8 Bearded Marion County Gobbler Headed For No. 3 Status

An eight-bearded gobbler was recently killed in Marion County that should become the new No. 3 atypical Georgia gobbler of all time. The bird scores 186.22 and is currently going through the certification process by the National Wildlife Turkey Federation in Edgefield, S.C. The NWTF is the gate keeper for turkey records.

Nick Mandese, of Tazewell, was hunting with his wife Jachelle on March 28 when the hunt unfolded just after daylight on property that his father bought in 1999.

Nick Mandese and his wife Jachelle from their hunt for a record-book bird in Marion County.

“I haven’t (turkey) hunted it in seven or eight years because the three adjoining landowners timbered, and it changed the habitat, and I really wasn’t seeing birds. The last year or two they finally came back,” said Nick.

Nick said he really enjoys hunting with his wife Jachelle, so he asked her to go.

“It was her first time ever going turkey hunting with me,” said Nick.

Jachelle, who has hunted and fished her entire life, admits she had worked a pile of overtime in the insurance business, so she almost stayed home on a morning that ended with a record-book bird flopping.

“We sat in one of our ground boxes for deer, it’s got burlap all around it,” said Nick. “We weren’t running and gunning or going to try to chase one down,” said Nick.

The ground blind overlooks a food plot of red clover.

“Before I got to the box I set up a single decoy. I’m a lone-hen-come-get-me kind of guy. I don’t set flocks out because that can get too confusing,” said Nick.

The gobblers in the area didn’t want to sound-off from the roost that morning, and the first turkey they saw was a lone hen at 7:20 that walked into the plot and began to feed around the decoy.

“Then all of a sudden she says she sees a tom running in the pines. The way the ground blind is set up, I can’t see it. I asked her if she was sure it was a tom. It was her first turkey hunt. I don’t see it, it’s gone.

“For a good half hour there’s no tom in the field and the hen feeds. I don’t call when there is a live decoy around me, there is no point. After she left, I did some calling.”

Nick was using a Lynch box call and a slate call.

“After about my third time calling, I heard a turkey gobble to my far right behind me, 400 yards away,” said Nick. “His head is blowing up. He’s interrupting my calls when I am calling. He was making his way to me, 400, 300, 200 yards.”

As the gobbler behind him is closing the distance, Nick was fixing to get confirmation that the turkey Jachelle said she saw and reported as a tom was indeed a tom—and a jealous one at that.

“When the bird (that was coming) started getting close, the original bird that my wife saw started gobbling. He never gobbled until the other one got close to his dating site,” said Nick. “When he entered the food plot about 80 yards away, he was all puffed up. He was spitting and drumming.”

The bird that was coming never showed, apparently worried about a tail whipping. Nick glanced over at his wife and knew her decision to go turkey hunting that morning would likely alter her springs going forward.

“Her smile and eyes were big, I knew she was hooked,” said Nick.

For the final steps the bird would have to take, Nick slid in a mouth call.

“I wanted to speak sweet nothings to him,” said Nick. “He never gobbled when he was in the field. He was tight-lipped. He got about 40 yards away, and I told my baby it was going to be loud, to be ready. I’m shooting my dad’s 3 1/2-inch Remington 870.”

One shot and the bird folded.

“We stepped out of the box, and we were walking up to it and he wasn’t moving, and then he started flopping,” said Nick. “I looked at her and said I had to go. I went up there and put my hand on his wing and grabbed his neck, and then when I rolled him over, that is when our journey started.

“Originally we counted six beards. We took our pictures and went to her dad’s to gloat a little bit. There were three older guys there who said that the bird had seven beards. I was still not thinking record or that I had done anything.”

Nick was obviously excited and contacted Carson Hinman at Hinman’s Taxidermy in Preston to get the process started for a full-body mount.

“I go to his place a half hour away, and he looks at it and says the bird has eight beards,” said Nick.

At this point it’s kicked in that Nick’s bird is a special one, one that could score pretty high using NWTF’s scoring method.

“Carson makes about eight phone calls, and then William Sullivan shows up,” said Nick.

William hunts locally and is a past president of the Florida chapter of the NWTF and currently runs a Lakeland, Fla. chapter.

“He was turkey hunting up here from Florida, and he walks in. I shake his hand, and he walks through everybody to look at this bird,” said Nick.

“He just started calling these measurements off. I’m like this is Sunday, and I hate math. You have to take the spurs and multiply it by 10 and the weight… and I am like, ‘The weight? Who has a certified scales?’”

It took a while to find someone with certified scales who was open on a Sunday who didn’t mind a dead turkey being weighed. They finally found a scale 30 miles away in Tazewell—back where they had come from.

“So I drive from Preston again to Tazewell. I get it certified, and I have to drive back to Preston to get this thing in the guy’s freezer to be mounted. We started our wake-up at 6:30, and this went on until 4 or 5 p.m. I said, ‘Baby, this is the longest turkey hunt I’ve ever had.’ Then she came home and had to work.”

The bird weighed 21.72 pounds, had 1.125-inch spurs and had beards that measured 15.9375, 8.75, 8.75, 8.75, 8.5625, 7.5, 7.25 and 5.5 inches. Using the NWTF scoring method, the bird scores 186.22. The scoring process is explained through NWTF’s website and also includes a scoring calculator where you can measure your own bird to get an idea of what the bird would score.

On the national level, Nick’s bird at 186.22 would rank as No. 10 on the list of all-time atypical gobblers for all turkey species throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Guatemala.

The 15.9375-inch beard will go down as Georgia’s seventh-longest beard.

When entering a gobbler into NWTF’s records, both the hunter and a primary witness must be, or must become, a current NWTF member in order to register the bird. A secondary witness must be present, but they are not required to be a member. All the information is explained in detail on the NWTF website at https://www.nwtf.org/hunt/records/register.

If you kill a bird that you would like to get certified, reach out to someone in your NWTF neighborhood for help or contact NWTF National headquarters at 800.THE-NWTF.