By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Spring, while not officially here, has sprung in my book. The month of March is here and with that one of my favorite hunting seasons of the year, turkey season.

March is a transitional month weather-wise. What is the adage? In like a musk ox out like a badger, or something like that. Whatever the adage, March is the transition from winter to damn near summer in our northern Gulf Coast world and that makes Meleagris gallopavo think of love.

Wild turkeys have a brain the size of a one-eyed cat’s glass eye, and aren’t on the verge of challenging Bonobo chimps as the world’s most intelligent animal. But they aren’t completely dumb, and I guess that is why we use their Achilles heel and hunt them during breeding season.

During the season of love, the male turkey, while still pretty wary, will let down his guard a bit in his search for companionship. Any guy worth his salt has let the call of the wild override his better judgment before and possibly made bad decisions based on biological impulses. Well the same bad decisions that leave men in an uncomfortable morning-after situation leave turkeys dead!

As you can tell, I have some guilt associated with spring turkey hunting. Not because I’m killing a turkey, that is a normal part of who I am, but the guilt comes from how I’m doing it. I’m not doing anything illegal in the way I hunt wild turkeys. In fact, I do it the way everybody else does, but I have a feeling I’m betraying some un-written male code of ethics.

The Mrs. has to put up with weeks each spring with me rehearsing my role as a willing-if-not-downright-slutty hen turkey. I work weeks ahead of time to make my calls the best and the most provocative they can be. That is how you hunt a turkey in the spring. I work hard at sounding like a sexy and willing female turkey would only to reduce my prospective suitor to some delicious turkey fingers. I guess this is where my dilemma arises. I love to hunt, but I also respect other creatures’ right to get a little love.

I catch fish by tricking them into eating something with a hook in it and feel no guilt. I shoot ducks that are fooled by a spread of decoys and are attempting to crash a party and as a not particularly social person I offer these bon vivants no quarter.

A covey of quail that rises with its members twisting and turning their acrobatic routines through the trees makes me feel lucky, not sorry when I can shoot one on the wing. The Tom turkey though is a whole other experience for me. I tend to anthropomorphize the situation wondering what it would be like to be a young man and hear the siren’s call of a young lady offering an encounter, only to follow that call around a corner and get shot in the process. I think that would probably suck.

I’m not going to stop hunting turkeys because of these feelings, but I may make my calls less sexy. I don’t think I’d feel as guilty if I knew a particular gobbler would come to any tired old hen in the woods. I may try to make my calls sound less like a seductive Bond-girl version of a wild turkey and more like the Bea Arthur version.

I worry too that hunting turkeys during the breeding season will eventually take all the macho out of the turkey world and leave it milquetoast. Through natural selection the male turkeys left will be less Bill Clinton-esque and more Mr. Rogers-like, and I can’t have that sort of thing on my conscience.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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