“Whoomp, there it is!” A great song by the duo “Tag Team” in the nineties. There have been many great duos and tag teams over time such as Andy and Barney, Bo and Luke Duke, Starsky and Hutch, Scooby and Shaggy, Tom and Jerry, and Batman and Robin. Could dynamic duos exist without each other? Maybe, but alone they wouldn’t be GREAT! Having a good hunting buddy is the same way. Hunts are more fun when you have somebody there with you that shares in that memory with you. I knew I had found a great hunting duo when I talked to Jimbo Bearden (bulldogducker) and Clark Moore (countryboy20) recently about their latest turkey hunt.
Clark and Jimbo at the College World Series
Clark and Jimbo met a few years back at church and became friends when they realized they had a lot of common interests….. deer hunting, turkey hunting, and MSU baseball. They had doubled up on deer in the past but never on turkeys. They had tried multiple times, but it just never happened. Also, they had never killed a turkey on camera while hunting together.
Clark and Jimbo’s double up last year while deer hunting
Clark and Jimbo started this morning just like all the mornings in the past. Early by fifteen minutes and walked to their usual listening spot. Clark was saying that they had never used locator calls to find birds because they preferred to let the woods come to life on their own. As morning broke, one gobbler struck up so close it shook them because the bird couldn’t have been more than eighty yards away. They felt the bird was close to where they normally set up on this field and where they had killed a bird last year. They had to backtrack and go a different route to the field, but they got to within fifty yards of their normal setup. Before they even sat down, the turkey had gobbled over one hundred times.
From where they were sitting, the field dropped off to their left into a bottom with a big creek. The bird was roosted in a tree, above the creek, and down in the bottom about 50-100 yards. Clark stealthily crawled into the field to put out a hen decoy. When he got back, they sat shoulder to shoulder as Jimbo readied the camera and Clark was preparing to shoot. Clark purred lightly on his slate call a couple of times and the gobbler lit up. Jimbo said, “I laughed in amazement that the bird could even hear the call.” At this point, they both were certain it was a single bird, so certain that Jimbo laid his gun down out of reach. A few minutes passed, and the sound of the gobble changed, Clark was confident the bird was on the ground. Here is the video from that point:
