Hunting for Turkeys, for the First Time
By Tina Kelley: Nov 22, 2009
YAPHANK, N.Y. — At around 5:45 a.m., armed with a Mossberg
835 12-gauge shotgun painted in camouflage colors and his
“sippy cup,” a travel mug full of coffee, John T. Rauh pulled
his big red Ford F-250 out of the driveway, his Navy dog tags
swinging from the rearview mirror. He had permission on
Saturday to scout out a large patch of private land where he
normally hunts for deer. “If you hunt the same area, I can
tell you what animal's coming up on the side of me every day,”
he said. “At one of the stands I use, there’s a pair of
chipmunks that comes out at 7:05 every morning.”
Mr. Rauh was about to embark on a first, both for him and for
Long Island: New York State approved wild turkey hunting in
Suffolk County, and the five-day season began Saturday.
“A first hunting season: I’ve been doing this 30 years, and
you just don’t get that,” Mr. Rauh said. The state started
the hunt mostly to provide recreational opportunities for
hunters, and because there had been scattered complaints from
farmers that birds were eating their grains. Mike Schiavone,
who coordinates the statewide turkey restoration program for
the Department of Environmental Conservation, said turkeys had
disappeared from Long Island in the 19th century, as land was
cleared for agriculture and timber. But thanks to the state’s
program to reintroduce turkeys from western Pennsylvania, there
are now about 300,000 in the state, 3,000 of them in Suffolk
County. The Long Island birds are descended from 75 turkeys
released in three locations in the early 1990s.
Uncertain of how many people would show up for the 5-day hunt,
the state opened it the same day as the 1st day of gun season
in the southern zone upstate, one of the most popular hunts.
But because turkey hunting on Long Island is so new, Mr. Rauh,
a state hunting instructor, said the day held much promise, &
noted that any bird had a chance to be a record breaker. “There
are a lot of birds, there’s less hunting pressure, and they’re
huge,” he said, adding, “They have been dying of old age out
here.” Mr. Rauh, 42, sat near a gully he knows is popular with
the birds, and waited, occasionally making convincing turkey
sounds by scraping a paddle over a small wooden box, or vocal-
izing with a diaphragm call pressed against the roof of his mouth.
“I have a particularly bad gag reflex, and it took me a couple
weeks of just about puking to learn this,” he said. The barnyard
calls sounded incongruous coming from such a large man.
As the sun rose, the drone of the Long Island Expressway seemed
close. Other sounds included dogs, a fox, an idling motor, the
beeps of a truck backing up and, at 8 a.m., church bells.
When the spot proved fruitless, Mr. Rauh got up and declared:
“Let’s see if we can find us some turkey. If they’re not going
to come to us, we shall go to them.” Up on a small hill near
a road in the woods, he heard a syllable, a tiny cluck. Using
a very colorful gerund, he declared it a turkey, then sat down
and waited, but the bird never came closer. “This is where you
get your thinking done,” he said, surveying the scrubby oak and
pine woods. “About your fight with your spouse, about getting
the insurance and the mortgage paid, either that or you’re
thinking about nothing at all, and zone it all out. Out here,
out here, that’s it. The rest of the world is just gone.”
Alas, so were the turkeys. Close to 10 a.m., it was time to
head out of the woods. After spending four hours in the field —
searching for those bare square-foot patches of dirt that showed
that a bird had recently been foraging there, and intently
sifting the silence for that one (one!) cluck that meant “I’m a
turkey” — a person becomes so used to thinking in terms of field
behaviors that it is easy to start seeing them in humans.
“There’s a palpable sense of dejection,” Mr. Rauh said as he
observed some of the 185 large mammalian bipeds who returned
empty-handed to the Ridge Hunter Check Station on Saturday.
“Can you see the tail tucked between their legs?” Those who
drove in slow to return their permits had been skunked. Those
who slouched & hung their heads had likewise been disappointed,
robbed of the chance to nab the first, and therefore largest,
bird taken legally in the county. Returning from the woods,
Alex Fabiano, 26, a turkey hunter from Shirley, N.Y., said:
“You want to see a 15-pounder? You better go to King Kullen.”
At the state check-in station, the small talk centered on the
tasty but tough bird, how it benefits from 12 minutes a pound
in a deep fryer, with 5 gallons of peanut oil at 175 degrees,
and how there is a turkey call iPhone application. It is tech-
nically illegal to use it in the woods, Mr. Rauh pointed out,
because you cannot use electronically amplified calls.
Over all, only four birds were “harvested” in Suffolk on
Saturday, the first day of the 5-day season. Two were taken to
the state’s check-in center and two to a local taxidermist.
But as surprising as it may seem (as surprising as the news
that old turkeys can have beards of hair, or that the scat of
jakes — juvenile turkeys — is shaped like a cursive “J”) the
humans seemed unanimous in their underlying mood: trophy bird
or no trophy bird, it had been a great day. Fred Boerum, 71,
of Medford, N.Y., who went hunting for the first time ever,
reported: “It was beautiful. You could hear the leaves falling
down.” In the end, Mr. Rauh confided that even if he had seen
a bird in the woods, he wouldn't necessarily have taken a shot,
not unless it was a trophy bird. He knows what the woods hold,
and he did not want to fill his one-bird limit for the season
with some run-of-the-mill wild turkey.
“There are monsters here,” he said. “I want a beard-dragging-
on-the-ground bruiser, with two-inch spurs.” And he intended
to go back to find him, before the season ends on Wednesday.
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sid
i don't fuckin' care
FYI, Russell B. Waters is a sock of Lamey the halfwit support group troll.
Oh naturally he'll be in shortly - lying.
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Master of Puppets Be proud of what's in your trousers
DENSA Life Achievement � Am I the only one with half a brain?
The point? He didn't get to kill a fucking bird? Who gives a shit? I
don't..
Would you suck my ass?
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Tom Evans wants your soul in HELL!
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Would you suck my ass?
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where's the starting point you're all ass
We have no use for Lamey down here.
If you were a knock dead gorgeous woman fresh out of the shower ....
I'd give that some consideration.
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Master of Puppets Be proud of what's in your trousers
DENSA Life Achievement � Am I the only one with half a brain?
so high i can't get over it ,
so wide i can't get around it ,
so low i can't get under it
Aren't you that punk who smelled like soap?
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Long Island Iced Tea hunt -- anagram
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Non-legal, dude! Shitcan it!
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,,, you suck
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sid
* ansgram that motherfucker