Youth hunter makes most of final chance for spring turkey

Elizabeth Lafleur woke up startled when her father, Chad Lafleur, gently shook her saying, “Hey, Lizzie, there’s a turkey out there waiting for us. We need to get up and get ready.”
The 17-year-old Port Allen High School sophomore had put in for the Sherburne Wildlife Management Area Youth Lottery Turkey Hunt three times before and wasn’t selected. However, that all changed this year when she finally drew out for the youth hunt a few weeks back.
Since age 13, when she harvested her first deer, Elizabeth has been an avid hunter. Moreover, she hunted turkey off and on with her father for the past few years.
However, though she and her father heard gobblers, she never saw one during any of those outings.
Set up near a roost, she and her father waited before daylight in a popup blind for turkeys to fly down so their guide, Hervey Moran, could call a gobbler to them. Elizabeth initially had her doubts about the hunt.
The younger Lafleur said, “Whenever Mr. Hervey and my dad were walking down the trail to set everything up, they were just talking like normal. I didn’t think anything was going to come that morning. Well, when Mr. Hervey and my dad called, a gobbler flew down. My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, I’m actually going to kill something.’ Mr. Hervey had set us up right in the middle of them.”
According to Moran, a committee member of the Krotz Springs chapter of the National Wild Turkey Federation and youth hunt volunteer guide, to be successful on Sherburne, you have to put time in scouting well in advance of the hunt.
“First thing you have to determine is if turkeys are there,” Moran said. “What I do and what most guides do, too, is before the season, they go out early in the morning before daylight and go down a road and just listen. Do not — big letters, red letters, underline — do not call them.
“All you are doing is educating them,” Moran said. “It helps if you can also walk during the daytime and look for tracks and droppings. Generally, if you find where the birds are, they don’t usually move a whole lot. But, first light, when the birds start chirping really good, you’ll hear a gobbler if there’s one in the area.”
Moran was set up hidden next to a tree about 10 yards behind the popup blind the Lafleurs occupied where he could see everything unfold. Making a few clucks and purrs on his slate call, a turkey responded with a loud gobble. Moran said a good gobbler will gobble real long and strong, but a young gobbler, known as a jake, isn’t either long or as strong.
When Elizabeth first saw the gobbler coming toward her, she poked her shotgun through the popup blind’s front window. But, with the bird moving, she couldn’t get a shot off.
Easing her shotgun out of the front window, she poked it out the next window, only to repeat the process again at the third window until father and daughter had comically completed a full 360-degree circle.
To go around in a circle inside a small popup blind safely with a loaded firearm is a feat in itself, but to do it quietly without spooking a strutting gobbler is another.
Watching from behind the blind, Moran had two other gobblers strutting not 20 feet away from him. What was thought to be one gobbler in the area they set up in that morning turned out to be four.
The older Lafleur noted that the ferns the gobbler was walking in were about a foot and a half tall. And the flowering weeds — like black-eyed susans, yellow star-grass and lizard’s-tail — were two feet high.
Whenever the bird put its head down, it would disappear. Only the gobbler’s neck and head would periodically stick up above the ferns.
Elizabeth said, “When we finally got him to the last window, we were back where we were at first. When Dad and Mr. Hervey kept calling to keep his head up, he started to walk away. I didn’t have much of a chance left, so I kind of guessed where he was going to come up and shot it. The next thing I know, my dad is running out of the blind and Mr. Hervey started to run. And, I ran out of the blind — all after the turkey.”
As it turned out, when Elizabeth shot, in the confusing instance afterwards, two of the birds took off flying and her father took off running after them thinking she had wounded the bird.
Moran thought it better to go back to the location she first shot, where lo and behold lie her prize Tom. Elizabeth’s first turkey weighed 16 pounds and sported a 10-inch beard and 1-inch spurs on each leg. A real trophy gobbler.
As it turns out, Lafleur was one of the few fortunate youth and adult lottery hunters in 2016 to harvest a turkey on Sherburne. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries MAV South Region Manager, Tony Vidrine, said since the 2011 Morganza flood, turkey numbers haven’t recovered fully.
Moreover, out 144 efforts on the wildlife management area, only five turkeys were harvested all season.
Elizabeth Lafleur was the only youth hunter to harvest a gobbler this spring. It took her four tries at the lottery to finally get her chance. Next year, she’ll have to put in for the hunt as an adult.
EDITOR’S NOTE: John K. Flores is The Daily Review’s outdoor writer. If you wish to make a comment or have an anecdote, recipe or story you wish to share, you can contact Flores at 985-395-5586, at gowiththeflo@cox.net or visit his Facebook page, Gowiththeflo-Outdoors.