Thoughts from the Colonel
Tom Kelly, the poet laureate of turkey hunting, answers a few questions...
What are some of your earliest hunting memories?
About 80 years ago I was with some people in Mississippi, including a friend named Pete Kennedy. I heard a turkey gobble for the first time. In fact, I thought it was an owl. Kennedy had to tell me what it was. And we fooled around with it and fooled around with it, and eventually we lucked up and killed it. And I realized then that [turkey hunting] was something that I would really like to do and do a [heck] of a lot of.
Around that time, I bet you there weren’t 1,000 turkey hunters in the United States, and every one of them thought that we were just about to lose turkeys — they were getting fewer and fewer. And they wouldn’t tell you [anything]. I mean, they’d lie to you, they’d give you advice like, “Son, you ain’t yelping enough, you ain’t moving around enough.” They’d deliberately lie to you because they thought, “Turkeys won’t be around for long, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him kill one that I could kill.”
For every 100 deer hunters, only about one or two are turkey hunters. Why do you think that is?
‘Cause turkey hunting’s hard work! Deer hunting, somebody else does all the [darn] work! You draw a stand out of a hat. Somebody drives you out to the stand and sits you down there. You sit in your chair with your legs crossed … You don’t have any skill involved. You got buckshot in your gun. You got three rounds in there. If a deer comes by, you kill it. If it don’t come by, you can’t leave the stand ‘cause one of the standers would shoot you. You got to sit there until they pick you up. [Heck], I’d rather work!
When has a turkey made you look silly?
Oh, boy. (laughs) They’ve made me look silly so many times — they will do things that are just absolutely unexplainable.
One time, a group came down and they wanted to get some shots of turkey. So I had a cameraman sitting behind me with the camera right over my shoulder and taking pictures all the time. The turkey gobbled, came up, and he got closer and closer and closer. I asked the cameraman, “You got enough?” and he said, “Yeah, go ahead and kill him.” And I missed him. Right there in front of God and everybody. He wasn’t 40 yards away. I can’t tell you why I missed him, but I missed him. And there ain’t no way to explain it away.
You ain’t on an equal footing with turkeys, and you never will be no matter how long you hunt and no matter how smart you think you are. They’re going to do something to you every year that makes you think, “[Dang it], I didn’t know he could do that.”
—Excerpt from Mobile Bay Magazine, April 2021