Five-week turkey hunting season gets underway
HUNTERS IMITATE THE YELPS, CLUCKS AND CACKLES OF FEMALE TURKEYS TO PERSUADE GOBBLERS TO COME TO THEM.
The spring wild turkey season opened with a bang last weekend at “Alligator” Ron Bergeron’s Green Glades West
Ranch.
His guests bagged five Osceola turkeys on the sprawling 6,000-acre property located north of the Big Cypress National Preserve. Bergeron, who lives in Weston, carefully manages the cypress swamps, pine flats, oak hammocks and prairies on his land for the benefit not only of turkeys but also white-tailed deer, wild hogs, panthers, bobcats and black bears.
The day before the five-week season began, Bergeron had discussed the importance of being a steward of the land, especially the Everglades, which supplies the bulk of South Florida’s drinking water, during an Environmental Day that he and his wife, Ali, hosted at the ranch for Youth Leadership Broward.
The experience, which included a tour of the ranch that featured sightings of deer and hogs and videos of panthers and bears roaming the property, amazed the Broward County high school juniors, many of whom said they never imagined such wildlife even existed in Florida.
The students didn’t see any turkeys that Friday morning, but the birds put on a show for Landen Tomlin and Remi DeSarro on Saturday morning.
They didn’t hear any gobbling, which is what male turkeys do during the spring mating season to let hen turkeys know where they are in the hopes that the hens will spend some quality time with them.
But 40 minutes after sunrise, two hens walked past the blind where they were sitting, followed by five immature year-old gobblers, known as jakes.
The woods were quiet after that, but Tomlin and DeSarro were patient. And three hours later they were rewarded when they saw two mature gobblers, both with long, bristly beards dangling from their chests, walking their way.
Tomlin raised his shotgun as the turkeys came closer. DeSarro said to shoot the second bird, which had a longer beard. The gobblers walked through an opening in the trees, intent on checking out the turkey decoys placed to the right of blind
and not realizing that Tomlin was 20 yards away.
When he pulled the trigger, the second gobbler flopped on the ground while the first one jumped up, then ran back to see what had happened to his buddy. After strutting around the dead turkey, fanning out his tail feathers and puffing out his body as if to say “I’m now in charge,” the bird headed over to the hen decoys, but they were not impressed.
The other hunters at the ranch had seen gobblers, but none of them came close enough to shoot, staying several hundred yards away. Hunters imitate the yelps, clucks and
cackles of female turkeys to persuade gobblers to come to them, but the males know that the hens should come to them and they often won’t budge.
The following day, Robert “RC” Callaway sweettalked three gobblers into shotgun range for Joe McDonnell and his son, Jake. The first one came right in to RC’s calling and Jake bagged his first wild turkey. The hunters then moved to a different area where Callaway called in two big gobblers that came in strutting and Joe got his bird.
That same morning, Bergeron demonstrated how to challenge a dominant gobbler to make him come in looking for a
fight.
A member of the South Florida Water Management District governing board, where he is the point man on issues affecting the water level and water quality in the Everglades, Bergeron, 80, is an exceptional turkey hunter. That’s partly because he has had so many encounters with the birds and partly because he is a master woodsman who knows how to use the landscape to prevent wary turkeys from seeing him.
Several gobblers were roosted in the trees adjacent to the field where Bergeron, DeSarro and Matt Parrish set up in the dark. The birds gobbled continuously for 40 minutes and eventually one of them headed toward the hunters.
Every time Bergeron yelped on his mouth call, the gobbler would stop and strut, then continue walking toward the source of the yelping. The hunters got a scare when a real hen showed up and started walking across the field. The gobbler followed her, but when she showed no interest in him, he headed back toward Bergeron’s calling. When he came within 40 yards, DeSarro dropped him with one shot.
Ready to pack up and head back to camp, Bergeron suddenly spied two mature gobblers in the middle of the field. To get their attention, he crawled through a flooded ditch with a gobbler decoy hiding his face and Parrish crawling behind him.
“Having that decoy in front of us allowed us to move on those birds without spooking them,” Bergeron said. “Otherwise, there was no way we could get to where we needed to be.”
When the hunters got to the edge of the ditch and the gobblers saw the decoy, they sprinted over. But before they got close enough to beat up the decoy, Parrish killed the bigger of the two, capping a perfect opening weekend.