It took the author years to finally kill an Osceola turkey. Their quiet nature and the country in which they live make them one of the toughest birds to bag.

We were down to the last morning and the swamp was silent--again. John Coan and I were perched up against a big cypress, shaded and well camouflaged. The little clearing in front of us was exactly perfect, and our hen decoys looked right at home. I knew there were birds around; we'd seen turkeys the evening before and had backed off quickly, banking our last morning on this ideal dry spot deep in the cypress swamp.

No plan for wild turkey is foolproof, but this seemed like a good one. Unfortunately the birds weren't cooperating. Nothing had responded to owl hoots, nothing had responded to a shock gobble. Now it was close to full daylight, even here in the deep swamp, and nothing was responding to John's most seductive hen talk.

Then I heard this incredible flapping right behind me, and a huge, dark form swept down and landed 20 yards to my left. I was caught flat-footed; the clearing was to my direct front, and from that direction I was well-protected by camouflage netting. To my left side there was just a little trail through the trees, and I was wide open, leaning against a tree with the big Browning pump gun over my knees.

To make it worse, I'm left-handed, and there was no way to shoot that direction without moving my entire body. I stayed frozen, swiveling only my eyes hard to the left. Yes, it was a turkey, and yes, it was a gobbler, a good one, with the tip of its beard hidden in the grass. Might as well be on the moon, I thought to myself.

Okay, so I'm no great shakes as a turkey hunter, but I have done a fair amount of turkey hunting over the years and had hunted the Osceola turkey on several occasions. It's just that I'd never gotten a shot at one, so, of course, this was something that I very much wanted to happen--for several reasons. One, the beautiful, iridescent bronze feathering on the chest of an Osceola gobbler is distinctive and, to my thinking, makes this slightly smaller, rangier bird the most beautiful of all the wild turkeys.

The Osceola gobbler also occupies the most restricted in range. Eastern gobblers occupy nearly half the country, from the Atlantic to the Midwest. The Rio Grande turkey ranges naturally from Texas up into Kansas and has been transplanted to other areas, including my Central Coast country in California. The Merriam's gobbler is the turkey of the Rocky Mountain west.

The Osceola gobbler isn't just Florida, period. Northern Florida and the Panhandle has Eastern birds, and then you have a broad, loosely defined intergrade area. You need to get into the southern two-thirds of Florida to find the real McCoy. The Osceola turkey is the bird of the Everglades, cypress swamps and palmettos.

Turkey experts might disagree, but I don't believe any of our turkeys are naturally either different to hunt or more difficult to hunt than any others. I believe the differences are caused more by climate, terrain and hunting pressure than by any innate differences in the birds themselves. Eastern gobblers live in human country, so the Eastern wild turkey tends to be well educated and extremely difficult to call. Rio Grande turkeys tend to live in country that is more open and also much more lightly hunted. By comparison with most Eastern gobblers, Rio Grande turkeys sometimes seem downright dumb.

Merriam's turkeys might be even more vulnerable, except they tend to be more thinly distributed in much rougher terrain, timbered up-and-down country where sound often doesn't carry well and the terrain creates obstacles. I've had my problems with Merriam's turkeys, but I've always thought it was due to the country, not the birds.

In my experience the Osceola turkey is a special case. The spring season starts very early, March 1, but I'm not sure this matters because the climate where they live is darn near tropical. They do gobble, I suppose, and certainly the hens chatter, but when during the long southern Florida season they might do this seems to me to be anybody's guess.