with Mark Drury
My daughter, Taylor, has been hunting turkeys since she was 10 years old. She is 22 now. As always, Taylor and I hunted together this season. We went to Iowa, one of our favorite places to hunt. Taylor doesn’t do real well getting up before daylight to go out and hunt turkeys, but she gets all fired up about an afternoon hunt. We were hunting a place on my farm that I call the “Hot Corner,” where two different woodlots come together. We set up in the timber, because earlier we had seen turkeys out in the field that was tilled. We had been hunting those turkeys in the morning and tried to pull those turkeys out of the timber to come into the field without any luck.
The turkeys roosted right on the edge of the field and then flew down to the middle of the field. There was no way to get close to them during a morning hunt, and we couldn’t get those turkeys to fly back into the timber where we could take them. So, I decided that the turkeys should be out in the field late in the afternoon. I also knew they wanted to roost in the trees right next to the field.
Taylor and I made a big loop around the field and into the timber to try and call the turkeys in before they flew up to roost. The birds were out in a clover field and a corn field. We started calling to them, and one of the longbeards began gobbling hard and loud. Finally, we saw him strutting out in the clover field at about 200 yards and coming to us. Then he moved into the woods and walked within 10 yards of Taylor, and she took him.
This hunt was memorable because that tom strutted through the timber for a good ways before he walked within range of Taylor. We filmed the hunt with our cameras in the spring of 2017, and we put the video live the Drury Outdoors Facebook page. That bird weighed 25 pounds, had 1-1/4-inch spurs and was a mammoth-sized Iowa gobbler.
