This week Clay Hayes is bow hunting wild turkeys in the Idaho mountains with Matt Schuster, the current Presendent of the Professional Bowhunter's Society PBS.
Although turkey hunting is a challenge no matter what weapon or method you choose, hunting turkeys with a traditional bow and without a blind is borderline impossible. Join Clay and Matt as they try to call in and put an arrow into one of these keen eyed gobblers. Matt is hunting with his longbow and Clay with an osage selfbow recurve.
Right from the start the guys are into birds with a Jake and nice Tom coming in to the decoys. But when bowhunting, getting close is just the beginning. You still have to draw and shoot which, with wild turkeys, can be the most difficult challenge.
Killing a wild turkey with a longbow isn’t a difficult thing. You scout out a good location, set up a popup blind, set out a decoy or two, and wait. When the birds show up, you shoot one. Easy peasy! But like a lot of bow hunting, the hunt is what you make of it.
Turkey hunting is intoxicating, consuming, maddening. When I first started turkey hunting in Mississippi I was a little lukewarm to the whole affair. Afterall, it’s a big bird with a brain the size of a pea. How challenging could it possibly be?! But after a few frustrating hunts I began to understand how the wild turkey could attract such a devout following across the southern states.
That first turkey season was also my first spring in grad school at Mississippi State. With a lite course load and classes not starting until later in the morning I was free to hunt. And hunt I did. Forty of the forty five day season I was chasing those damn public land birds. The other 5 days were probably storming…
I would get up well before daybreak to try’n catch a gobbler still on the roost, get setup, listen to the woods awaken around me, listen to the birds fly down and, more times than not, head the other way with an entourage of hens. Then I’d formulate a sure fire plan for the next day only to be fooled again. But through sheer stubbornness I was able to finish that first season with 3 public land toms in the freezer. That was with a shotgun.
Fast forward a few years and I find myself living again in the middle of some great turkey hunting in north Idaho. But unlike the unbelievably paranoid Eastern subspecies of Mississippi, the western Merriam’s would let you get away with so much more. So I took to hunting them with my selfbow… and no blind.
The whole no blind thing is where the difficulty comes in. Finding birds is easy. Calling them in isn’t too terribly difficult either. But getting to full draw on an unsuspecting animal with zero curiosity and eyes like an eagle is damn near impossible. Damn near but not totally! That’s what I keep telling myself anyway. I’m beginning to question that.
With most of this spring spent in Florida I was only able to hunt turkeys for about a week this year. But even though we ended yet another season turkeyless, we had a great time. I was able to get one shot at a jake but shot just high as he was running from my moving shape tucked into the brush. Next year though. Next year it’s gonna happen.
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