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March/april 2016

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From a turkey hunter’s perspective, this 23-county region in Alabama is an earthly

backside of Heaven. By Jim Casada

BLACK BEARDS

IN THE BLACK

BELTBy Jim Casada

acuity had turned me into a quivering mass of uncertainty. Finally, at a pace that bid fair to make an unhurried turtle seem a 100-meter sprint champion, the gobbler came in range and a load of high-brass No. 5s ended his career. Not two minutes later, as if lamenting the death of this magnificent creature, the heavens opened up.

Another time at a different location in the Black Belt, a protracted session of listening to what I deemed to be drumming had a quite different outcome. I first heard it almost immediately after a few yelps on my wingbone brought a resounding gobble that had me scrambling to set up against the nearest tree. The drumming continued, seemingly at close range just over a ridgetop, for an entire afternoon.

Finally, my patience exhausted, I resorted to crawling instead of calling. After cresting the nearby hill, I realized the “drumming” that had held me captive so long was the bass beat emanating from a boom box in a sharecropper’s shack a quarter-mile away.

central Alabama from east to west. The Black Belt is a region of stark

contrasts. Among the most notable of these is human economic hardship counterbalanced by an abundance of wildlife. From a turkey hunter’s perspective, it is an earthly backside of Heaven. Words don’t suffice to capture the Black Belt’s sporting glories seen through the eyes of a turkey hunter, but perhaps sharing a medley of personal experiences there spanning more three decades and some three dozen separate hunts will give you a glimmering.

On a foggy morning sometime in the 1980s, one of those days when ominous clouds hugged the horizon and a drenching downpour seemed certain, I found myself listening to a drumming turkey for well over an hour without seeing the bird. That sound, difficult to course and one even the keenest of human ears likely cannot detect at distances much greater than a hundred yards, had me on red alert. It went on for so long that second-guessing my auditory

ecades ago a corner of my soul was hope-lessly lost to America’s big-game bird, the wild turkey. Over a

marvelously misspent period of some four

decades, it has been my great good fortune to pursue gobblers in roughly 40 states and two foreign countries. Those years have been filled with an abundance of miscues, missteps, misfortune, mistakes, and misses, but in a way only a fellow turkey hunter can truly appreciate, all of the misery has been pure magic. And nowhere has that magic been more manifest—has the bird’s allure pulsated through the fiber of my being with greater strength—than in Alabama’s Black Belt.

If you want a detailed geological and geographical account of the Black Belt, that information is readily available on the Internet. For present purposes, suffice it to say that it embraces 23 counties, all distinguished by rich, dark topsoil, stretching border-to-border across south-

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On this occasion, we were just sharing time together as friends who had all fallen victim to the grand obsession. It was one of those times—and they are exceedingly rare in a sport where the only real certainty is constant uncertainty—when everything went pretty much according to plan.

I roosted a bird in the gloaming of our first evening together, and come daylight we were set up in a likely spot with Ron videoing while Tes and I called. All seemed well when at first light the gobbler announced his presence from his lofty perch. And other than a mad scramble to reposition when the tom started to approach us from an unexpected direction, all went as planned. To be sure, excitable as I always am when a gobbler comes within range, my shot likely came a bit quicker than Ron would have preferred. Nonetheless, there was a flopping bird, followed by high-fiving and hugging aplenty, within a half-hour of our first setting up. From that point forward things only got better.

With some astute advice from guide Joe

Among all of my turkey-hunting recollections, the only time I can recall being more nonplussed was when I spent an entire morning dealing with a bird that responded lustily to my calls but never moved my way. Once again, after hours of exasperation, I left my position only to discover my seemingly irresistible notes of seduction had been directed at a penned-up domestic tom.

I’ll always cherish delightful two days afield with the prettiest turkey hunter I’ve ever been around, Tes Jolly, and her husband, Ron. Both are highly experienced and exceptionally skilled when it comes to taking turkeys, whether with a gun, a still camera (Tes is an award-winning wildlife photographer and to my knowledge the only female ever to work as a turkey guide), or a videocamera (Ron has been doing stellar video work since the days when such efforts involved lugging around 60 pounds of equipment in the field).

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ildlife photographer Tes Jolly killed this Alabama gobbler on her hunt with the author. Below: The author and Eddie Salter, host of the television show turkey man, with a big longbeard.

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These and many other turkey encounters form a mélange of memories. Among them are a duel of wits with a gobbling jake accompanied by a half-dozen hens, spotting a treasure trove of arrowheads as a gobbler marched across a field, three delightful days with Jim and Sherry Crumley of Trebark Camouflage fame, and a solitary hunt where I watched enchanted as a pair of bobcats played a game of grab ass in what presumably was a mating ritual.

Hopefully you begin to get some hint of what turkey hunting in the Black Belt has meant to me over the years. It has given me pleasure in more than ample measure, and along with the treasure cached in the storehouse of my mind, there is something more tangible. Across the room from where this is being written are decorative boxes filled with shotgun hulls. Each shotshell holds a turkey beard and a tiny scroll of paper on which is typed a brief account of that particular hunt—the date, gun and ammo used, weather conditions, type of call, and how the turkey behaved. By merely picking up one of the shotshells and reading the account, I am transported back to wondrous moments under the southern sun. Many of them took place in Alabama’s Black Belt, where Dame Fortune has been kind to me when it comes to shaping memories to savor for a lifetime. n

If yOu wANT TO GOThe Alabama Black Belt Adventures

Association (ABBAA) is an umbrella organization serving guides, outfitters, and plantations in the Black Belt. It lists a whopping 52 destinations in its membership, and well over half of them offer turkey hunting. In all likelihood, there’s nowhere else in the country where you will find a comparable concentration of guided turkey hunting opportunities, and that fact in and of itself speaks eloquently of the region’s first-rate sport in connection with His Majesty, the wild gobbler. Knowledgeable guides are an integral part of the overall picture, and here you will find seasoned hunters fully fluent in turkey talk and holding advanced degrees in that critical element of success in the sport, woodsmanship.

Visitwww.alabamablackbeltadventures.com or e-mail the group’s competent and congenial director, Pam Swanner, [email protected] for full details and trip-planning information.

the landowner scrambled to get his gun from the truck, Eddie winked at me then whispered: “Aw, that bird doesn’t sound like he’ll come to a call. Let’s just go get us a sausage biscuit.” And we did just that, but only after setting up on the gobbler, which in short order came straight to the call.

Another memorable hunt involved three days of frustration with Danny Hawkins on game-laden land near Eufaula that has been in his family for generations. On the last day, a turnaround lasting no more than 30 minutes wiped away every vestige of our vexation.

It started with a mid-morning call, again on my trusty wingbone suction yelper, that brought a distant gobble. We scrambled to close ground and set up. Once positioned, three longbeards showed up almost immediately after we called.

No sooner had Danny whispered “shoot the strutter” than the deed was done. This was a classic example—commonplace in turkey hunting—of something suddenly seeming so easy after being so difficult.

Predictably, the tides turned on another occasion while hunting with Danny’s brother, Craig. Amazingly, with winds whistling at 25 to 30 miles-an-hour, we heard a gobbler. Indeed, he came to us in short order, but somehow, despite Craig repeatedly whispering “there he is,” I couldn’t make him out. The upshot was the gobbler suddenly remembered he had urgent business two counties away, a decision that elicited a string of socially unacceptable portions of my vocabulary and keen disappointment.

D isappointment, with soaring highs and abysmal lows, is an integral part of turkey hunting. The incidents I’ve relived

constitute a mere sampling of my adventures with black-bearded toms in the Black Belt.

There was the turkey that found salvation in a six-inch diameter pine, the only standing tree in a clear-cut, placed precisely between him and me. Or another one that spooked and was killed stone dead in flight only to have my mortified guide say: “We never shoot at flying turkeys.” Or the time when I managed a singularly shameful miss at a strutting tom while Pam Swanner, director of the Alabama Black Belt Adventures Association, looked on in a mixture of anguish and disbelief.

White, whose skills were a silent reminder that when it comes to success in the turkey woods, there’s no substitute for local knowledge, we soon located another bird. Tes then brought into play an enviable blend of calling skill, bellying through broomsedge, and knowing when to move. The end result was a second Black Belt gobbler and one of the most satisfying mornings afield I can remember.

That afternoon we fished a nearby pond where bream were bedding and bass were on the prowl, then enjoyed a fish fry—altogether the cherry atop our sporting sundae.

As an aside, one of the real fringe benefits to turkey hunting in the Black Belt is that if you get a bird during your morning hunt, there are usually fishing opportunities close by to consume the rest of the day.

Eddie Salter is arguably the finest hunter I’ve ever been privileged to accompany in the turkey woods, and like Ron and Tes Jolly, he’s a product of Alabama’s Black Belt. Eddie knows turkeys in a fashion reminiscent of the sport’s icons from yesteryear, such as Ben Rodgers Lee and Doug Camp (both, incidentally, Alabamians). Somehow Eddie just BELIEVES—believes that there’s a turkey just over the next ridge, down in the next hollow, or sure to answer your next call. Together, we’ve seen the last hurrah of a score or more turkeys, but the one that stands out in my mind was on a morning when Eddie was miserable and running a fever.

We were hunting the property of a friend and over the course of the morning we must have stopped and called at 30 likely spots without hearing so much as a hint of a gobble. Clearly exasperated, the landowner finally said, “Let’s just give up and go get a Hardee’s breakfast biscuit.”

Salter agreed but indicated he wanted to try one final spate of calling before we threw in the towel. He called, and once again there was nothing but the sounds of silence. Turning to me, Eddie suggested that I venture a few yelps on my wingbone, which is my go-to call. To our amazement, a nearby gobbler responded immediately.

Eddie may have felt rotten, but he hadn’t lost his keen sense of humor. As

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