Saturday March 21, 2009 started the Florida Central Zone spring turkey season.  The morning was quite cool and there was just a sliver of moon in the sky.  I had spent a couple of hours on Thursday morning listening to roosted gobblers and drove the property on Friday afternoon to complete my preseason scouting.  This was only the fourth time I had been on the property in Starke, FL.  It was 45° when I left my truck at 6:20 am and started the walk to the area I planned to hunt.  I had decided to hunt in an oak hammock adjacent to beautiful cypress swamp.  There was turkey sign everywhere.  I had seen two good birds in that area when I was riding through the property for the first time the previous Friday.  I was near the southwest corner of the property.  I set two hen decoys on a two rut road and backed up towards the swamp about 25 yards.  I have a small roll up blind I erected up against an oak tree.  I was set up by 6:40 am facing towards the west and ready for daylight.  The woods came alive around 7:00 am.  A crow’s call caused two birds to shock gobble in the swamp behind me a couple hundred yards I guessed.  At first light I heard something no turkey hunter wants to hear.  I heard the sound of wings sending a big bird to the other side of the swamp.  I had set up too close to the roost and had been busted by the bird in the tree.  He was roosted about ten yards from the tree where I was seated against.  Oh well that’s hunting!  The hens started their morning routine of the light tree yelps and I had a hen fly down in the hammock about fifty yards to my left at 7:15 am.  Two more hens flew down and milled through the hammock.  I guess they did not get spooked by my presence in the predawn.  I stayed in that area until 10:00 am thinking  that more birds would show up.  I had a great time just being in the woods.  I walked back to my truck and decided to drive around and see what I could see.  I saw a group of five jakes run down a road in front of my truck for a couple hundred yards before they decided to hit the woods.  I was making a right turn onto a firebreak when I saw a single longbeard cross the firebreak to my left.  I turned to the left and saw him hot footing it through the planted pines.  I thought this might present an opportunity.  I sped around the block of pines and quickly parked my truck, grabbed a decoy, my shotgun and my diaphragm mouth call.  I put the hen decoy in the road about mid way from where I thought he might appear and bailed into the planted pines across the road.  I was thinking a single male maybe wanting some female company.  I called on and off for about forty-five minutes and never heard or saw anything.  I loaded up and headed home around noon.

I did not hunt on Sunday.

I woke up at 4:45 am on Monday and started my drive to Starke in the rain at 5:15 am.  It rained moderately all the way to Penny Farms where it let up.  My strategy was to hunt the same general area but go deeper into the hammock and not disturb the roost I had messed up on Saturday.  Somewhere between Penny Farms and Starke I changed my mind and decided to hunt the area where I had heard the birds gobble from the roost on Thursday morning.  I could park by the barn and slip around the field and into woods with a pasture in front and the roost behind it.  I took my B Mobile strutting tom decoy and a hen decoy that I set up on the ground like she was going to breed.  I placed the decoys at the edge of the field and erected my roll up blind against a tree facing the south and waited for the day to break.  At 7:00 am four or five birds started to gobble from the woods across the pasture in front of me.  There was only one problem; the birds were on the other side of the woods three hundred yards away.  They gobbled nonstop until 7:15 am when I assume they flew down.  I did not hear another gobble.  I had several hens fly down in the field and fed in front of me.  At 7:30 am I noticed something moving in the pasture and could not tell what it was.  It looked like a fan of a struttin gobbler but different somehow.  He was about one hundred fifty yards away when I determined he was missing four or five of his primary tail feathers.  A big notch was missing from his fan.  He was in full strut with three hens getting his attention.  The hens were moving in my general direction with him in tow.  He mounted two of the hens in succession and had his way with the wenches.  The third hen was playing hard to get but he mounted her and finished the orgy.  The group was about seventy-five yards away.  I soft yelped and got split tail to look at my decoys.  He strained his neck and looked for a couple of minutes but did not leave the hens.  They were starting to leave the field to my right and were going to take the tom with them out of shotgun range.  I slipped up from my blind and started to move behind several trees that would give me cover to intercept the group.  I saw the hens walk by at about  forty-five yards but no gobbler.  Where did he go?  I was straining to see him when I caught movement to my left.  He was on a fast trot straight towards my B Mobile decoy.  I was standing and braced against a pine tree and took aim.  I whacked him at 26 yards and rolled him up!  WOW!  A great bird with inch and a quarter spurs and an eleven-inch beard.  I have harvested two Osceola’s this season and I am excited to hunt Georgia, Alabama and Texas in the upcoming weeks.  GOD is Good! “Livin the Hunt Life”