Talking turkey: Spring hunting season lasts for another week in South Florida

Everything for this turkey hunt was perfect.

Robert “RC” Callaway knew the exact limb in the exact pine tree on which the gobbler was roosted. He and Ingrid Bon walked quietly through the woods in the foggy, predawn darkness and hunkered down about 100 yards away in front of trees and dense vegetation to hide the silhouettes of their profiles.

The turkey, which they could see as the sky slowly brightened, started gobbling at 6:50 a.m., well before sunrise. And he continued gobbling for the next 25 minutes, probably 50 times in all.

When Callaway imitated the clucks and yelps of a hen turkey on his slate call, the bird gobbled. When another turkey gobbled in the distance, this bird immediately gobbled to assert his dominance.

At 7:16 the gobbler flew down and started walking away, then turned to chase a jake, a younger, smaller, year-old male turkey. When he heard Callaway’s excited yelps and looked at RC’s jake decoy, the gobbler began to walk toward us to show the fake upstart who was boss, and his booming gobble felt like it shook the ground.

Bon held her 12-gauge shotgun steady and pointed at the bird, which was 65 yards away and would soon be within 40 yards, or even closer, allowing for a clean, lethal shot. Except the gobbler turned and walked away, never to be seen again.

“Walking 30 yards that way saved that turkey’s life, and he doesn’t even know it,” Callaway said.

But that’s how it goes more often than not with gobblers during the spring turkey season, which runs for another week in South Florida and through April 25 in the rest of the state.

Wild turkeys are exceptionally wary, and although their brains are the size of a grape, they have an uncanny ability to sense when things don’t seem quite right. Instead of sticking around to investigate, they walk, run or fly away when they see or hear something that they’re not sure about.

That’s what Bon’s friend, Todd Polk, and “Alligator Ron” Bergeron experienced at a different location that morning near the Big Cypress National Preserve. They were hunting from a blind where, while scouting the week before, Bergeron had a lovesick gobbler hang out for more than two hours trying to impress the hen turkey decoys he had put out.

This morning, a gobbler marched in more than 300 yards, stopping 45 yards from the blind. Bergeron was confident the bird would come much closer, so he told Polk to wait. But for some reason the gobbler turned, walked behind some brush and disappeared.

“Had I known he was going to do that, I would’ve told Todd to shoot,” Bergeron said.

That afternoon, Bergeron and Polk spotted three gobblers in a pasture, 200 yards away. For three hours, hidden behind Bergeron’s gobbler decoy that he named Butch, they carefully worked their way through the woods around the field, eventually getting to within 75 yards of the birds. When Bergeron called, one of the gobblers moved his way, only to hang up at 60 yards, rejoin his buddies and depart.

Not long after, when three hens appeared, Bergeron told Polk that a lonely gobbler had to be close behind them. Sure enough, a bird that was bigger than the other gobblers appeared. When Bergeron yelped and the gobbler saw Butch, he came right in. Not wanting to risk having a repeat of the morning hunt, Bergeron told Polk to shoot when the gobbler was 35 yards away. The handsome 3-year-old bird had a 10-inch beard and sharp 1 1/4-inch spurs.

“That was cool. I enjoyed that,” said Polk, of Loxahatchee, who hid himself by stretching out flat on the ground and couldn’t see the gobbler when Bergeron said to shoot. “I was tucked in so far behind Ron. I knew he was there, I just didn’t know how close he was. I just kind of creeped out and there he was.”

Callaway and Bon also had seen another gobbler in another spot, but after starting their way when Callaway called, he decided not to head across the field to them and walked into a cypress swamp.

So Callaway devised a plan for the following morning: He’d build a blind out of camouflage material and palmetto fronds in front of the cypress trees where the gobbler felt safe. The fronds would break up the top line of the camo material, making it and Callaway, Bon and Polk less noticeable.

“That move was outfoxing the fox,” said Callaway, who had three gobblers approach the blind the next morning. Bon shot the closest one, about 30 yards away, for her very first wild turkey, which had a 9-inch beard and spurs just shy of an inch long.

“I think we all had an amazing weekend,” said Bon, who, like Polk, got to experience the frustration of turkey hunting as well as the ultimate thrill.

This story was originally published April 3, 2021 at 2:00 AM.