I know a lot of you have been really successful, and I love seeing your pictures and reading your stories. Here's some stories of those more common mornings where it doesn't go quite right.

So far this season I've had six close encounters with gobblers and gotten one myself.

I took an 8 year old boy on youth day, where the first bird escaped from 7 yards due to the safety not being off, and he missed a second bird later that morning.

This morning I took a friend of mine who has never really done any turkey hunting. We set up on two roosted birds, one happened to be right on top of where we were listening from. Called one of them in to 10 yards for my friend, but the bird wouldn't clear the last brush pile and never offered a shot. We went to a second property around 10:00 and had a gobbler sound off before we even called, no more than 60 yards from us. I called, he answered. 15 minutes later, nothing. I had a previous encounter with this bird where he stepped into a powerline 100 yards from my decoys, gobbled, and walked a big loop around me and never came in, so I was suspicious of his activities. Back to today, we had not heard the bird for about 20 minutes. We got up, moved 50 yards toward where he had been, called, and he gobbled again 150 yards below us. I told my buddy to get in front of me 40 yards and get ready. The bird spooked just as he sat down!

In between the daylight encounter and 10:00 we walked a 1.5 mile loop to get in front of a travelling gobbler that just kept going the other way. Just as we got to where we thought we would be in front of him to set up and cut him off, he flew up 20 yards from the logging road we were on. Best thing to do is to keep on with the patience, persistence, and perseverence.