Kansas City Star Newspaper Article
Publish date: 04/25/99
HEADLINE: King of the roost North Missouri may lack trees, but it's still home to turkeys
BYLINE Brent Frazee
CREDIT The Kansas City Star
The farmland in north-central Missouri didn't exactly look like a turkey hunting paradise. But it sounded like it.
As Bruce Johnson settled into the cover of a fence line, he listened as the loud gobbles of turkeys carried in all directions from a landscape that had seemingly little cover.
"Think there's enough turkeys on this land?" Johnson whispered as he slipped a camouflage headnet over his face and leaned back against a gnarled tree."
"This place doesn't look real impressive at first glance. With all these fence rows and draws, it looks more like a place where you'd hunt quail than turkeys. It doesn't have many big patches of timber. `"But it's always had a lot of birds. Just listen."
Johnson didn't exactly have to strain to hear the birds. As darkness lifted, he was surrounded by mouthy gobblers - a welcome sound on opening day of the Missouri spring turkey season.
Johnson guessed that there had to be at least 10 toms perched on the roost trees not far from his ambush point. And there were more gobbling in the distance.
As the morning began to brighten, the turkeys pitched down out of the trees and landed in a clover field. Then they spread out and began picking at insects and seeds.
Johnson sat still and began issuing soft calls, a combination of clucks, purrs and yelps. And soon, he got an answer. Every time he hit one of his calls, a big gobbler fanned out and began strutting, seemingly wanting to impress whatever hen was calling him. But the big turkey was stubborn, reluctant to move very far. Yes, he wanted attention. No, he wasn't going to be the one to make the first move. So, Johnson became involved in a battle of wills, calling the big turkey and working it closer for almost 45 minutes.
But that gobbler wasn't the only one coming in. On the other side of a barbed-wire fence, another gobbler was coming to Johnson's calls, sounding off as he made his way through the brush.
Finally, one of the turkeys moved into a clearing behind Johnson and began displaying. Johnson poked his shotgun through the fence, fired and watched as the bird went down.
Then he watched as the other bird, startled by the shot, scooted across the field to freedom. "Now that will get your heart pounding," said Johnson, who lives in Peculiar, Mo. "This is the way an opening-day turkey hunt is supposed to go."
Johnson's turkey weighed 22 pounds, had a 12-inch beard, and had 11/2-inch-long spurs - an impressive turkey in anyone's book. But it didn't come as much of a surprise to Johnson. As a member of the Mid-America Hunting Association, a Grandview business that leases prime hunting land and opens it to hunters who buy a club membership, he discovered the farm several years ago when he was bow hunting for deer. "I was seeing more turkeys than deer," he said. "I knew I was going to have to come back there that following spring."
He did, and immediately found success. He started by setting up in a fence row along a clover field, a couple hundred yards from where the turkeys roost. He shot a gobbler there the first year, and has taken seven more in the past four years. But Johnson wasn't the only hunter finding success on that farm on opening day. In another draw, Johnson's friend, Chad Huff of Overland Park, also opened the turkey season the right way. A gobbler flew down from its roost tree, immediately responded to Huff's call and came in. In three minutes, it was over. Huff was carrying a 20-pound bird out of the woods.
On an adjacent farm, Jon Nee, owner of Mid-America Hunting Association, also had a day to remember. He watched as two gobblers and a jake followed a hen around a field. Unable to pull the gobblers from the hen, he went to Plan B. He called the hen in, then shot one of her followers.
But for as good as the opener was, Nee knew that it wasn't unparalleled. He has photo albums filled with proud hunters who have taken big turkeys on land leased by the Mid-America Hunting Association. In fact, the 152 hunters in the club who went out last spring took 212 turkeys.
"This is a good farm, but we have a lot of places where we could have done this,"' Nee said. "I'd say 70 percent of our acreage has turkeys. Up here in northern Missouri, there are farms that will hold a lot of birds."
All contents copyright 1999, The Kansas City Star. Reprinted with permission.
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