My brother and I usually get out for 1-2 days each year for the spring turkey hunt.  We have permission on some private farm land that holds a fair amount of turkeys. My brother put in for a spring turkey tag and didn’t draw one. I on the other hand, missed the registration date so I didn’t have a chance at drawing a tag. So now we had to wait and hope that there would be leftover tags available online. Luckily, we ended up both getting tags for the 5th period starting on May 17th. Once we found out we both drew tags for the same period, we immediately talked about whether we could pull off shooting two birds at the same time. So that is what we set out to do.

We spotted several toms and hens the week before the hunt when we set our blind up. Our setup involved a standard pop up blind, 1 Hen decoy and a full body mounted Tom in full strut. The first night of our hunt we had 13 hens come into our decoys, with two of them having beards. There wasn’t a single Tom or Jake around. We went out the following morning and had two hens and a jake come out of the woods within an hour. They hung around and checked out the Tom decoy for 2 hours.

When they finally made it to the field edge, I noticed 3 birds come over the ridge about 200 yards away.  They immediately saw the Tom decoy in strut and sprinted in before we could get ready. It took us a while to call them away from the blind so that we could get ready and get separation from the rest of the birds. We were able to shoot both birds within a second of each other at 15 and 25 yards.

Although we were hoping we could have shot two big Toms, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take two birds at the same time and be able to tell the story of our hunt for years to come.

-Tom