Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat, but here's what we did.
We drove back down the road and parked well away from the area, and cut across the woods to the north into the cutover. It was very thick, and we had to weave and duck and slither through it, using it as cover to quickly get all the way to the edge of the timber nearest the place we'd seen the turkeys in the field. Neither one of us liked the idea of trying to get to the island of woods via a wide open field like that.
So, we used the cover of cutover to quickly work our way into the woods near the field where we’d spotted the birds earlier. As we eased out of the cutover into the edge of open woods, we paused, and shifted to stealth mode. And I immediately heard scratching. I motioned to my brother to sit down, and it soon became apparent that there was a fairly large group of turkeys nearby. The turkeys had moved from the field into the woods, and were tearing it up. ("X" - our position; "S" - for scratching)
We went to work on them, and after about 5 minutes, I could catch glimpses of them starting to work over our way, scratching as they came. It looked to be 15 or more turkeys. Then, a tractor drove by out in the field, and the turkeys turned and ran deeper into the woods away from us.
Aggravated, we stayed put and continued to give them some soft stuff.
After several minutes, I decided to crank it up a notch, and was rewarded with hearing my first gobble of the day!! It was one of those lazy afternoon half-hearted gobbles, but it was sweet to hear. And they were probably about 100 yards away.
So, we went to work on them, and soon we could see them coming our way. My brother was going to be the shooter, and I was the backup.
But suddenly, a couple birds started approaching quickly, swinging wide to our left – the only place my brother couldn’t shoot! We had already discussed what we would do if that happened – I was to shoot if a shot presented itself.
So I scooted around the tree I was on so I could cover the entire left flank before the birds could see me. They were coming fast, and staying behind some bushes. And within 30 seconds, I saw the lead bird was a tom, and the bird behind him was a strutter, with the hens following behind. When the first one arrived at an opening where he could see us and stopped, he craned up his neck, and I gave him what was coming.
My bird went down, and the second bird ran up and jumped all over him. But the bird just stayed right there in that spot flogging and pecking, with his fan up and facing away from us. I was blocking my brother, so I laid down, inviting him to shoot. But he didn't want to shoot with the turkey's head unseen, so he kept waiting for a shot. In the meantime some of the turkeys were trotting away back through the woods putting and carrying on, and I was beginning to think my brother was messing up. Most of the birds were moving away quickly, and the one doing the flogging was bound to go join them before much longer. Finally, after what had to be a couple minutes, the bird ran off to join the others, and my brother took a bad running shot at him, and missed.
