Professionals, Experts and Champions

On a calm spring morning, walk and listen and call, and you can be successful on your first hunt.  Success depends more on patience and persistence than on calling ability or gear.

"A wild gobbler is no respecter of persons" an old turkey hunter once told me.."sit me down in the woods with a king and I am his equal, in the eyes of an old tom."  Any beginner can call in a wild turkey on any given day, and any self-proclaimed professional or expert can fail.

I went to the National Wild Turkey Federation meeting in Nashville Tennessee two weeks ago. I wanted to hand out some of my magazines and show some people my book on wild turkey hunting I wrote a few years ago, “The Greatest Wild Gobblers”. And while there I met with some interesting folks, as there were lots of ordinary hunters like me, looking at all the booths and folks hawking their wares.

It was the last such trip for me… no more. What time I have I want to spend outdoors, not in some city so clogged with traffic you are risking your life when you drive. Besides, I can’t afford to buy the gas to get there! Shucks, I bought a new shirt at Wal-Mart, and shined my cowboy boots and when I got there, everyone else had on camouflaged hunting garb. In the middle of Nashville!

The place was filled with experts and professionals and team hunters and everywhere you looked was the words ‘trophy’ and ‘champion’. The silliness of grown men competing in a turkey calling championship astounds me. Experts and professionals serve as judges, sitting behind curtains listening to callers striving to gain fame and acclaim as “turkey calling champions”. Imagine the high point of your life being the accomplishment as a turkey-calling champion. Nowadays there are more turkey calling champions and professional turkey hunters than there are professional athletes. I am always amazed how many of them live in suburbs and are 50 pounds or so overweight. To tell the truth, interest in calling contests seems to be waning as the simplicity of turkey hunting begins to dawn on people.

Those judges must feel like the silliest people in the world. Who amongst those would-be champions sounds different than the others? If you went out into the woods on a still calm April morning and called like one of those champions, you might offend a turkey. You’d be as out of place as a woodpecker with a jack-hammer. I think if you snuck a real hen turkey in on one of those judges, it might finish last.

The NWTF exhibition hall hosted a ton of “game ranches” offering hunters shots at huge “trophy” deer and elk. A space there costs from 800 dollars up. But, those people have the money. A large number of those places charge thousands of dollars to line up a hunt for the wealthiest of hunters and their trophies are often raised in captivity, fed special meat product diets to produce the huge antlers.

I grew up around Ozark hunters who were nothing like what I see in those places. I see hunting, at least what I knew and grew up with, as something much different than hunting is going to become in the future. When you are actually talking about “scoring” wild turkeys, and trying to get in a record book, you aren’t going to be hunting with me, I have nothing in common with you. If you are teaching some little obese boy how to use an ATV to hunt from, I know little of your hunting world, and want nothing to do with it.

One large company, out to make millions from the sale of their products, advertises their team of professional hunters as “Turkey Thugs”. Do we really want to involve the word “thugs” in hunting today? Aren’t there enough anti-hunters without inciting more with such terms?

I am a hunter, not a thug. I will hunt wild gobblers dressed in hunting clothes that didn’t cost much more than a half-tank of gas, and I’ll get years of use out of them, with the help of a patch or two. My old shotgun is scratched and scarred from hundreds of days in the woods. I doubt if I could sell it for much, but you couldn’t buy it because of the memories it invokes. One box of shells will last several seasons, and I don’t save turkey beards or spurs. I quit that 20 years ago. I will walk when I hunt turkeys, I don’t want to even be close to an ATV. I just pray I don’t get in the woods with someone who has one. I won’t be hunting trophies, and if somebody calls me a professional or expert, I will be offended just because I saw so many of them there at the wild turkey convention that I didn’t admire much.

I like to make the calls I hunt with, they only involve about ten minutes of work and they are a little bit crude, but they will compete with any of those calls I saw at that convention that costs thousands of dollars. And I am not kidding folks, they had calls there at that convention that cost hundreds of dollars, even thousands… and people were buying them. The economy must be improving.

I believe that hunting and fishing is a poor place for teaching youngsters competition. The woods and waters left in a semi-natural condition for us to use and enjoy, are sacred places. If you want to be a professional, do it legitimately. If you want to compete, do it on a sports field or in an arena or, the local pool hall! Let’s get back to being hunters and fishermen and conservationists, and not experts, professionals, and thugs. Because if we lose the right to hunt in the future, it won’t be because of what anti-hunters have done, it will be because of what we hunters have made of hunting.

There is nothing easier than calling up a wild gobbler when conditions are right, nothing harder to accomplish when conditions are wrong. Last year I was within 60 yards of an old tom that stayed in one little area for three hours while I watched him, and tried my best to call him to me with no luck. That day, I was the worst turkey caller in the world. The next day, miles away in different woods, I suddenly got good at it again.I called a wild gobbler about mid-morning that gobbled at me about 200 yards away, and ran to my call as hard as a wild turkey can run. He nearly went past me, running. His head was bobbing back and forth so fast it was like shooting at a rabbit. The second gobbler was a bigger, older tom than the one the previous day, judging from his spurs.

You can get one of my little wooden calls at the swap meet we are going to have March 19th. I will make a bunch of them and if I run out I will show you how to make your own. I don’t want too many of them out there in the woods though, the population of wild gobblers may suffer if they should fall into the hands of some experts and professionals. I don’t want those turkey thugs to get ahold of one.

There will be an Ozark turkey call maker at our swap meet with some really good, top quality box calls. If you want to reserve a table for yourself, do it soon, as we only have about ten tables left. See all the information about our swap meet on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. In a week or so I will write about all the things we expect to have there. It is going to be a great event, and lots of fun for all of us common everyday grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen. Best of all, we are going to raise some money to help people in need in the Ozarks.

Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@ windstream.net