By Dennis Smith
Derek and Dawson huddled anxiously behind a flimsy blind of camouflage netting, cattail stalks and sticks of scraggly dead cottonwood limbs thrown together in a hasty panic. I hid several yards away with just the lens of my camera peering out from a similar heap of netting and swamp rubble. Twenty yards away, two turkey decoys wobbled seductively in a swath of bright green marsh grass. The boys called softly, making the sounds of a lonesome, lovesick hen.
Within minutes, three gobblers appeared: two jakes and a young tom. Piercing, dark brown eyes were set in featherless, buzzard-like heads with warts and wattles that constantly changed in color from brilliant red to white to blue, and then some marvelously bizarre combination of all three. Their tail feathers erupted in circular, buff-tipped fans of brown, black and tan fiery. Wing coverts and puffed-up breast feathers flashed iridescently in the sunlight, a hundred nameless shades of black, blue, gold and rusty bronze. Black- and white-striped wing primaries flared from their sides and reached all the way to the ground. They strutted, fussed and pirouetted around the hen decoys for what seemed like an eternity, but there was no way either of the hunters could draw their bows without spooking the wary gobblers. I, on the other hand, fired off about 50 shots with the camera before they finally grew suspicious of the indifferent hen decoys and wandered back into the cottonwoods.
When it was clear they weren’t coming back, I crawled out from under my blind and clambered to my feet. I shook from the effects of an industrial strength jolt of adrenaline that started racing through my veins the minute those turkeys stalked into view a half hour before, and my heart was still pounding wildly. Whew! What a rush.
That was nearly two months ago, but I can’t think of that encounter without getting a residual twinge of excitement at the wonder of it all. In fact, it’s a constant reminder of all the wildlife drama that goes on around us every day, and not just in the deer or turkey woods. Much of it happens in our own backyards, right under our noses, but goes unseen or unnoticed because we’re preoccupied with the more pressing realities of our workaday lives.
Recently, I took some time to watch and I now have photos of a raccoon family that raids our bird feeders and digs worms out of our lawn every night. And though I never saw him make a kill, every now and then I spot a telltale clump of feathers under the pine tree where a sharp-shinned hawk that hung out here ate a dove or flicker. And I frequently find patches of rabbit fur in the junipers where the neighborhood fox dined on a cottontail. One snowy day this past February, the fox actually caught the hawk and dragged him flapping and screaming across the yard and into the bushes where he promptly ate him for dinner. I have photos of that too, but they aren’t very pleasant. Hence the turkey photo.