After 6-seasons in the chase I finally connected with a beautiful bird in Southeastern Colorado.
The hunt that almost wasn’t.
After five long seasons of chasing turkeys, and after a successful harvest during deer season, I was actually planning on taking this 6th consecutive spring season off to focus on my stand up paddleboarding and other activities with the kids. However, I was reading a post online from a friend of mine Bear Miller, he’s an avid outdoorsman and blogger, and was lamenting that he’d not be able to get out this spring due to a recent back surgery. I considered his situation and thought back to all of those mornings getting to watch the sun come up from some dew soaked ground blind, and knew I had to keep trying.
Scouting for a bird
I started the scouting effort at my primary hunting area south of Las Animas, Colorado. The area is called Purgatoire River State Wildlife Area and is a 913 acre plot situated along the river and crossed by a couple of irrigation canals. I had never been there before but thought it would be a great spot because it was relatively wooded for the high plains and had a lot of water compared to the other areas I’d be scouting. I left the house before 5 AM and drove 45-minutes to the south west to begin my day. I reached the SWA and began my hike, Purgatoire turned out to be a pretty dry place, as well. I decided to follow the trail about 2-miles and all of the way to the back of the property where an irrigation canal met the river. I kept my eyes on the ground and stopped at every set of trees looking for any sign of turkeys – nothing. However, when I got down to the river there were huge turkey tracks in the dirt along the Northside of the river. I scouted all around but didn’t find feathers, I didn’t hear any gobbling, and worst of all couldn’t tell how old the tracks might have been. I crossed the river and scouted the other bank for a while before returning to the Northside where I planned on covering the rest of the property off trail. I spent the next couple of hours looking for birds but found nothing but one additional set of tracks. I decided to pack it in so that I could scout the other areas and was also “itching” to get out of the high brush in my dress shoes – somehow I walked out of the house without my boots or even a pair of tennis shoes, whoops.