Swimming gobbler surely a Kodak moment

Tall tales are part of fishing, but you have to give Ronnie Lee and Emerson Payne credit for the whopper they came back with after an October trip to Kerr Reservoir.

The men were fishing for bass near the Ivy Hill recreation area when they saw something swimming across the lake. It didn't look like a duck or goose.

"The silhouette looked like a loon," Payne said. "But I'd never seen a loon down there. "Then the closer we got, we could see it was a turkey."
The men said the hen eventually made it to shore and walked up into the woods.

Norfolk Southern retirees who fish together every chance they get, Lee and Payne were still contemplating the sight when they spotted another swimming turkey, this one a gobbler. It too, eventually made it to shore.

"It shook off like a dog and walked up in the woods just like the hen," said Lee, a 54-year-old from Roanoke.
When the men told their story to friends they got the kind of skeptical looks you might expect. "People thought I was crazy," Lee said. "They were asking if I was drunk."

Payne, who is 59 and lives in Boones Mill, got the same treatment.
"Once word got around, people thought we were making it up," he said, pretty much summing up the reaction I had when Lee called me with the story.

Then, with a satisfied grin, Emerson added the key phrase.
"Until we got the pictures developed." Pictures? What a novel idea. Photographic proof is usually missing when someone sees - or thinks they see - something unusual in the wild.

A photo would have been missing in this case if the men had seen only one turkey. But when they saw the gobbler they had the presence of mind to reach for a disposable camera, a piece of gear they carry along on all their fishing trips.

Using their bass boat's trolling motor the men headed for the swimming gobbler. It wasn't difficult to catch up. "They're slow swimmers," Lee said.
That's because they're not supposed to swim. "I've never heard of a turkey swimming," said Bob Duncan, Wildlife Division chief for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. "But I wouldn't put anything past a wild turkey. "They are amazing animals."

Turkeys aren't amazing swimmers simply because they aren't designed to swim, lacking key components such as webbed feat. How they got in the water is another mystery. The lake was not quite a mile wide at the spot, the men said. Turkeys can easily fly that distance.

When the men pulled alongside the gobbler Payne snapped several shots. The pictures clearly show the gobbler, right down to its submerged beard.
"I wish I could have gotten closer," Payne said. "But I didn't want to spook him."

No worries. The pictures are plenty good enough to prove that this is one of those tall tales that really happened.

http://www.roanoke.com/outdoors%5C14994.html

Ive turkey hunted around Kerr lake for years. Around here it is called "Buggs Island". Ive seen plenty of deer swimming the lake but never a turkey. I bet those are some interesting pictures.

There are numerous loons on Kerr (or "Buggs), this time of the year. They migrate down in the late fall and spend the winter on the lake. I never remember loons being on the lake in the winter when I was a kid, remember seeing the first ones there about 10~12 years ago. Saw the gull's diving and thought they were over a school of stripers, which turned out to be a pair of loons. The wife and myself took a vacation day yesterday and fished for largemouth and stripers at Buggs as the weather was to be sunny and 70 degrees. We saw at least 20 loons from the mouth of Eastland reek to the mouth of Island creek (Ivy Hill section), along with one mature bald eagle. Saw one deer swimming the lake to escape the hounds that were running it, but saw no swimming turkeys!!! Seeing a turkey swimming would be worth taking a picture... but after some of the things I have seen them do, don't think I would be shocked.

Back in the mid 90's while preparing to launch our boat in pre-fishing for a bass tourney, we saw a hen turkey walking across the Grassy Creek railroad trestle beside HWY 15. She walked all the way across the span, then sailed across the cove, landed on the bank and walked off into the woods. Numerous people saw it, and that was by far the biggest topic of conversation at the tourney meeting.

This is not the first time I have heard this, I just want to see the pictures.

I called in a hen several years ago while duck hunting and watched her land in the marsh that had been flooded with about 6 inches of water. She landed in it like she did it all the time, or had seen enough ducks do it that she figured that she could do it as well. Once she got in the water with the reeds and other vegetation, she was inpossible to spot. I figure that the turkey stays in that marsh due to the hunting pressure around the marsh and has all the food and protection she needs to survive. Unfortunately for her (or one of her offspring), she made a fatal mistake this past Thanksgiving day and got to close to this duck hunter!!