Recently, I sat for 1.5 hours in a doctor’s waiting room. It seemed like an eternity.
Two days later, I plopped my butt in a ground blind for five hours as I hunted spring gobblers. I swear that only 20 minutes went by.
Perspective! Right?
If you bag a spring gobbler, you are required to make the state aware of it. You know … where and when did you get it? What tool did you use to make it dead? How long was the beard? How big were the spurs?
There are many other things, though, you can harvest on such a trip and there is no requirement to tell anybody, unless you choose. Before daybreak on the morning of May 1, perched high above the ridgeline of Dan’s Mountain was a stunning half-moon. Only the left side of the slightly yellow semi-orb was glowing. It was a sight to behold and I beheld it for a couple of minutes, slowing my arrival at the ground blind.
It was from that blind on the first day of the gobbler season that something downhill caught my eye. Moving slowly uphill toward me was a porcupine. I have a lot of trail camera images of porcupines from the mountain and I’ve actually seen a porky three times now. This was the best view yet and I snapped a photo.
Although I haven’t observed the brilliant red of a scarlet tanager yet this season, that is one of my favorite visions to bag which I don’t have to report. I’ve always thought of such a sighting as good luck, a delightful omen that I would soon be seeing and tagging a longbeard turkey. One spring I saw five of the dazzling scarlet dots in the same tree. No, I didn’t get five gobblers.
With my over-the-counter hearing aids, I can once again hear forest music that had evaded me for a long time. On that same half-moon May morning, I listened to the lilting serenade of a woods thrush. This guy or gal went on with its crepuscular anthem for some time and I didn’t object. Just to be a nice bird, it moved closer so that I didn’t miss a note.
I have hunted that particular site several times this spring. There is a crow or crows that raise a ruckus in the same place off to my right every time. The cacophonous opera takes place off and on all morning. I keep thinking a Tom turkey will schock gobble to the sounds but it hasn’t happened.
The mountain, even at 2,300 feet has taken on that soft, chartreuse glow that is produced by young foliage, especially when seen from a distance. There is still pretty good visibility beneath the canopy, but it will close off more and more as the leaves enlarge and take on the dark-green tint of summer.
If you needed yet another of your natural senses made aware of life in the woods, skunks can do that for you. I’ve detected the presence of many a skunk in the spring gobbler woods via my nose, but none this year so far. I once saw an albino skunk.
You experience a lot of woodsy things when you hunt from a ground blind, because you don’t spook other life forms by moving around. Deer and bear are the exception, of course. Noses with those sorts of detection talents should be illegal.
If I am lucky enough to get a gobbler, I promise to report it. But even if I don’t, I know I won’t go home empty- handed or empty-headed.