This past Sunday was a Possum Cop Chronicle first.
After church, my wife, youngest son and I were walking to our vehicle in the parking lot when a man and a woman in a yard across the street started waving and trying to get our attention. They didn’t seem to be in distress; heck, they were smiling.
I looked back behind us to see if maybe they saw some friends of their or something, but no one was there. I started walking towards the couple as the man started gesturing and pointing.
As he said, “We got us a wild turkey,” I saw it.
Indeed, there appeared to be a wild turkey meandering around his yard. The man said he had called animal control, but they told him to call the game warden.
The game warden didn’t answer, and that’s when he saw me. I was still puzzled.
I didn’t recognize the guy and wasn’t sure how he’d known to ask me about his bird.
Anyway, as I walked over to look at the turkey, the man said to my wife, “I recognized him from the paper. I read his articles. I figured he’d know.”
Ha! I still get quite a few game warden calls from people who know me, but this was the first time I got a one because I wrote stories for the paper.
Oh well, I figured I’d help them out. The turkey in their yard looked similar to a native, wild Rio Grande turkey hen, but it was definitely of a domesticated variety.
I gave the gentleman several options on what to do, helped him pen the bird in his back yard and told him to call me if he couldn’t find the owner. Case closed.
I’ve gotten quite a few turkey calls over the years. The most memorable one was about a year before I retired.
A guy called me and reported that, on his way to work every morning, he saw a place where two wild Rio Grande turkeys — a gobbler and a hen — were locked up in a pen.
I told the guy they were probably of a domesticated variety, but the man was insistent that he knew his turkeys, and these weren’t barnyard birds.
To emphasize his credibility, he started rattling off all the game wardens he knew and had ridden with. I got to say, it was a pretty impressive list. I agreed to pick him up the next morning and have a look.
When I picked him up, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He was a normal looking dude who lived in a nice house.
As we made small talk in between directives from him on how to get to the Rio Grande jail birds, I found him to be a nice guy.
We made a left off a farm-to-market road and the man started urgently whispering, “Shish, shish… it’s up on the right. Slow down.”
I didn’t particularly appreciate being shished, but I went ahead and slowed down like he said.
“There!” I pulled over and stopped.
Sure enough, in what looked to be a big hog trap about 200 yards away was what appeared to be a wild Rio Grande turkey gobbler and hen. I grabbed my binoculars, slouched down in my seat and took a gander.
Shortly thereafter, I tried my best to not laugh, drip with sarcasm or demean the poor dude in any way as I said, “Have a look yourself, sir” and handed him the binoculars.
After the man focused in on the motionless turkey decoys inside a hog trap next to a shed, he slowly handed me back my binoculars and lapsed into a soliloquy of apologies that lasted until I dropped him off back at his house.
Spring turkey season in Bandera County starts on March 30.
