Rios on the Umpqua

With a decoy placed just so, pumpguns loaded and headnets pulled up around our ears,
Andy McCormick let go with a series of putts and yelps. Before the box call quit resonating, the tom offered its spine-tingling reply.

Almost as quickly, any poise I had mustered up was gone. And somehow, call it hunter's intuition, I knew things were about to get worse before they got a whole lot better...

We were turkey hunting along the Umpqua River in Douglas County, Oregon, with Alvin Kesterson, proprietor of the Big K Guest Ranch. It's a homey, family-run operation catering to sportsmen of all persuasions; you can catch salmon, steelhead and smallmouth bass along its 10 miles of river frontage, or hunt big blacktail bucks up on its ridges and hilltops. The occasional bear wanders the property, and neighboring lands are home to herds of Roosevelt elk. Intermingling clear-cuts and pastureland dot the countryside, which otherwise is covered with dense forests, kept cool and dark by a leafy underblanket of ferns. This is prime western longbeard country too--prime Rio Grande country, to be exact.

But that has not always been the case. Oregon, particularly its southwest corner, provides some of the best turkey hunting in the West. But only after years of hard work and dedication on behalf of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, The National Wild Turkey Federation and the state's landowners and hunters is this true. The first serious attempt to establish wild turkeys in Oregon took place in the late 1920s, when better than 1,000 birds were released. Propagation failed, and it wasn't until the early-1960s that the state's wildlife managers again took up the task of translocating birds, releasing a little over 50 Merriams turkeys in eastern Oregon. This time the birds seemed to do well. Pleased with the results, in 1975 game managers turned loose another batch of birds, Rios, in the southwest corner of the state. This population took off in a big way and allowed for the capture and translocation of hundreds of birds throughout the state by the late '80s. In 1987 nearly every county in Oregon had a huntable population of turkeys and a statewide season was established.

"They had a hard time establishing birds until they introduced the Rios," says Kesterson who has lived and hunted in Oregon most of his adult life. "And now they're all over, especially in this part of the state. They're in every hollow."

Hiding in the dampness as well as we could, Andy and I were experiencing the Rio boom firsthand. The set-up was less than perfect but there was little time to do anything else. We'd seen the tom come off its roost seconds earlier and the loan oak--a giant apparition in the morning fog with tentacle-like branches hanging low to the muddy ground--was our only hope. I leaned my head back against its giant trunk and inhaled deeply.

Several minutes and a volume of turkey dialect passed before the bird showed itself--I don't know exactly how long it took though, because I hadn't looked at my wristwatch all morning: an oversight that nearly turned out to be a costly mistake. As we remained hunkered and hushed, not one tom poked its head around the corner in the meadow, but two, each inquisitive of what or who was making the seductive come-hithers. They were nearly clones of one another, heavy-bodied birds, each with four or five inches of beard. Following them was a second pair of birds--both jakes.