Getting Ready for Spring 2015

The spring season  is drawing near. Opening day is three weeks ahead and just like my inability to buy holiday gifts with time to spare, I'm not at all prepared for the big day. My license has yet to be purchased; my hunting arrows have yet to be sighted in; my calls, well, they are all set. Been making them up for months and have at least one short box, scratch box, diaphragm, and  tongue call in my car and truck.

My freestyle calling and rhythm accompaniments to modern pop songs is getting pretty good. We'll see if the gobblers respond to the refrain from "Uptown Funk" and the monotony of Maroon 5 or Taylor Swift. Not great music but fun to accent with clucks and purrs with a yelp or kee kee run in transitions from one chorus to another.

Hunting stories are starting to fill the internet turkey forums. Hearing tales of misfortune and good luck is beginning to put a bit of urgency into my preparation. The edges of fields and the areas below the evergreens which remain somewhat sheltered from the snowfalls have begun to melt. Seeing the flocks of turkeys scratching about looking for something to eat is becoming more common. Axel deep ruts on many of the dirt roads hinder the ability to keep an eye out for birds. Occasionally a south facing field has melted off and the Toms are puffed up and strutting for the hens which are too busy looking for food to notice the display. Seeing this makes me happy. Birds survived the winter giving me hope for an eventful spring season.

Strutting Toms and hens ignoring them. Soon the flocks will break up and the season will get underway

The woods roads are melting out and with any luck, gobblers will replace skiers.

Looking for something to eat.

Weather is the wildcard. This past winter in Vermont was colder then usual. Each month from November through March there was at least one night with below zero F temperatures. February had a few hours where the thermometer read above freeing. The snow arrived  before Thanksgiving and most of the woods have at least a foot still to melt. Must be similar in most northern states. Right now the snow is falling at three inches an hour. In the morning some fortunate turkey hunters will be running a scratch box while I'm running a snowblower.  Not to worry; last winter we were skiing the local cross country trails until tax day and the hunting was fantastic.This year, despite the cold and current snowfall we put the skis away last week.The trails become the shooting lanes during the summer so it's time to prepare the bow.

Might still be able to ice fish after noon on opening day. Still three feet of ice on the lake.

People very often ask why hunt turkeys with a bow and not a shotgun. I wish there was a good sportsman's answer and there isn't even a bad sportsman's answer. The reason I enjoy hunting with a bow is the quiet. Not the stealth quiet of the silent arrow but the quiet of training. To be able to hit a turkey in the head with an arrow at twenty to thirty yards requires a lot of shooting. Shotguns are fantastic but loud. Shooting is a meditative activity for me and archery can be  practiced at any time of the day without bothering anyone.
My family is fortunate to have two dedicated ranges at the house plus the back porch to shoot from. There is a 50 meter International Biathlon Union legal biathlon lane and another 100 meter archery line. The archery line doubles as a rifle range when we feel like shooting a bit of 1/5 silhouette or plinking tin cans. Even the neighbors are not too close but close enough to hear the report of firearms.

There is also the experiment of seeing how difficult it might be to feed oneself using just a bow. Granted, modern equipment makes it a bit simpler and the ultimate goal is taking a turkey with a home built bow. In the meantime we'll practice up with the training wheels and rifle quality sighting gear. This season I've decided to try some guillotine style broadheads and will report on this in a future post.

Eighteen months ago I decided to go back to school and earn a masters degree in environmental law and policy. I began looking for a job six months ago and have had a few phone interviews but not much else. Feels like a gobbler responding to a yelp and then nothing; exciting at first but ultimately a letdown.

To stay busy and figure out some wood combinations for a kitchen cabinet retrofit I began making calls. What grabbed my fancy has been scratch boxes and vibrating tongue calls. The scratchers are made on a milling machine and the tongue call bodies are cut on the tablesaw. A jig guides a small router to separate the tongue from the top. It took a long time to learn to make and tune a simple scratch box and many fires were started with reject tongue calls. Eventually, the calls began to sound like turkeys and if I can't take a bird with a homebuilt bow I feel good about being able to take one with a homebuilt call.

A few vibrating tongue calls. These are a combination of bodies being some combination of cherry, maple, purpleheart,  and walnut. The playing surface is either walnut or beech. The bottoms are either curly maple, walnut or cedar.

These scratch boxes are made from a single piece of wood with a top cover to give the calls contrast. They play well on pegs made from walnut, beech, ipe, maple or slate. Each peg gives the same call a different sound.