drrxnupe
Well-Known Member
So I'm going to share a story where I admit I was clearly in the wrong...just needed to clear my guilty conscious 
:/ Turns out I'm able to laugh about it now. For those of you that claim to be "moral and honest" hunters like myself...I know you've been in situations where you broke the rules. At least I'm being honest and forth coming.
So yesterday I was hunting a friend's farm with a buddy when we got a response to an aggressive cut/yep on the slate call. Turns out...the bird is across the fence on somebody else's property...maybe 150+ yards away. So we gradually make our crawl towards the fence line to try and call the bird onto our side. When we got to the fence, we discover a nice sized cattle pond with a pretty dense strip of trees kinda blocking the pond from our side. So we try to devise a plan but quickly come to the conclusion that there was no way we'd have a shot IF/WHEN he came across. Our side of the fence was very thick with overgrown sticker briars and there was a ditch that looked like a small river from the recent rain. At this point, we haven't seen the bird yet, but he's moving closer hot and heavy and pretty quickly. So we decide to position ourselves to see if we could at least get a shot from our side, jump the fence, quickly grab the bird, and bolt like the wind back to our side. So we get into position and send a few purrs back at the tom. He gobbles his head off so we sit and wait. The gobbles continue to get louder and louder and finally after 30 or so minutes, I get a view of him. He gradually comes alongside the bank on the far end of the pond, runs off a heron that was wading in the shallows, and keeps getting closer for a shot. He ends up being a pretty large bird so at this point I'm super excited as I have yet to kill a TN bird this year. Not to mention, his beard looked like rastafarian dreadlock dragging the ground.
So we wait and wait, he moves closer and closer. Finally he's within a few yards of me being able to shoot from our side of the fence. So I lift my gun, kneel my head into shooting position, click the safety switch, put the red dot on his neck and then........all of a sudden....I hear a mower fire up. The bird stops, pokes his head up, and looks around. All of a sudden, I see the mower topping the hill on the other side of the pond. An just like that....SHAZZAM!...the bird vanishes in mid air.
Oh well...I guess I got what I deserved.
:/ Turns out I'm able to laugh about it now. For those of you that claim to be "moral and honest" hunters like myself...I know you've been in situations where you broke the rules. At least I'm being honest and forth coming.So yesterday I was hunting a friend's farm with a buddy when we got a response to an aggressive cut/yep on the slate call. Turns out...the bird is across the fence on somebody else's property...maybe 150+ yards away. So we gradually make our crawl towards the fence line to try and call the bird onto our side. When we got to the fence, we discover a nice sized cattle pond with a pretty dense strip of trees kinda blocking the pond from our side. So we try to devise a plan but quickly come to the conclusion that there was no way we'd have a shot IF/WHEN he came across. Our side of the fence was very thick with overgrown sticker briars and there was a ditch that looked like a small river from the recent rain. At this point, we haven't seen the bird yet, but he's moving closer hot and heavy and pretty quickly. So we decide to position ourselves to see if we could at least get a shot from our side, jump the fence, quickly grab the bird, and bolt like the wind back to our side. So we get into position and send a few purrs back at the tom. He gobbles his head off so we sit and wait. The gobbles continue to get louder and louder and finally after 30 or so minutes, I get a view of him. He gradually comes alongside the bank on the far end of the pond, runs off a heron that was wading in the shallows, and keeps getting closer for a shot. He ends up being a pretty large bird so at this point I'm super excited as I have yet to kill a TN bird this year. Not to mention, his beard looked like rastafarian dreadlock dragging the ground.
So we wait and wait, he moves closer and closer. Finally he's within a few yards of me being able to shoot from our side of the fence. So I lift my gun, kneel my head into shooting position, click the safety switch, put the red dot on his neck and then........all of a sudden....I hear a mower fire up. The bird stops, pokes his head up, and looks around. All of a sudden, I see the mower topping the hill on the other side of the pond. An just like that....SHAZZAM!...the bird vanishes in mid air.
Oh well...I guess I got what I deserved.
Good thing the mower fired up too, or its rider might have been investigating a mysterious shot.... I may have ridden the fence once or twice but I won't go and shoot something clearly over the line. Sometimes it's hard to tell the line though. Awful tempting when a bird is that close. Thing that keeps me from going and shooting on another property is that I would feel guilty every time I thought of that bird. I had one gobbling very close last year, late season. Just across the fence and property line, just out of sight, and I could have crawled closer and shot him across the line if I wanted. It was a test for sure. I ended up bumping a hen or two and figured he already had hens and wasn't coming over the fence. he then drifted away. There was a bird I killed that jumped up and ran after flopping on the ground. I really don't know where the boundary was because it wasn't marked (WMA) and I had to go off memory from the map. But I put down the shotgun and ran and chased that bird down till he sat down and I grabbed him. may have crossed the line but there was not a boundary marker or posted sign, and I was chasing a wounded bird. That was a crazy hunt and I don't plan to hunt that spot much in the future because the boundary is so iffy.
I even got the last segment on camera, my 1st kill on video. 
