Weekly reflection #3

Week three was another exciting week for my Senior Project. Like the past weeks I tried to balance my time between hunting and fishing evenly as best I could, but this week seemed to be more fishing than hunting. This week I learned that a loss can't keep you down. A quick ten hours after the final horn sounded on my lacrosse career, I called in a strutting turkey to 20 yards. The loss sucked, I was really disappointed. But nothing improves my mood like hearing a turkey gobble at 4:50 in the morning. I learned to keep my head up, to focus on the future because that is the direction that I'm heading. I did not enjoy the fact that I only got to hunt Thursday morning. Granted I had a blast fishing, but I can only chase turkeys one month out of the year so I like to spend as much time as possible hunting. Nonetheless hunting for only 45 minutes and killing a bird does make a great story. I think that mentally I shifted gears from my lacrosse game to hunting very quickly because as the season winded down I was burnt out of lacrosse. I could add in plenty of behind the scenes bs to further explain my feelings towards lacrosse. But bottom line I knew I wanted to be turkey hunting Thursday morning, that's where I wanted to be. I was not expecting to kill a bird that early in the morning hunt. We have had hunts go like that before but after a long season of chasing birds almost until lunch time, I was hopeful but not expecting it. I also was not expecting to catch two native brook trout this week. I had fished those same pools earlier in the year with no success. One native fish, nevermind two was definitely not on my radar. I will benefit from my weeks activities with a new lifelong learning moment, and an awesome memory. I've always been a hand on learner so seeing first hand how important it is to keep pushing on after a difficult time, something I will never forget. A first turkey is also a memory to hold forever, one that neither my dad or I will forget. I helped achieve my goals by learning more about fish and turkey habitat. Very similar to what I learned last week. If the habitat is right, then the animal or fish will be there, period. Dave Pilla used the same section of stream to teach his wildlife classes about proper dissolved oxygen levels, bugs that fish feed on. I learned about turkey behavior. I had guessed all week that if we could get one of the four birds off by himself then we could call him in. Not only is it less eyes and ears to worry about, but I thought a lone Tom would respond to calls and decoys better. We saw that this was the case. But the bird was not careless as he approached us. He went slow, looking and listening as he went. Eventually he “broke” and ran the last couple of steps to close the distance on our decoys. It was obvious that the bird knows that it has been hunted before, therefore making him shy compared to how he would have been on opening day. Overall I learned a lot about how turkeys react in different situations.

Hours spent on project this week: 15
Hours spent on project over all: 65