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Clay were in such good spirits after slogging a rugged 10 miles, crouching for an hour in the cold damp at the end of a day-long thaw and neither seeing nor hearing a bird.
They’d try again the next morning. And then Weakley would drive back to North Carolina, where he says he goes out and calls turkeys just about every weekend, in season and out. He and Clay admit it sometimes seems a shame to shoot a wild turkey after all the communicating.
“You even get to know the quirks and characteristics of individual birds," says Clay, who compares turkey hunting to fly fishing.
“I know I could take you out and teach you to fly-cast in an hour,” he says. “And I could teach you to hunt turkeys in maybe three hours. You’d still have to experience some hunts, but you could acquire the fundamentals just listening to a tape. That doesn’t mean you can be a real fly fisherman in an hour or a day or a week or maybe even a season, and it doesn’t mean you are suddenly a turkey hunter.”
“Just like me,” Weakley chimes in. “Most people I’ve hunted turkeys with were hunting other game for years before they ‘graduated,’ you might say, to turkey hunting.”
Turkey season began Nov. 2 in the Commonwealth. It runs through Jan. 2. Maryland’s three-day season ended Nov. 7, and the first part of West Virginia’s split fall season ended Saturday. The second part runs Dec. 14-19. And Virginia and many other states, North Carolina excluded, also have spring seasons.
Both Clay and Weakley remember when few states had spring seasons. (That’s when the young toms have matured, put on some meat and are ready to run at whatever sounds like a lady turkey.) That was before the National Wild Turkey Federation began redistributing wild birds, fostering flocks where they had been depleted almost to extinction.
The wild turkey population of the United States at one time had dwindled to an estimated 30,000 birds. Now Virginia, alone, boasts some 12,000.
Clay lives and does a lot of his hunting west of the Blue Ridge, but he says there may be even more turkeys in Loudoun and Fauquier counties. He says, in fact, that the property now being prepared for development by the Xerox Corporation between the company’s International Center for Training and Management Development and Goose Creek, east of Leesburg, is some of the best hunting ground in Northern Virginia.
The summer drought has made acorn crops a bit sparse, much to the turkey hunters’ lament. According to Clay, a turkey’s favorite delicacy
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