Went out to a family friends ranch in Burnet this weekend to do a little turkey hunting with my dad.  Couldn't have asked for more beautiful weather and they have had a pretty wet winter / early spring so everything was incredibly green. The guy who owns the ranch is one of my dads old friends and he lets us come up there whenever we want to stay in the ranch house (he lives on the other side of the ranch).  Its 1500 acres with natural springs, rolling hills and several decent size ponds, or as I like to call it, my happy place...


pulling into the back side of the ranch heading in to our house. little blue / purple flowers covered the ground as far as you can see



over looking one of the open pastures from a high point. Picture doesn't do it justice, there are very large hills all over the ranch.  I am a couple hundred feed up overlooking a valley in this picture



My dad and another group of friends were up there for opening weekend of the season and they said that none of the gobblers would respond to a call.  They only shot one all weekend and it was just a "right place at the right time" situation, the turkey just happened to walk by.

This weekend wasn't any different.  We got out friday afternoon and heard turkeys gobbling in the trees so I would make a hen call then they just went silent, never heard from them again.  We eventually gave up on the call and just came to terms with the fact we would be spending a lot of time out in the field waiting for them to hopefully come by.

Sure enough, early saturday morning we saw a lone jake walking across the pasture.  He zigged, he zagged and ended up popping out from behind a bush 35 yards from us. Not a prized bird by any means but we weren't sure if we'd get a chance to see another one so I took the shot.

Tango Down!


No I'm not drunk at 9am, the sun was just shining in my face....



After heading back to the house to clean it up we decided to go out and post up on the hill in the middle of the ranch just to see what we could see.  I didn't bring my shotgun because I wasn't planning on shooting another gobbler.  After about 5 minutes of us getting situated under a shade tree on top of the hill, we spot two turkey just walking down the trail in the middle of the pasture about 300 yards away down the hill.  I get my rifle out and take a look, and its a monster! I get into better position a little down the hill and watch them for about 15 minutes as they slowly got closer and closer.  Once it got to about 100 yards it started walking off towards the woods so I took a shot.

Tango 2 Down!



Beautiful birds.










My dad, the owner of the ranch and one of my dads old hunting buddies all have the top 3 birds shot on the ranch.  I am told this is now the #1 -  11 1/2" beard with 1 1/2" spurs.  Didn't weigh it but it was significantly larger than the first one I shot.

All in all it was a fantastic weekend.  Always love getting out to do some turkey hunting and even more importantly spending some quality time with my dad.

Enjoy!

Nice. Congrats!