Lucy Bland knows a few things about finding and harvesting big bucks. She’s actually harvested birthday bucks the last couple of years, but she’s never been turkey hunting until this spring.
“It was just something I’d never done, and I wanted to do it,” Bland said. “I wanted to hear them gobble!”
This 75-year-old grandmother from Collinsville believes she can do anything she sets her mind to and up until now she’s been successful at just about everything she has tried.
On her very first hunt she harvested a gobbler with an 8 ¼ inch beard, 1-inch sharp spurs with a weight of 18-pounds!
New friends
A few years ago, Bland met Randy Munn and his wife, Allison. They became friends after an unexpected meeting at Okatibbee Lake. Bland was a hunter and angler, but she’d recently moved to Collinsville. After that chance encounter, she and the Munns fished together quite a bit and even deer hunted at their place.
So far this year they’ve had several good crappie fishing trips, but along the way she decided she wanted to harvest an old gobbler, so she went about getting set up to do just that.
“I told Randy that I wanted to hear a gobble and kill a gobbler,” Bland said. “After talking about it a while the season finally got here so I went hunting with Randy.”
Munn was a great athlete and baseball player from the Beulah Hubbard area and throughout the years he’s become known by friends and others in the area as an expert turkey hunter and crappie angler. Some people are just talented at everything, and Munn is one of the good guys as well.
Worth the wait
On the day of the hunt, March 24, Munn put Bland in a good area and he went to another spot to try and kill a bird of his own.
“Randy was hunting in another area behind me and told me that If I’d stay in the area he put me, that I’d probably get to see some turkeys and maybe even a gobbler,” Bland said. “Randy called me and told me to be on the lookout for turkeys because he’d just killed a gobbler and the others were on the way.”
At 1:00 p.m. Bland had almost given up hope after three hours, but she hung in there just long enough to get the job done.
“I was about to go home when I heard a twig snap, so I sat back down,” Bland said. “After three hours of waiting on that old gobbler I got my gun ready, and a hen came walking out. Right behind her came a big ole gobbler with his beard swinging from side to side.
“The gobbler was walking behind some honeysuckle vines, and he tried to stick his head and push through but he didn’t quite make it. Then he poked his head out and I took him!”
A great shot
Ka-Boom, roared Bland’s 12-gauge shotgun and a load of No. 5 shot smacked the bird right in the perfect place. The bird then went to dancing and jumping and flopping and doing the death flop as many of them do.
“Randy had told me to make sure the gobbler got his head up before I shot and then to just shoot him in the head when the opportunity presented itself,” Bland said. “I aimed at his head, and he dropped instantly. That’s the only way I can cook it.
“I called Randy and told him what happened, and he told me not to grab that bird until it quit flopping. Randy said not to grab him too quickly because he might spur me, and those sharp spurs can really do some damage.”
Bland said that she’s going to keep on enjoying the outdoors as long as she can.
Danced? C’mon, Mike. Don’t be that guy. Describing how an animal dies isn’t helping hunters out one bit. It really doesn’t help when you try to make it comical.