H
earing three tom turkeys gobbling in the distance,
OWu president Whitney Hurt and her guide set
up next to a logging trail cutting through the
jungle of pine trees, palmetto, and brush that is
the mississippi Delta in the spring. Hurt’s guide
started calling. One tom moved closer but then faded away, as
did another tom. That took about an hour, and just as Hurt was
thinking her morning hunt was about over, bird number three
suddenly boomed out a series of deep gobbles. Very close.
Her back to a tree, Hurt shifted towards the direction of the
calls and got her shotgun ready, while her guide coaxed the
tom with clucks and the occasional yelp.
“That tom got pretty close to us, we could tell by his gobbles,
but then he just shut up,” Hurt remembers. “i was looking at
that brush and it was all green, and then all of a sudden there
was this white spot. His head, maybe 20 yards away. i aimed
surveys of outdoor recreation, there were 116,000 women turand shot.”
key hunters 16 years old and older in 1996. By 2001, that was
up to