Photo By Philip Jordan

It was a cool and dreary midseason morning with a stiff breeze. Not the best of spring gobbler hunting conditions, mind you, but certainly not bad enough to keep me from going. It made for kind of a solemn Sunday, no less, at one of the few Mountain State counties that still afford the option. A long pre- and post-dawn traipse atop a Logan County ridge was met with nary a gobble.

Sure, the habitat is roughed up a bit by surface coal mining, logging, gas lines and ATV trails so typical of the state’s southwestern coalfields. However, this 2006 hunt began to play the sweet-sounding Golden Oldie music of a distant gobble that barely penetrated the stiff breeze.

Knowing this country more so than having turkey scouted it, time was of the essence for the somewhat distant bird. For folks who hunt these rugged hills, many such a “heard bird” is flat out impossible to get to. This one was within realm. I had his location estimated to be near a fairly new gas well site where he could openly strut his stuff for the hens.

I all but ran the horseshoe-shaped gas well service road to get above and around to him, but my guess may have been a little too good. I almost busted a turkey while closing the distance to make my calling setup. Luckily, the bird crept out of sight in the opposite direction. With waning hope, I set a hen decoy in the gas well service road and plopped down in a stump-backed foxhole just aside of it.

I yelped with a diaphragm call, receiving a decent if not immediate response. While I played hard to get, the infrequent gobbles seemed to be going in the other direction as the wind picked up. At least that’s what they were telling me. That in mind, I called back a little louder and more aggressively.

A bobbing white head soon appeared over the mini-horizon right at the gas well, and as if to say “ah-ha there you are,” he instantaneously made eye contact with the decoy from some 100 yards distant!

The gobbler then began a slow but steady, head half-high, zigzag walking strut of an approach. I had flubbed just such an “open” bird the year before and was doing the best I could to wait for the proper shot through the weeds.

The Mossberg model 835 boomed and the turkey fell dead in its tracks. The dandy gobbler lay goose-necked on the ground, first ever for a Sunday bird as well as for the scattergun, a National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) 30th Anniversary version, which I’d won at a local fundraising banquet.

Just as my luck had quickly changed for the better that morning, the West Virginia turkey flock could use a little bit of a good run, too. Speaking of runs, there was nothing like that meteoric restoration-era ride of 17 straight state-record spring gobbler kills between 1979 and 1995, topping out at the then-record kill of 16,770.

The DNR’s in-state trap-and-transplant program ended in January 1989 and the 1995 record reflects a “saturated” statewide population for all 55 of its counties. Nature has a way of keeping some sort of balance and the flock came back down to earth, mostly declining between 1996 and 2000.