an escalating sense of anticipation. Our drive went quite well. In fact, things were going far too well. That is, until all hell broke loose.
With no more than an easy 45-minute pavement-to-cabin arrival, my truck began to sound off like a pack of wild boars. My rpm-gauge soared into next week, transmission practically disappeared, and the rumble of destruction echoed. Both of our faces looked at each other in shock. Needless to say, we both had to laugh as I reached for my cell-phone to call AAA. There are many times throughout life when accidents happen. Several of the misfortunate occasions are completely out of our control. I always take it as a bummer spill of luck and always find the slightest humor from the situation.
An hour passed. I found myself gazing at my worthless truck being yanked onto a flatbed. I was also reluctant to be heaving a forty-pound driveshaft into the back bed of my truck. It was apparent that the demise of my truck suffered from old u-joints.
Jenn and I rode ‘shotty’ with a delightfully nice old man who talked with us about hunting. He lightened up the mood and shed light on a totally new atmosphere. We were not only rescued by his tow-truck, but also his saving grace. With my truck towed to the nearest city for repair, I called Gary for a pickup. I figured hitchhiking in the Northwood’s wouldn’t be the wisest idea of mine…
He was more than happy to be our transportation and checker-flag-finish our grueling journey from one state to the next. We arrived in paradise at nearly midnight. The torturous escapade from Wisconsin to Michigan was finally over. Now it was time for us to get unpacked, settle down, and get Jenn’s eye on a boisterous redheaded bird!
To be continued….
