An Outdoorsman's Journal

       An Excellent Youth Turkey Hunt

Hello friends,

       This week's column is chalk full of interesting experiences, so I have to be vague, if you know what I mean. Carsyn and Conner Thiede are the 13- and 11-year-old children of Tyler and Patsy Thiede of Mayville. I met this family through my very good friend the late Rod Bensley and we have become very good friends and do at least one deer hunt and one turkey hunt together in the Burnett area at what is called The Foul Mouth Hunt Club. Each hunt, I switch kids and have witnessed them shoot deer and turkey.
      Justin "Beaner" Braun is part of this group and one of Tyler’s lifelong friends from growing up in the Burnett area, and Justin is very good at helping people to harvest turkey.
      Chad Reifschneider is also a part of this gang and this weekend his children Kensie and Joey would be hunting as well with Chad and Tanner Weber.
      To close out our gang we would have Jim Klug and his 8-year-old son Jameson. Jim grew up with Beaner and Tyler, is now a fire chief in Greely, Colorado and came home to introduce his son to hunting and see his buddies. Jim and Jameson would be guided by Beaner.

Friday, April 12th
High 66, low 40

      I would like to add that since getting to know these guys Chad and Tyler and their children they have become very active in The Dodge County Chapter of KAMO. So today I arrived at "The Lodge" and there is an immediate problem. The land I was going to take Conner hunting is no longer available. I had to do some hard thinking and came up with Jeff Pausma. Jeff and his wife Melissa are local dairy farmers. I had never met Jeff, but he reads this column and when Michelle passed away he contacted me and said some very nice things. I just happened to put Jeff in my phone, made a call and just like that we had the green light.
   Conner, Tyler and I headed over to the Pausma farm which I fell in love with as soon as I saw it, Jeff gave us the tour and all was perfect in our world.

Saturday, April 13th

High 59, low 31

   Our morning started off at camp with a very tired Tyler. Fourteen-year-old Joey Reifschneider and Tanner Weber would be hunting public land near Beaver Dam and these guys would see 13 toms but they were on private land.
Tyler and Carsyn would have lots of deer experiences while hunting private land adjacent to the Horicon Marsh. Jim, Jameson and Beaner would have an excellent hunt as they all realized that Jameson loves to hunt.
    The afternoon hunt was where big memories were made. Beaner did an excellent job calling in a beautiful tom and Jameson whacked his first bird and without a doubt, a hunter was born. Conner and I had moved our setup to where I thought the birds had roosted the night before and had hundreds of amazing experiences watching ducks and geese.
   With 30 minutes of legal hunting left I heard a bird fly into its roost, the problem was it was on private land and we were hunting a marshy pasture, no problem, we would get one in the morning. Over the next 15 minutes we watched 13 hens and toms fly into trees 25 to 40 yards away.
   Our luck switched, a hen appeared as it had crossed the marsh, we could not shoot it, but it was fun to watch. I kept working the call, there were 6 minutes left to hunt. A very large tom made a mistake and came on our side of the fence but out of range. The hen flew up to the roost, the tom was furious with my jake decoy, four minutes left, he got in range, Conner made an excellent shot and whacked a humongous turkey.
   Tyler had made a bet hours earlier with me that if I did not get my hunter a turkey both my hunter and I would have to jump into a very cold stream. Tyler and Carsyn would go swimming not Mark and Conner!

   Sunset