Baby Bluebirds

I thought you might need a short break from turkey hunting adventures, so I will start this post with pictures of the baby bluebirds. I checked the nestbox last Wednesday and there were 4 newly hatched babies. I checked tonight mainly because I wanted to see if either of the other 2 eggs had hatched and to get a picture to share with you. Father Bluebird was patrolling the area and Mother Bluebird was doing her duty in the nestbox. There is no way this mom is going to leave her babies. She scooted a little farther back in the box, so you can see a couple of the babies towards the front of the nest, but I couldn't get her to fly out to do an accurate count of the little ones. She's really a good mom.

We moved to a new turkey hunting location today. We had gotten previous permission from one of my former employers who has about 23 acres and lives only a couple miles from us. They have a huge and fabulous flower/water garden on their property and Mrs. H. was more than happy for us to come in and "shoot 'em all" as they were getting into her newly planted flowers and scratching everything out. Of course, this would be illegal, but we told her we would be more than happy to try and get the 2 allowed by our permits.

The area we hunted was in a sheep pasture. Having no previous experience with sheep, we were curious as to what the sheep would do upon discovering our hunting blind and turkey decoys. They were curious, but not nearly as curious as cattle can be, and after studying our set-up for a few minutes, they decided we weren't interesting enough to warrant a closer look.

We had heard a turkey gobbling all morning and around 9:30 he finally made his way up to our pasture. Rick actually saw 2 birds coming, but unfortunately one of them was a hen. The tom was interested in our decoys, but not willing to leave the hen, no matter how convincing I tried to make the calls sound. He never came any closer than 21 yards and Rick decided not to try the shot because of all the weed stems in the way. If a person was gun-hunting this would have been an easy shot, but hitting even one of these little sticks with an arrow is enough to deflect your arrow and turn a good shot into a bad one.

Here's what our blind looks like from a turkey's perspective. The inside of the blind is coated with some sort of carbon fabric sealant (to inhibit human scent if you were going to use the blind for deer hunting) so the interior is completely black and opaque. Therefore, instead of regular camouflage, we wear all black clothes inside and try to cover up as much of our faces as possible so we blend in with the background of the blind. (Rick is sitting in here on the right side of the blind and I took the picture from about 16 yards away.)

I finished the Nora Roberts book today, so tomorrow I'm going to start "Last Child in the Woods," loaned to me by one of my friends at work. I've heard about this book, but never had the chance to read it, so I'm glad he offered it to me.