NY Boss Tom down!


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Yesterday, May 1st was opening day here in NY. My buddy Mike had to work and so did my dad so I couldn't skip school like originally planned. Besides the weather was crappy anyway.

So we decided last night that we would head out this morning and see what we could do. We went to a place he has access to in Orange County, only about a 30min drive from where we live here in Rockland County.

It was pouring rain this morning so on the ride upstate we were debating on wheter or not we made the right decision, but we quickly agreed that a rained out morning turkey hunting sounds better than sleeping and thinking about what could've been. He said he knew where the birds were roosted and sure enough, he did. We got there around 5:00 am as the rain slowed down and eventually stopped and went for a little hike. At about 5:15 we look up in the trees and there was a turkey sitting on the limb about 75 yards away. We get set up real slowly as the turkey is waking up, I throw some soft tree yelps out there the bird stands up on the limb, shakes off the rain from the night and turns around looking our way. All we saw was the sillhouette of a beard on the bird. I throw some more yelps out there and the bird pitches down 15 minutes later about 10 yards in front of the decoys. He took a few steps closer towards the dekes and at that point I didn't have a shot because there were trees in my way and I was facing differently. I told Mike I had no shot so he took the shot. He shot and down the bird went. When we got up to him we had no idea how big of a bird it was. 11 1/4" beard, one spur was 1 3/8" and the other spur was 3/4". The one spur was broken and missing probably a half an inch. We later weighed him in at 22lb. So basically, Mike had his bird down at roughly 5:30am.

We worked a few more birds the rest of the morning, only one coming close, about 55 yards according to Mike. I didn't see this other gobbler either. I certainly heard him though. This bird pitched down off the roost towards the hens that were yelping behind us. He had another gobbler with him too. We're gonna see if we can get back on them tomorrow morning.

But anyway, here's the pics:

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