Hunter buys hunt/gun package at NWTF banquet
For every mature gobbler killed, with few exceptions, so many things have to go exactly right for the hunter, almost as if every star is in perfect alignment.
On that, you will get no argument from Blake Jensen of Woodville, whose successful shooting of a record-book bird last week in Adams County overcame so many twists and turns.
His turkey, which should rank No. 8 all-time for typical gobblers in Mississippi, had an 11 1/8-inch beard, one 1 10/16-inch spur and 1 9/16-inch spur and weighed 22.35 pounds, netting 76.35 under the National Wild Turkey Federation scoring system used by state biologists.
“It’s unbelievable,” Jensen said. “Those spurs, that beard and his size make him a bird of a lifetime.”
Just telling you the facts of the hunt would not do Jensen’s story justice.
“That part isn’t all that exciting,” he said. “It was over and we were back at the truck in under an hour, done and gone and off the property by 7:15.”
The true story of this hunt was how it came to be. He bought the hunt at Sligo Plantation, which donated it to the Natchez Chapter NWTF banquet.
“I live in Woodville and I always go to our local banquet, but this year I had a conflict and was out of town,” Jensen said. “My father-in-law owns a restaurant in Woodville and he was invited by one of his vendors to attend the Natchez Chapter banquet. He couldn’t go so he offered the two tickets to my wife and me.
“Since I missed our banquet I really wanted to go, so we went and they had this auction package that included the guided hunt at Sligo and a Winchester SXP Turkey Special 12-gauge shotgun. The gun was really tricked out, with TruGlo sights and all. I knew the gun was almost worth the $650 I bid when I got the package.”
The turkey hunt at Sligo Plantation was like a bonus.
“Part of the agreement was that a Natchez NWTF committee member had to go with me to act as a guide,” Jensen said. “Key Smith agreed to go, but neither one of us had ever been there before. The day before we hunted, Key went to Sligo and the guy there drove him around and gave him a basic tour of the place. As for the turkeys, the guy drove Key to a couple of areas and said something like ‘these are the places where we always see a lot of turkey during deer season.’ That’s all we had to go by, a starting point.”
While Smith was getting the tour of the property, Jensen was able to pattern his new gun.
“I figured, since I bought the gun and the hunt in the same package I had to use the gun,” he said. “I went and bought a box of Hevi-Loads and shot one time at 40 paces and put something like 45 to 50 pellets in the kill zone on paper. I have a 10-gauge I like to use on turkey but I think it will be staying at home in the closet for a while.”
Before sunrise on Thursday, Jensen and Smith arrived at Sligo and went to the best listening spot.
“We went to the place, got four birds to gobble within 300 yards left and right and decided to go to this one bird first,” Jensen said. “We ran into water though, and the property line was close, so we had to turn back and take our second option, which turned out to be this turkey. I guess running into that water was like a blessing in disguise.
“We got to within 100 yards of his roost, and he was still gobbling. We started some soft tree yelps and then the woods between him and us erupted with the sounds of hens yelping and then flying down. Then we heard him fly down to his hens and we thought it was over.”
With nothing to lose, Jensen and Smith went aggressive with their calling.
“Our intent was to get inside the head of the dominant hen, make her mad and call her to us with hopes of her bringing the gobbler to us,” Jensen said, adding the strategy didn’t work out as planned. “We went overboard, much more aggressive than I normally like to be, with clucks and purrs and the next thing I see is the gobbler coming to us. We didn’t entice the hens and I can’t believe it but we called him off his hens.
“In retrospect, I think part of how we were able to do that is that we detected what we thought to be a jake yelping. The hens weren’t really in a direct line between the gobbler and us, more like they were a little to our left. The jake was behind the hens and I think the gobbler wasn’t happy with the jake being there close to his hens and that might have been why the big bird was willing to leave his girls, you know, to check on him.”
The gobbler kept coming and got behind a tree, allowing Jensen to turn and get his gun in position to his right.
“All of a sudden Smith starts clucking to make him break strut and stick his head up, but what he didn’t know was that I couldn’t see him,” Jensen said. “He was still behind a tree. I thought ‘oh no, this is bad and this is over,’ but then I see the gobbler walk out and he gave me a shot.”
The shotgun roared and the bird went straight to the ground, and didn’t move.
“He went down so hard that I didn’t jump right up and Key didn’t get up because when I shot, that last step the gobbler took put him behind a tree and Key couldn’t see him,” Jensen said. “Then after a few seconds while we were getting up, the bird started flopping and fell over into the deep little slough. When I got to him, all I could see was his head and I wanted to see his spurs so I reached under the water to grab his legs.”
OUCH!
“Man I didn’t know if a snake had bit me or what, but I screamed like a little girl and jerked my hand back out of the water,” Jensen said. “I thought about it and I knew that if it wasn’t a snake then I had something really special.”
Did he ever!
“I grabbed its head, pulled him up and was shocked,” Jensen said. “Never in all my life, and I’ve been hunting turkeys over 20 years, since I was like 7 years old, have I seen spurs like that. They were long, hooked and as sharp as a knifepoint.
“When we saw those and the beard length, and he was obviously heavy, we knew he would score good. So we got on the phone to Jackson to the wildlife department and I got in touch with (turkey biologist Adam Butler) and he was able to dispatch a few officers to meet us in Meadville. As a rule, anytime a spur is over 1¼ inches, they have to be measured officially by a representative of the agency. We certified the weight at a local fish market.”
With all that done…
“I went online and found the NWTF’s website and it has a program where you enter the beard and spur measurements and the weight and it gives you the score,” Jensen said.
When told what the score was, Butler indicated the bird, if certified, will rank No. 8 in the state.
“No doubt, that’s a great gobbler,” Butler said.
And, a great story.
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Factoid:
Scoring turkeys.
Typical turkeys are gobblers with single beards. All multiple-beard birds are scored as non-typicals.
Total score is obtained by adding the turkey’s weight plus 10 times the combined length of both spurs, plus two times beard length. Weight should be measured to the nearest ounce on certified scales. Beards are measured in 1/16-inch increments from the center point of the beard’s base where it attaches to the skin to the end of the longest bristle. Spurs are measured in 1/16-inch increments along the outside center of the spur from the point at which the spur protrudes from the scaled leg skin to the tip of the spur. All weights and measurements should be converted to decimals. To compute the score, visit www.nwtf.org/all_about_turkeys/turkey_score.html.
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Got a turkey hunting or fishing story to share, contact Bobby Cleveland at bobbyc7754@yahoo.com. Selected stories will be told on Ms-Sportsman.com and may be printed in our print edition.
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