Not your typical turkey season for two hunters

For two days, Kensen Lee had done his best to bag one of the mature turkeys he had seen on the private land he had permission to hunt. After calling had failed to bring the birds within shooting distance, he decided to give stalking a try, but the wary birds caught him in the act.

Lee fired his shotgun twice and missed twice as the birds made their rather hasty exit. To Lee’s surprise, his shots were immediately followed by two more. There was only one other hunter who had permission to hunt this particular piece of property.

“Yeah,” Kevin Pratt called back. “Who’s that?”

“It’s Kensen. Did you get that bird?”

As it turned out, neither hunter was taking a gobbler home for supper. Not at that moment anyway, so they spent a few minutes comparing notes. Lee told Pratt he had come in from the south end of the field where he had parked his Ranger and pointed in that direction. Pratt looked toward the Ranger, and at that moment, a group of turkeys was passing just below the ATV.

Pratt was down to a single shell. Lee was empty.

Lee chuckled and said to Pratt, “With my luck, I’ll probably go back to my side-by-side and see the biggest bird of my life and not have a shell with me.”

At that point, Pratt offered Lee his one shell. Though Lee was reluctant to accept Pratt’s offer, he eventually gave in and took the shell. Then he made his way toward the Ranger and the turkeys that had crossed below it.

Lee spotted a hen and a tom in the corner of a field. He slipped through a thick stand of mesquite trees to close the distance. When he emerged, Lee found himself looking at a group of turkeys that included five or six gobblers.

“I didn’t have time to look at them all because they were starting to run off. So I picked the second bird out of the group that was going left to right,” Lee said.

As he prepared to take the shot, Lee caught a glimpse of another bird as it ran past the first. It was preparing to take to the air, and soon most of the birds were doing the same.

“I looked to the back of the flock,” Lee said, “and there were still two toms back there. I picked the one that had the biggest beard and got ready to shoot, and he started flying. So I took the shot. I had never shot at a turkey in the air before, and he went down.”

When Lee found the bird, he was surprised to see it had four beards. The bird weighed 20 pounds, 3 ounces, and each spur measured 1.25 inches.

Its beards measured a total of 38 1/16 inches in length. The individual beards measured 13 1/16, 9¾, 8¾ and 6½ inches. I plugged those numbers into the scoring calculator on the National Wild Turkey Federation website and came up with an unofficial score of 121.3125.

The Friday after Lee killed his gobbler with a borrowed shell, his benefactor was in the field again. It was closing day of the season.

Pratt was running a little late, and the turkeys had left their roosts by his arrival at his chosen destination. Knowing the habits of these birds, he starting hiking in the direction he expected them to go once they left the roost. He soon found a hen, and where there is a hen, there is bound to be a gobbler.

“I watched the hen, and there was a tom that was all strutted up with her,” Pratt said. “I laid down right there. At that point, they’re probably 30 to 35 yards out from me, and it looked like they were walking toward me.”

But the turkeys had other plans and skirted some brush that actually took them in another direction.

Pratt used a line of brush to cover his movements and tried to get ahead of the birds. The hen caught Pratt’s movement and began to sound the warning to the other turkeys. Pratt froze, holding his position for several minutes until the hen finally relaxed and moved on.

“I kept thinking this tom’s gonna come out, this tom’s gonna come out. So I stayed there, stayed there, stayed there,” Pratt said.

Nothing happened. So Pratt began belly-crawling through the brush in search of a better vantage point. He finally spotted a group of turkeys 30 to 35 yards away.

In the group were six hens and five gobblers, but he didn’t have a clean shot. So Pratt began moving up through the brush and was busted by one of the toms that stuck his head up in a position that seemed to say, “Hey, I see you.”

Pratt squeezed the trigger on his shotgun, and the bird went down. Upon locating it, he found that it also had four beards. The beards measured 37 1/8 inches. Combined with its weight of 16 pounds, 4 ounces, and spurs that measured 1 1/8 and 1 1/4 inches, the bird had an unofficial score of 114.25.

The National Wild Turkey Federation classifies birds with multiple beards as atypical. Should they choose to record their birds, Lee and Pratt will be the first hunters to record atypical Rio Grande turkeys in Nevada.

This is the second of a two-part column on the turkey season. Freelance writer Doug Nielsen is a conservation educator for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. His “In the Outdoors” column, published Thursday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NDOW. Any opinions he states in his column are his own. He can be reached at intheoutdoorslv@gmail.com.