Saturday May20, 2006

This morning I figured that I would move in to where we had the close encounter with the birds behind Putnam's the day before. We got into a good spot, and waited, and waited and waited. No gobbles on this side of the road. The bird across the road gobbled again, once! I started a series of calls, and on my first call a bird sounded off to my call, about 400yds up the mountain. It was one of the birds I met with my Dad two weeks ago. He answered 4 times, but moved up the hill, just as knew he would, and I should have just went up there first and gotten around on him. We worked Loder's again, and found 4-wheeler tracks that were fresh. The same joker that rode past Bill and Aaron two weeks ago was in there again. We didn't see or hear anything in there. We headed over to the Corners, and as we sat in the truck finishing up the stories from the ride over, a hen flushed 50yds in front of the truck. Oh well, get all the hens out of here! We worked the lower side of the corners and on our way back up to the pond we ran into that hen and spooked her again in the clearings just above the road and below the pond. We went over to Sausage Hill, and started working along the ridge. The wind was really whipping today, and it made the top of that hill almost unbearable. I decided to drop off the back side of the mountain, where it is protected from the wind. As we neared the first switchback on the trail going down, I told Ned about how I had called birds in there before and the we should call. Well, my first series of calls was answered by some yelps and cutting. We set up and brought a hen in to about 10yds. Ned caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and the slight motion of moving his head spooked the hen. The motion turned out to be nothing, and we were done for the day!