May 24th, Day 21

Took one heck of a walk this AM. Covered about 5.5 miles of the Pocono Plateau. Rang up 2 gobblers early on but things were prety quiet after that. Very nice AM. The high-light of the morning, and it was a big highlight for me, was coming across my first ever identified grove of American Chestnut trees. There were all small of course but a few were almost 4" in diameter and 12-14' tall. To lay my hand on one has been an outdoor bucket list item of mine for years.



The AC to the left is alive and healthy as can be but the one to the right succumd to the blight some time ago.



There was a lot of blight to be seen in the rest of the trees too but also lots of little healthy sprouts and youth trees fighting the good fight. The trees resilience is an amazing story. Not matter how effecient that horrible infection is the tree just keep pushing up new life. Very cool find for me and it made my season. I hung out amongst them for a good 30 minutes hoping to pop a gobbler there.

On the hike out a hen nearly scared me to death when she exploded from under my foot. She held as tight as she could.



All in all a great morning in the big woods. I'll be sad to see this end next week.

I was in the woods at 5:10, sitting where I stayed until noon yesterday (but at a different tree). In the past I've discovered that sometimes a gobbler will show up after I leave, so I figured I might meet him there this morning.

At 5:45 everything was still quiet except for the songbirds. The fields were fairly light, but the woods were still fairly dark, so I decided to give a little tree yelp on my scratchbox call. Nothing responded, so I'm sitting there for a couple of minutes when suddenly a gobbler is 20 feet from me to my right, standing beside the tree I was calling from yesterday and behind a small bush only big enough to hide him. He must have seen my head slowly turn because he putted, turned, and flew down an old trail.

He never gobbled, and I don't know where he came from. I just know he was standing 22 feet away at my extreme right. I stayed there for an hour and 15 minutes calling very softly occasionally. Then I moved about 200 yards to the spot where I killed a bird two weeks ago. Three hours later I spotted him coming, but he was about 60-70 yards away and heading for a field. I couldn't get him to change his mind, so an hour later I left, being careful to take the long way so I'd reduce the chances of running into him. He'll be there tomorrow. If only he would gobble. Even once! It's so much easier if they gobble!

Steve.