Toms on the move

Continued from page 1 afternoon, we had some birds working that just wouldn’t commit to our decoys and come into range.”

The next morning turned out to be pretty exciting.

“I kept hearing some birds gobble in the distance, all morning long, and we were just about to make a move when a hen showed up,” Yates said. “I hit a call, and then all of a sudden two toms came running in. My brother and I counted to three, and then shot at the same time. We doubled up.”

Nick Dancsak spent the opening weekend hunting in Lampasas County with his father-in-law. They heard and saw quite a few birds but were unable to bring any within shotgun range.

“The toms were in somewhat of a fickle mood, it seemed,” Dancsak said. “At times they would be pretty vocal, but there were also long stretches of radio silence. They appeared to be pretty henned-up on the property we were hunting.”

Turkey hunters in Stonewall County reported large flocks of birds with good numbers of hens and mature gobblers aggressively engaging with decoys without any calling from the hunters.

Several hunters reported taking multiple bearded toms. James Meissner had some buddies travel from Tennessee to Wilson County, where they doubled up during a morning hunt, tagging both a triple beard and a quadruple-bearded tom, while Joshua Haese harvested a gobbler with six beards near San Angelo.