Gobble! Gobble! Do You Hear Me?

 

A lot has been written about a wild turkey’s ability to see things, and rightfully so. Make even the slightest wrong move at the wrong time and a wild turkey’s eyesight seems to be able to see through concrete walls. 

A wild turkey’s power of visual resolution, or that of any bird for that matter, has been estimated to be upwards of eight times that of humans. I believe it. I think they can see the whisker roots of uncamouflaged, male faces shaved yesterday, and know them to be human. Yes, I do. 

That being said, not enough has been said about a turkey’s ability to both hear sounds long distance, and pinpoint within one yard the exact origination point of that sound. It is yet another characteristic of the species that makes you think that given their inability to scent danger, they would otherwise be unkillable in a fair chase hunt. 

One time Jerry Ballard of Hominy and I were chasing gobblers up on the old Dixie Oil Lease up in the wild, Big Osage just as an afternoon thunderstorm was bearing down on us. Off to the west, the sky was a deep, bruised purple veined with golden forks of lightning. The wind was fitful, seeming to blow several different directions at once. “Fire on the mountain, lightning in the air,” Marshall Tucker would’ve said. 

Not hunting turkeys off the morning roost that day, we had no way of knowing where any were exactly. Basically we just began to meander around in known turkey country hoping to call a wandering spring gobbler up “blind” as they say. 

Finally, we got a bird to answer; a long ways off, many hundreds of yards away, was all we knew. We sat down immediately in a clump of running oak on the edge of a broad prairie, and began team calling in earnest. 

After the better part of an hour, the bird’s gobbling location had not changed. He was “hung up”, way over yonder somewhere; maybe over beyond multiple draws was all we could guess. 

“Let’s move,” Jerry said, “and try to cut a circle on ‘im.” So we did. 

We got to the spot where we thought he had been, and began to call again, confident now that we had cut the distance to where the wily old bird would be more comfortable with rendezvousing in a place where everything wanted to eat him. Then he gobbled again, in what sounded like the exact spot we had just left when we first heard him. 

And he gobbled, and he gobbled, and he gobbled. He gobbled so much in the new location, again without moving, that I would have sworn he would have lost his voice. He gobbled so much the thunder began to answer him, or maybe it was the other way around. Gobble, thunder. Thunder, gobble. It was crazy. 

“Conrad”, Jerry said, “something’s wrong. Let’s sneak back up this ridge and look back at the spot we left,” which is what we did, using binoculars to scan the point of our original contact, maybe an eighth of a mile away. 

Doing that, we saw not one turkey, but two, both longbeards; one not gobbling, and appearing to be subordinate to the other in pecking order rank. They were standing in the literal butt impressions Jerry and I had made when the “go ‘round” had begun. They could not have coursed our first calling location any better had they been carrying along a GPS system. 

Maybe they had been headed our way all along, just taking their time in doing it. Nobody knows. 

We did not kill either of those two turkeys. That all happened several years ago, somewhat beyond the known life span of a wild turkey. They are still alive in my brain; maybe Jerry’s as well. 

I believe that they will hear me in the turkey afterlife, exactly where I sit, should I make a turkey sound down here on earth, and come to me as turkey ghosts where I sit after dark in this room hunched over these computer keys. In fact, they just did. 

You heard them, too, right?

 © 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen