Life springs from a South Texas field
If, as Emerson wrote, “Earth laughs in flowers,” the patch of South Texas before me was busting a gut.
So, from the sound of it, was the tom turkey behind me and a little to the south, somewhere in the mosaic of oak motts, mesquite flats and grassy openings that define the rich landscape of the great coastal sand sheet splayed across a handful of counties near the southern tip of this state.
The tom had thundered an answer to my earlier imitations of a hen turkey — yelps and clucks and purrs scratched out with an oak striker on a slate-over-glass call fixed in a cup milled from Texas mesquite wood. And he gobbled, then double-gobbled, then triple-gobbled (!!!) when I hit him with a mix of calls from the slate and a mouth diaphragm. He was, as turkey hunters put it, “hot.”
My heart rate jumped, and I’m sure I smiled. Simply having a turkey respond to a call — to know you touched some deep, primal part of a wild creature — has a value that can’t be measured or explained in terms anyone but a hunter (and not even all of them) understands. It’s a connection, direct, atavistic and crucial. Connecting, after all, is the most valuable reward to be found through time spent afield during spring turkey season. It comes through moments such as when a gobbler answers your hen imitations.
But it comes in a lot of other ways, too. Some of those competed for my attention on this late April morning.
One was the open field in front of me. I’d nested to a set against a large mesquite on the edge of the 20-acre or so expanse of mostly treeless land when it was still dark. As the sun rose behind me, it illuminated a landscape bathed in color. Lavender of croton blossoms. Blue curl and blue-eyed grass. The mix of reds and yellows in lantana and Mexican hat and brown-eyed Susans. Bee balm and buffalo bur. The bright yellow of a half-dozen members of the sunflower family. The near luminous yellow of prickly pear blossoms. Yes, the earth in South Texas was laughing.
Conditions are ripe
It doesn’t always laugh, as anyone who knows this state certainly understands. But a wet, mild winter in the wake of a blessed couple of consecutive years of mostly mild, wet conditions had its cheering effect on the landscape. South Texas, like much of Texas, has exploded in a flush of vegetative exuberance. The result was painted on the land in the riot of wildflowers and the robust growth of native grasses and budding and leafing of trees and shrubs. The land was dressed in its Sunday best, the air a perfume of chlorophyll and flowers.
Just as the land had responded to the tonic of rain, so had the wild things that live on it. Wildlife has thrived on this landscape, thanks to the run of beneficial conditions.
A dozen white-tailed deer, mostly gravid does trailing near-grown yearlings that soon would be on their own when fawning season comes in a few weeks, browsed for buds on shrubs and nipped forbs growing among the grasses and flowering plants. The morning was still enough, and the deer so close, I could hear the “snap” of them nipping breakfast and the grinding as they chewed. The deer looked fat and healthy — like the land.
A caracara lit in the top of a dead live oak, the tree a victim of the oak wilt disease that has left tree skeletons across so much of central and south Texas. The “Mexican eagle” was immediately set upon by a mockingbird that relentlessly and bravely hectored the raptor, repeatedly diving and striking the much larger bird. Chances were, the mockingbird had a nest nearby and was protecting that considerable investment.
We’d witnessed other examples of such behavior over the previous couple of days my brother Les and I had roamed this piece of wild Texas on the excuse of hunting turkeys but really just reveling in the things we saw, the experiences they brought and the connections and epiphanies they generated.
We’d watched a scissortailed flycatcher divebomb a hunting Harris hawk, at one point actually alighting on the hawk’s back and riding it for a few yards. The Harris hawk yielded the field to the slightly built flycatcher.
Les was similarly bombarded and cursed by a pair of green jays when he sat beneath a tree for a session of trying to call a gobbler. The raucous jays were ceaseless in their screaming and pestering. He soon figured why. The pair had a nest in the tree, and it held a pair of fledglings. His cover blown, Les, like the Harris hawk, moved on, leaving the parents to their crucial duty.
There were so many other birds, too — birds found almost nowhere else but deep South Texas. Kiskadees fighting their reflection in the camphouse windows, so angry with their perceived rivals that the crests on their heads rose like punk-rock mohawks. Male golden-fronted woodpeckers announcing their claim to territory and soliciting mates by hammering on anything resonant. Curve-billed thrashers chasing beetles on the ground. Vermilion flycatchers repeatedly bouncing from perches to the ground where they snatched grasshoppers and returned to the perch to enjoy the snack.
From all corners
One morning, as Les walked to a hunting spot in the growing dawn, he caught a glimpse of movement in a oak. It was a hawk having a meal of mouse. Life in the food chain.
We saw Texas tortoises eating cactus. Coyotes slinking in the shadows. Snake trails in the sandy two-tracks. Painted buntings in the mesquite. Horned lizards scurrying across the sandy grasslands like miniature dinosaurs. So many grasshoppers that walking across a grassy opening was like wading into a sea of grasshoppers, each step flushing waves of the winged insects. No insect-eating bird was going hungry.
And the quail … Lord! Three consecutive years of good conditions have seen the bobwhite quail population explode in much of Texas, a welcomed event following years of drought that had many wondering if these iconic game birds would evaporate like a South Texas stock tank in August.
We heard quail calling almost constantly, especially in morning and late afternoon. It was hard not to smile at every “bob … white!” We laughed at the ranch foreman’s telling of how the constant whistling of quail frustrated a fellow working with him. They were up near the front of the ranch, working on a building. The other fellow had set the ringer on his cell phone to emit a bobwhite call when he received a call. After a dozen or so times digging for his phone only to realize he was hearing a real quail instead of a digital one, the guy gave up and turned off his phone.
Texas turkeys also have responded to the good habitat conditions over the past couple of years.
Two years ago, the birds had one of their most successful nesting seasons in well over a decade. This year, Texas spring turkey hunters are reaping the benefits. In many parts of Texas’ Rio Grande turkey range, the turkey population is booming and holds an abundance of 2-year-old gobblers. These 2-year-olds, entering their first mating season as adults, are long on testosterone and often short on experience and wariness. They can be vocal and aggressive and make even a modestly skilled turkey hunter believe they are the best turkey caller/hunter since Ben Rogers Lee. That has helped make the 2017 spring turkey season, which closes May 14 in much of the state, one of the best in recent years, according to many hunters’ anecdotal observations.
I have chased turkeys on the Brooks County tract we hunted last weekend for more than a decade. I have never seen as many turkeys as we saw this season, or the landscape so robust and almost bursting at the seams with life or witnessed so many memorable moments of connection with it all.
Trail of turkeys
I thought about that, sitting under the mesquite that morning this past weekend, mesmerized by the sight of field carpeted by wildflowers and wildlife.
The gobbler brought me back to the moment. He gobbled, hard. He was closer.
Two gray-headed hens appeared in the edge of the field as if they’d sprung from the ground. How do they do that? The hens stared at the two decoys for a few seconds before resuming their furious bugging.
Then he was there, standing near a mesquite snag, tail fanned, feathers puffed to their maximum, his blood-gorged, naked head and neck almost luminescent blue and red. He’d been trailing the hens. The bird threw his head forward in a thunderous gobble, tucked it back to his body and came strutting and drumming and dancing through the flowers to the decoys.
He was 17 steps away, standing a couple of yards in front of the jake decoy, feathers glowing iridescent in the early-morning sunlight when I eased my head over a couple of inches to look and aim through the red-dot scope atop the shotgun balanced on my knee.
Around the gobbler’s brightly lit head were even brighter wildflowers stretching to the horizon.