MWB put long beard on the ground this weekend!!

Friday morning finally started the Missouri spring turkey season for Bo and I as we pulled out of the driveway at 4:30 AM and headed to a property that neither of us had ever hunted before.  However, we felt that by the use of aerials, topo maps and some wishful luck, that we had a pretty good idea of where the birds would congregate.  Luckily, the farmer had not yet had a chance to disc up this particular 40 acre bean field, which created a perfect stage for some struttin', drummin', and lady romancin'.  The weather certainly did not want to cooperate as it would go from an annoying drizzle to a monsoon where you couldn't see the end of the field.  Due to the rain, the birds were pretty quiet on the roost, but we did manage to get a few gobbles out of the roosted toms in the bottom ground.

We were completely surrounded by birds all morning.  Shortly after sunrise, seven jakes and a couple hens pitched down into the field.  After an hour or so, three of them decided to check out our decoy set.  Unfortunately for me (and fortunately for the jake), I made an absolutely poor attempt at a 20 yard shot at the more dominant of the jakes and missed him BAD.  I'm not even going to try to think of any excuses why I missed so bad, I'm just accepting the fact I missed...  I was pretty down about missing the chance at my first bearded bird with a bow, but was hopeful that I would get another chance.  After watching birds in our field for four hours, the field finally cleared.

But as we were stretching our legs outside of the blind and trying to get a game plan for the remaining couple hours, a lone long beard entered the field and immediately starting making a b-line to our setup.  We quickly got everything situated again and were about to get the show of our lives.  This bird got held up at about 100 yards and sat there for over an hour in full strut, gobbling 75 times at Bo's calling with the sweet sounding VECtor calls!





































He finally broke strut to cross through a small section of standing beans and fully committed to our setup.  Again, he went into full strut and started dancin' for the ladies.  He got to within 20 yards, but I couldn't get drawn back without him catching movement.  While in full strut at 4 YARDS, he finally turned to face one of the hen decoys, giving me an opportunity to draw and give him an old fashioned texas heart shot.  He didn't go far and I finally got my first long beard with a bow.
























Bo's footage of this harvest is awesome!  We hope to have a short video of the hunt posted sometime this week, as I have a little bit of editing to do for his one hour plus show.  He ended up having a cut up 10" beard, 1" hooks, and would probably weight between 20-25 lbs.  Definitely a first bow bird I am proud of!