ARKANSAS SPORTSMAN

April a time of big dreams for Arkansas hunters, anglers

With so many great things to do, April is a tough time for sportsmen in Arkansas, but more choices are better than fewer.

Spring turkey season, which for adults runs April 9-23, is April's headline act, and it's a fabulous time to be in the woods. The dogwoods and redbuds will be in bloom, and the woods will be awash in pastels.

At least, they will be if you hunt in diverse woodlands. I hunt in an industrial pine plantation in the Gulf Coastal Plain. It's not a particularly colorful place. In fact, it's kind dank and swampy, with great mounds of timber spoil lying about like giant pick-up-stix among stagnant pools of tannin-stained water covered with a layer of yellow pollen.

Oh, but to be there in an afternoon when the wind whispers through the swaying pines! It is intoxicating, and it can calm the most troubled and cluttered mind.

There are are a few colors that I look forward to seeing above all, the irridescent red of a gobbler's head and the golden glow of sunlight in his plumage. A backlit fan of a strutting gobbler is one of the most beautiful sights of all.

Tempted as I am to see them early, I restrain myself. I do not visit my turkey hunting woods until opening day. I don't want to take a chance on bumping birds out of an area, and I stifle the urge to call birds in to photograph. Every hunter has a distinctive calling style, or voice, as does every turkey hen. Many hunters believe that if you call up a bird that cannot find a hen making the calls, it will be disinterested the next time it hears that voice.

Worse, if you call up a gobbler and spook it, you will have conditioned that bird to ignore or move away from that voice. I learned that lesson the hard way two days before the 2001 spring season in Missouri. I called up a pair of hot gobblers on a friend's farm near the Osage River. They dashed out of a field and sprinted up a hill practically into my lap, and I never got close to them again.

Neither was the boss gobbler. I called up the boss off the roost on opening day and missed him at an impossibly close range after he tried to mate with my decoy. I still wake up in cold sweats over that one.

The next year I hunted at a public area near Tipton, Mo. A bird left its roost at dawn and flew down a hill. After failing to call him up, I went to the edge of the bluff overlooking a field. Hens skittered helter skelter through the crop rows, and I wondered how I could have possibly spooked them from deep cover so far away.

I didn't.

At the edge of the field stood the gobbler, like a statue with his fan outstretched, his back to the edge of a thicket bordered by the Lamine River. There was no way a hunter or any other predator could approach him undetected. The hens ran to him one by one -- in order of flock rank -- to be bred. Next! Next!

We have a short turkey season in Arkansas, and yet for me it's enough. If the season were 30 days, I'd hunt as many of those days as necessary to try to bag one, and hopefully two birds.

A 16-day season gives me plenty of time to enjoy prime fishing season. April is one of my favorite times to float fish a stream for bass, and bass fishing on our lakes is never easier or more exciting than it is in April. It's also a great time to catch monster striped bass on topwater lures in the mornings at lakes Ouachita and Beaver.

It took a little longer than usual, but crappie have finally moved to the banks at lakes in the central portion of the state. Anglers have been catching slab crappie from shoreline cover for several days, and that pattern should peak within the next two weeks.

Some surprisingly good crappie fishing is available in our streams, too. While casting grubs for smallmouth and Kentucky bass, consider taking a long rod with a light tube jig on your next float fishing trip. You'll be surprised how many crappie you'll catch daubing a jig next to fallen logs and treetops next to the bank.

It all ends so fast, and then come the torrid days of summer.

Sports on 04/01/2018

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