March is a favorite time of year for hunters and anglers alike as the woods are coming alive with buds and blooms and love is in the air. From spawning bass and crappie to lovesick gobblers, there’s sure to be something to seize your attention and draw you into the wild Mississippi outdoors.
Opening day of turkey season is always exciting and last year I spent the opening Saturday in the woods near Lauderdale and called up not one but two longbeards. The king of the flock came strutting up to 20 yards from me with his sidekick following close behind. I shot him in full strut, and he jumped straight up and started flipping and flopping in his dance of death. The second gobbler flew about 8-feet straight up, came down and started towards the gobbler I’d just shot.
I had to run the second gobbler off to tangle with another day. Had it been legal to kill two gobblers in one day I would have given him a free ride home also.
A few days later I was on the water at Okatibbee Lake catching my first limit of crappie with Ken Murphy. In fact, we each caught our limit of the papermouths and brought home 60 crappie after fishing about an hour! Don’t you just love spring?
So much to do and so little time to do it all. However, you can pick your passion and do some or all of it during the spring. Some hunt gobblers in the morning and then head to the lake in search of succulent crappie.
In this month’s magazine, you can meet Becky Nicosia in “Turkey Slayer Extraordinaire” and read how she hunts and harvests gobblers with her Mathews bow. Hunting with a bow almost exclusively now, Nicosia is an expert at locating and harvesting wise old birds with only a stick and string. Read about her tips and techniques of harvesting the wary old gobblers with a bow.
The 2021-2022 Deer of the Year feature revisits some of the spectacular bucks harvested during the past season. Mississippi hunters, both male and female, brought down some impressive whitetails. Take a look back at a few of the best deer and the successful hunters who harvested them.
Phillip Gentry will give anglers a variety of ways to find and catch springtime crappie in his article “Locating spring crappie.” When March rolls around anglers can catch crappie in a variety of ways and Gentry has a few tips to help anglers achieve their goals of catching the succulent perch.
If you want to know what’s happening in the turkey woods, then Andy Douglas will have his “Spring Turkey Season Forecast.” He’ll tell you what to expect in the five different regions. Check out the best bets for harvesting turkeys around the state and you just might be able to harvest a “Thanksgiving gobbler” during the spring season.
Whether you choose to fish or hunt, or do both, there’s surely some good fishing and hunting just a cast or shot away!
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