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The turkey hunt starts with a little yellow card

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THE PROMISE of adventure in Wisconsin’s great outdoors often starts with something very simple, like receiving a yellow card in the mail from the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
This particular card, says the scribbler, will be authorized to chase tom turkeys in central Wisconsin starting on Wednesday, April 23, the second of six week-long seasons that occur in seven different hunting zones — ending on the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend.
It is that authorization, which used to be called a tag, that sets in motion all sorts of thoughts and plans and dreams about that first spring morning in the turkey woods, which starts when there’s barely light in the eastern sky.
That’s when we get to really appreciate, after a long winter, the sounds of a woods coming alive before dawn. The song starts with songbirds and the verses are added by honking geese, whistling wood ducks, cawing crows and the ancient echoes of the sandhill cranes.
And then comes the most glorious sound of all, tom turkeys gobbling from their treetops roosts, answering the soft yelps of hens in nearby trees — not to mention the shock gobbles prompted by other toms.
If you’re really lucky on a given morning, downwind of a particular ridge filled with toms, the gobbles start on one end of the ridge and move like a wave, not much different than football fans doing the wave at Lambeau Field.
For those unfortunate hunters who have yet to experience a morning chasing spring turkeys, they can only imagine how those sounds get the heart pumping with anticipation.
And for the tens of thousands who have, and who know how special this spring hunt can be, they long for the next adventure and the memories it will bring.
To be clear, spring turkey hunting is not the ambush-style meat hunt of the fall season, when toms aren’t courting hens and they aren’t generally gobbling. In fact, the state allows the taking of hens in the fall hunt.
The spring hunt is all about calling toms away from their hens, which they always seem to keep close at hand. That’s the challenge and it can be very frustrating at times.
Decoys, whether just a hen or some combination of a jake and hen, or tom and hen, can sometimes make the difference in getting a tom to close the last yardage needed to get them into gun or bow range.
But there are also times when toms are intimidated by the decoys, or spooked even, and you never learn that until they turn and just walk off — back to their hens.
It’s all about the chase, and the fun here is trying to convince a tom that you are the best deal in the woods, something worth leaving hens to check out.
Once in a great while the sport seems too easy, especially when a tom flies from its roost and marches right over to your calls and decoys without much hesitation. That’s akin to a deer hunter shooting a trophy buck at 6:30 a.m. on opening day. It doesn’t happen very often.
It’s more likely that the hens will fly down first and coax the tom or toms to follow in the opposite direction of your calling, for you see, the hunter and his or her calls are competition to those hens.
It is sometimes laughable to hear hens step up their calling game, with louder yelps and angry cuts and clucks, to draw a tom’s attention to them.
How aggressive do these hens get, you ask?
I can answer that because I’ve watched, with my own eyes, as a hen charged and crashed into the back end of a tom that was paying too much attention to my calls. And when the hen turned and ran in the opposite direction, he was right behind her.
There have been times when a group of hens came my way, leading a tom within shooting range. But you better be in the perfect position to take off a safety and pull a trigger, because with all those eyes around you, there’s a good chance the hens will bust you.
Of course the odds are in your favor if you are hunting from one of those camo tents or from some elevated deer stand, but I’ve always chosen to hunt in the open — with my back to a tree.
I think that roaming attitude came in the early days, when I started chasing gobblers with friends in Sparta who had 500 acres of fields and ridges. That was long before there were turkey seasons in central and northern Wisconsin.
Besides that little yellow card for the second season, I’m hoping to buy a couple of other tags for Zone 3 Waupaca County in order to do some hunting in May.
Every winter and every spring is just a little different, so you never know when the peak weeks will occur in any given year.
Authorizations mean opportunity, and without them, there’s no legal way to chase those May turkeys.

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