Late Season Michigan Turkey Hunt with Video
By Glen Wunderlich
With Michigan’s late turkey hunting season well under way, it was time for me to see if I could bag a bird of my own. A Day 6 Plotwatcher Pro trail camera showed a few hens as regular visitors at one property, but not one gobbler. Another riverfront property, where I’ve had permission to hunt for many years, had been good to me during previous turkey seasons, so I made an early morning visit to see what I could hear.
The raucous gobbling of toms from the roost before sunrise can give their location away. With that in mind, I cupped my hands at my ears for increased volume and patiently waited for the call of the wild. Nothing.
My hunting partner, Joe, later phoned to let me know he’d be available to operate the video camera on a hunt, (he already tagged a turkey) but Tuesday would be his only chance during the workweek. Without a clue, I knew I had to put the Browning Powerhouse blind up somewhere, so I loaded the ATV with the gear on Monday and headed to familiar grounds.
In the cutover corn field, I poked along and viewed a hen turkey several hundred yards away. The bird soon noticed my approach and scampered to the confines of the nearby woods. Proceeding down the lane at the field’s edge, I noticed some distant tom turkeys in full display that hadn’t seen me, but I proceeded, nonetheless.
After scaring them off, I set up the portable blind under a shagbark hickory conspicuously located alone in the field, trusting that the turkeys would have a short memory of my intrusion into their world.
The next day at 5:15 am, Joe and I made our way to the hideout and I set the cheap rubber decoy, dubbed Miss Direction, about 30 yards in front of us. Shortly after 6 am, far-off gobbling from the roost commenced, while a lone hen worked the cornfield.
Before long, several whitetail deer emerged from the forest, and one in particular realized the presence of the blind and began protesting with foot stomps alerting the others. Finally, it snorted loudly and the field cleared. The fact that the deer picked off our shelter reaffirms my belief that wise deer must get used to blinds for them to be effective hunting tools; however, we weren’t hunting deer today.
The gobbling got louder as the toms edged closer – still undetected visually. I scratched out the first hen calls of the morning with my cherished Ring Zone slate call and was rewarded with an immediate and resounding response. Game on!
At long last, two proud toms revealed themselves only a hundred yards from us. With the decoy in their sights, their purposeful approach continued with no additional effort from me. That same blind that spooked the deer earlier meant nothing to these love-struck fellas!
I’ll never know which of the two was a better choice but the Winchester Long Beard XR shotshell ammo with number 4 shot and my Browning Silver shotgun made the comparison a moot point, as a mature gobbler lay on the ground 35 yards away.
The beard measured 10 ¼ inches and one spur was 1 ½ inches long, while the other had been broken off quite shorter than that.
At 7:08 am – the first day of my hunting – the season was over, all because we had become “invisible” in plain sight with the help of a little misdirection.
