Jakes Member Bags Grand Slam
Article taken from Jakes Magazine - Winter 2000
Dave Henderson




Grand Slammin'

A North American Wild Turkey Grand Slam is a quest to kill a wild turkey of every huntable subspecies of wild turkey in North America - Eastern, Osceola (or Florida), Merriam's and Rio Grande.

Jeana Sears, a fifth-grade student at North Spencer Christian School in Spencer, N.Y., may well be the youngest person - and most certainly the youngest girl - to ever take the North American Grand Slam of wild turkeys. Plus, she achieved the feat in a little more than a month last spring. Jeana was 10 years, eight months and 19 days old when she completed the four-bird, four-state, four-shot odyssey on a snowy April 18 morning near Trinidad, Colorado. Her dad, Joe Sears, a well-known hunting guide and game call manufacturer from Spencer, N.Y., set up the entire journey and was by her side that exciting spring.

Osceola
Jeana started the quest by taking an Osceola wild turkey near Lake Wales, Florida, in March on land scouted by a friend of her dad's. She took the bird on the second day of hunting but then got sick and the father/daughter team headed home rather than pursue scheduled hunts for an Eastern gobbler in Georgia and South Carolina.

Eastern
The Eastern bird would come on Good Friday, April 2, in a similar setup. Jeana and her dad arrived in east-central South Carolina at 1 a.m. after an all-night drive. They met their guide outside of York, S.C., at 2 a.m., bought the required tags and were hunting by 5 a.m. Jeana bagged her Eastern gobbler in less than two hours.

Rio Grande

After celebrating Easter at home in New York, the pair then flew to Oklahoma City on April 16. The next morning, Jeana took an 18-½ -pound Rio Grande bird on a prairie ranch in Durham, Oklahoma.

Merriam's The duo then rented a car and drove a 1,380-mile round trip to a ranch in Cokedale, Colorado, where she killed a 19-pound Merriam's gobbler on April 18, rounding out the Grand Slam and making her the youngest female to ever achieve this feat.

Slammin'
Did she ever have any doubts that she could do it?

"It (the Grand Slam quest) sounded like a lot of fun when Dad mentioned it, but I really didn't know until I the Osceola," said Jeana, who was too young to qualify for a hunter safety course in New York and had to travel 12 hours to Maine to take the test. "I'd never hunted anything before, not even squirrels, so I didn't know what to expect.

"After I shot it (the Osceola)," Jeana explained, "I started to think about the whole thing. Even after I got sick, I was actually pretty sure that I could do it because I just kept encouraging myself."

She did it all with four shots from her Mossy Oak 20-guage Remington 1100 Youth Model shotgun and with Dad at her side.

"It's been absolutely amazing," her dad, Joe, said. "She'd never even hunted anything before last month. She can't do it in New York; not even a squirrel (because of her age)."

"But she went from that point to selecting the birds she wanted and making good shots every time. Four, on-shot kills. I've been guiding hunters for 15 years and haven't seen that kind of performance very much, even from experienced adults."

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