Apr 28, 2018 5 min read

Well, the trout season in Southwestern Pennsylvania is in progress and the spring hunt for bearded gobblers has begun. All one has to do to hear a turkey yelping or gobbling is to step outside in a rural or semi-rural location and listen. Last week, I did mention that some of those turkey sounds just might not be a feathered animal, but rather a human pretending to be a feathered animal.

While I am no biologist, I seem to think that turkey numbers are down a bit from previous years. There are still plenty of turkeys but I base my belief on the fact that I saw very few poults during the course of the year. In years previous, I would spot hens with eight to 12 poults, and this year the ones I did spot had but one or two. Again, I do not profess to be any kind of expert but I do spend a lot of time in rural areas.

I repeat my warning from last week: be careful when hunting this keen-eyed bird. Never assume you are the only one in the cover you are hunting in. It matters little if the land owner says no one else is hunting the property. In particular, make sure your back is protected by something big, be it a large tree or a big rock. Remember, you can see another hunter approaching you from the front but not from behind you.

This is especially true when using a decoy. I have seen more than one decoy with holes in it that were put there by another hunter stalking the sounds they just heard. Such occurrences should never happen but they do. After all, the turkey must have a beard, and while I have one and so do other men in the woods, my beard in no way resembles the beard on a Tom Turkey.

I certainly hope your fishing has been better than mine. Maybe it is nothing more than old age but I must admit to having an off year so far. First, as I always do, I fished for Crappie, Most of my trips to Cross Creek Lake have been duds. This I blame on the goofy weather we have been enduring. The one good day I had was great. I fished with an old friend who I haven’t been able to fish with in a while.

It was nice just to catch fish on a sunny day and catch up. But then the next day we had a cold snap, and as usually happens the fish shut down. Perhaps it just happened to me, but other than one great day Crappie fishing has been a disappointment. I have talked to a few other Crappie fishermen in the same situation.

What really sticks in my craw is that this misfortune has extended into the trout season. I spent some time fishing with my daughter Kathy and she outfished me by a good margin. She has spent far less time along the stream and has outfished me 2 to 1. I will never hear the end of it, but she has always outfished most anglers since she was about six years old. I have learned to tolerate it, telling myself that it’s because I taught her everything she knows about fishing.

A long time ago, when she was knee high to a grasshopper, we would stay at a friend’s cottage in McKean County. Across from the camp flowed a little stream that held a nice population of native brook trout. In the wee hours of the morning, while my son Pat and my wife Eileen slept, I would get up and make the coffee. Kathy would be in the woods across the gravel road fishing. Someone once asked me if I worried about her being there all alone. My honest answer was I truly believed, and still do, that she was safer there than she was on the streets at home. She always caught trout.

Today, maybe with all the school violence, I might not have allowed her to go it alone. The main topic today is what should be done to make schools safer from these deranged persons with firearms? My one answer is simple and true. I think metal detectors and armed guards would be a good start to making schools safer. If such measures were employed it would be a big help and would demonstrate a willingness to face the real problem. The problem, as I see it, is not the legitimate law-abiding gun owner, although the easy path is to place the blame for school shootings on the instrument not the mentally challenged person.

Such action places the blame on persons such as myself and not on the person who solves his personal problems with a weapon of some kind. The blame and the punishment need to fall on such a person and very little pity shown on someone who would consider such an act. If the laws had been enforced, then the shooter in Florida could have been stopped long before the massacre had occurred.

Have you been into the courthouse lately? The entry is well-protected by metal detectors and armed guards, yet our schools are not. Are the judges and other courthouse employees more important than the children going to school? That seems to be the message we are sending.