Anyone headed out for the Wisconsin Youth Hunt this weekend?

[nbadger23]

I'm taking a friend's 13 year old daughter out this weekend. It's going to be a bit of a flyer as I don't know the territory we're going to hunt at all and the winter could have taken a big toll on the birds but what the heck, we'll be out there!

She's shot 3 deer already so she has some hunting experience and she has a lot of patience, which is great. I'm going to go up early Friday a.m. and do some scouting in the morning, then take her out after she gets out of school and do some scouting with her then, hoping to find some tracks to show her or maybe even see some birds we can roost.

If we can hear a few gobble in the morning and see some strutting activity it would be great. If we happen to get lucky and shoot a bird even better! If nothing else, it will be a good scouting trip for her later season.

[DonBo]

Good luck! Pictures, we'll need pictures.

[nbadger23]

We came close but unfortunately I could not get the turkeys to cooperate to get them close enough to get her a shot.

The weekend started off on a very sad note as I found their 2 year old brittany spaniel dead on the road right by their driveway when I pulled in Friday morning. He had been hit a very short time prior to me getting there and the driver had just left him there. This was her dog, he slept with her every night. Thankfully she hadn't witnessed it as she had already gotten on the bus and I got there just in time for us to get him off the road before the younger one went out for his bus. We had a lot of tears later that night when mom told her about it and I wasn't sure if she'd be up for hunting but she decided she wanted to.

We hunted both mornings and both afternoons/early evenings and saw birds each hunt. We had a tom at about 50 yards both Saturday a.m. and p.m. but they were with hens both times and I couldn't get the hens to come our way and I couldn't pry the tom off of them. She got to hear hens talk a couple of times, got to watch tom's strutting 3 times, got to watch a hen come off roost and glide into the field, and best of all, got to belly crawl in a muddy field in an attempt to sneak up a hill on a tom that had gotten passed us. She thought that was pretty cool :-)

She hung in there pretty well given how cold and raw the weekend was and she's anxious for her May hunt. She really soaked in anything I'd point out to her about bird behavior and such and told me she'll keep an eye out on the fields around her and write down any activity she sees to do some scouting for May. Hopefully we can get a little more land secured around the area and with some of the knowledge I gained over the weekend we'll make a better run of it in May!

[hugonian1]

Sorry to hear about the way this started.

That is a tough one.

It is nice you were there and able to hopefully take the edge off the loss by introducing her to this great sport.