We had a great hunt for Merriam turkeys a couple of weeks ago up in Ruidoso, New Mexico. It’s a beautiful place and it’s full of turkeys. Hunter and I went with Kyle Barefield and Cole Barthel to do some filming. We were up in the mountains and that isn’t easy hunting for sure. It was cold, too. A couple of mornings it was down to 23 degrees in the morning, but thank goodness it warmed up during the day.
We ended up harvesting seven turkeys. Hunter and I got five and Kyle and Cole got one apiece. It’s a 500,000 acre area so you sure have lots of places to hunt. The turkeys were still henned up a little bit too much, but we just kept moving around and finally got into some good hunting. The cold doesn’t really affect them up there because that is the norm. Every once in a while it will slow them down, but the wind is the real problem. When it is really blowing, it will shut them up.
As usual, we had a funny story to bring home in addition to the turkeys. Hunter ended up with the wrong choke in his tube — he had a duck hunting choke and it wasn’t working for the turkeys. He ended up missing four shots and at one point, I thought he was going to walk home he was so frustrated. We finally figured it out and I gave him my gun and he got his turkeys. The funny part about it was one of them was at 15 yards and Hunter never misses.
