Thursday morning, second week of the Missouri season, finds me en-route to Walker, Missouri to hunt at my friend Chuck’s place. Chuck and Gina Naas own about 60 acres, running about 35% timber. Chuck and Gina live here and early after they purchased the land, he jokingly name it The Six. This means if someone else bought the land, they would have subdivided it into six, ten acres lots. Chuck and I go back to our college days at Northwest Missouri State. I have hunted the Six for nearly eight years off and on. Chuck and Gina have graciously let me stay at their home a few times during spring season. Most years there are birds on his place. It is very to access. A decent riparian corridor exists along the creek, with scattered pecan trees in the bottoms. It is a great place to take a kid; however, you need a ground blind. I have taken my kids down there several times.
As always, I have to leave at 4:20 to arrive at 5:26. One hour and six minutes exactly. Besides the long drive, once I get there it doesn’t take more than three minutes to walk in. I decide this morning to simply pick a big tree on the east side of the bottoms and face west. The bottom runs maybe a quarter mile north to south and I’ve had turkeys roosted all along the east side in years past. This morning it was a dead zone. No gobbling, no hens, no nothing. I try hunting an overgrown patch above the creek south of his house and with the same result. I depart at 10:oo. Before I drove down he told me he’d been hearing a few off and on. I don’t know if the populations are down, or the birds are simply using different property this year. The weekend weather forecast again looks abysmal for Walker. I decide to focus my efforts back over in Kansas at Stranger 157. This is the second year in a row I have not harvested a bird in Missouri. It certainly doesn’t help that places I hunt are small, but I do believe harvesting a bird is possible even on small acreages. This will be the one and only time I hunt The Six this year. Rain and winds have hampered the days I’m available to hunt. I shall return for redemption in 2017.
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