Scott: Even the best turkey hunters come up empty

After he had been foiled again by Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam lamented, “I hates rabbits!”  

I know how he feels. A frustrating series of miscalculations during the first four days of this year’s spring turkey season has left me more than ready to say, “I hates turkeys.”

When I go hunting, I expect to kill a turkey.  My friends, my readers and complete strangers expect me to kill a turkey.  

Most of my spring turkey hunts the past several years have lasted less than an hour.  I have been reminded that turkey hunting isn’t always like that.

On opening morning, I hunted a multi-hundred-acre piece of land I know like the back of my hand.  

Most of it is open fescue hay ground, and all but the smallest drainages are timbered with a mixture of hardwoods and a tangle of brushy under story.  

I’ve been hunting the property for a number of years, and the one thing I know for sure is the gobblers will move into the open fields to see and to be seen as soon as they fly down from their roosts.

I set up a blind overlooking the edge of a field at the head of a timbered hollow.  

I had killed several big gobblers from this location and saw no reason why April 19 would be any different.

Dawn found the air filled with lusty gobbles emanating from every place on the property where two or more trees stood within 10 yards of each other.  

But not a single turkey set foot beyond the boundaries of the gnarly timber.

After three fruitless hours, I accepted defeat.  

I couldn’t hunt on the second day of the season, and my host had promised someone else they could hunt there later in the week, so I moved my base of operations to another, much larger but even more open farm.  

Again, I’ve hunted the property for several years and have had exceptional luck tagging gobblers there.

I set up near a newly planted cornfield at dawn Wednesday with four decoys displaying what I hoped would be come-hither glances.  

Again, I heard an extraordinary amount of gobbling but not a single turkey came into the cornfield.  

I set up a second blind close to the creek that bordered one side of the farm.

I hunted out of it Thursday morning but to no avail.  Then about 9 a.m., I spotted 22 turkeys about an eighth of a mile away in an open field.  A closer look aided by binoculars revealed that all of them were either mature toms or jakes.

I belly-crawled through 8-inch tall, dewed-soaked grass to within 70 yards of the flock without being detected — or so I thought.  

Then a loud “Putt!” directed my attention to my left.  Two mature toms were standing about 50 yards away.  I twisted around slightly and raised my shotgun only to discover that red-dot electronic sights apparently can’t withstand the repeated side-to-side blows created by belly-crawling through soggy grass.  

By the time I remembered, I could see beneath the sight’s mount and aim with the shotgun’s front bead, but there wasn’t anything to aim at.

Call me a quitter if you must, but at that point, I went home.

If you wrapped a tag around a gobbler’s leg during the first week of the season, I offer my congratulations.  

If your experiences so far this season have given you just cause to hate turkeys as much as I do, take heart. 

We’ve still got plenty of time left, and both of our tags are still valid.