Photo by CRAIG HOLT A hunter’s chances to see turkeys are increased near chufa patches.

Farmers want rain in the spring after they’ve planted their fields so seeds will sprout and eventually grow crops.

Now precipitation doesn’t grow wild turkeys, but it certainly doesn’t hurt when scouting for birds. Wet weather — but not downpours — seems to “grow” turkeys in fields during the early spring. At least that’s what happened last April during a hunting trip at Northampton County.

After passing through the town of Jackson, which is split by U.S. 158 (the shortest route, believe it or not, from central North Carolina to the Outer Banks instead of U.S. 64 East), the dashboard clock showed 5 p.m. It was cloudy and drizzling rain.

Bands of showers and black scudding clouds punctuated the two-hour drive to Northampton, not a good omen, one would think, for a long-planned turkey hunt the next day.

But as I glanced out my side window at a big, dark field beside US. 158, my mind suddenly flashed back to a southern Virginia Saturday morning some 30 years ago and a wet adventure with a veteran hunter whose mailing address was, believe it or not, Turkeycock Mountain.

The wind roared in the tree tops and the rain stung like sleet that morning. Then the front passed about 11 a.m., and the sun began to play peek-a-boo behind rapidly-moving clouds.

“Let’s ride some of the back roads and see if we can see some turkeys out in the fields,” my host said.

Sure enough, we hadn’t gone 2 miles when he said, “There’s one.”

A big Virginia Eastern tom, black with wet shiny feathers, a blood-red wattle and 11- or 12-inch beard, was strolling unconcerned near the edge of a green field.

“Let’s get him,” said the 70-ish Virginian, as he yanked his WW II-vintage Jeep off the blacktop, and we began bouncing through mud puddles pocketing a logging path at the edge of the field.

With seconds we pulled even with the gobbler, who began to sprint toward the safety of the woods at the field’s far end. We had him cut off from the forest beside him, so his only hope was to outrun us to the tree line in front of him.

“Stick your gun out the window and pop him,” my driver yelled above the roar of the Jeep’s engine.

Well, needless to say, I declined his invitation. As the outdoors editor of a local newspaper, I didn’t believe blasting turkeys from a moving Jeep was something I ought to do.

But, for just a moment there ...

Last April as I drove through the misty evening rain in Northampton County, I remembered the long-ago rain-and-turkey-chasing experience because when I looked into the field in the fading light, I saw not one, but perhaps three dozen wild turkeys, feeding as carefree as yard chickens.

At the next opening beside the road, I saw more dark shapes, perhaps 50 turkeys, also nonchalantly scanning the ground for earthworms driven to the surface by the rain.

The further toward my destination I went the more wild turkeys I saw. Each field had dozens of Eastern birds, walking about in the drizzle a few minutes before time to fly to roosts for the night.

Caswell County has long been designated the top turkey haven in North Carolina, while Ashe County in the northwestern corner of the state has tremendous flocks of birds. But nothing beats Northampton County these days.

The reason? Probably chufa.

If you’re not a turkey hunter, you’re probably scratching your head. Chufa? What’s that?

Well, chufa is a little plant of African origin with long grass-like stems that may grow from knee to waist high. Anchoring it in the ground are a mass of tubers in a root system about the size of two side-by-side fists. Most importantly, chufa tubers have a sweet almond taste, and wild turkeys love ’em like kids love lollipops.

Remember Yogi Berra’s famous line — “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded” — when somebody asked him about a famous restaurant? Well, a field of chufas can be just about as uncrowded with turkeys as Yogi’s restaurant.

Plant chufas properly, get the right amount of rain, let ’em grow and every gobbler and hen within 5 miles will show up at some point to scratch and dig out the sweet root nodules.

And one of North Carolina’s biggest chufa producers lives and works in Northampton County.

Donny Lassiter, 27, owns Cyprus Knee Chufa (www.cypruskneechufa.com), a part of Lassiter Farms, a family-owned business at the Conway community in Northampton County. Besides cotton, peanuts and soybeans, Lassiter also raises 30 acres of chufa, then harvests and packs mature tubers in sacks for sale. A 50-pound sack costs $100 (he also sells them in smaller bags for lesser prices).

“A lot of guys around here buy chufa and plant it for turkeys and also for waterfowl,” he said. “The National Wild Turkey Federation gets chufas from Spain and sells them to members.”

Alan Page, a dedicated wild turkey hunter from Duplin County, met me at Lassiter’s home a few miles east of Jackson at dark. He’d been scouting for wild turkeys that afternoon. We were going to hunt one of the chufa patches at Lassiter’s farm the next day.

“I got some chufas from Spain, but they arrived too late for me to plant them,” he said. “When I did plant them, they didn’t germinate. Then I started looking on the Internet and found Donnie and Cyprus Knee Chufa.”

Page has been making regular runs to Northampton County ever since, buying 50-pound bags of chufas for Duplin County buddies who place orders with him.

“We call it ‘turkey gold,’ ” he said. “You plant chufas, and you’re going to draw in turkeys.”

Lassiter said, because of his location in the northeastern corner of the state, the weather is too cool to plant chufas during March. He waits until April (to lessen the risk of losing young plants to a late frost). It takes from 90 to 100 days for chufa tubers to mature, which means they won’t be big enough for turkeys to eat until after the hunting season closes in early May.

So, basically, chufas are planted for the next hunting season.

Mike Seamster, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s wild turkey project leader, said his agency plants chufa from March through June. Seamster and his employees use chufas to attract flocks of turkeys to fields where WRC personnel trap and relocate the birds to other areas.

“Chufa will grow until the first frost in October, then the grassy stems turn brown and fall down,” he said. “After that, turkeys will scratch out chufas and eat them through the fall, winter and into the next spring season.”

The problem, Seamster said, is turkeys that’ve never eaten chufa don’t know what they are, but after they discover them, they’ll dig up an entire field. The following spring, they’ll also dig up chufa seeds that’ve just been planted.

“I first planted chufa near my house several years ago, watched (the plants) grow, the frost came in October, the grass turned brown and fell down, but nothing bothered (the chufa) all winter and spring,” he said. “So I pulled up some by the roots and threw them on the ground. I came back two months later, probably in March, and that field looked like a pond with a bunch of bream beds. When the turkeys found the chufa I’d pulled up, they dug up the field trying to get the rest of ’em.

“It’s been the experience of several people that turkeys also will dig up just-disked chufa, newly planted seeds.”

Seamster recommended planting at least one acre or more of chufa.

“If turkeys find a quarter-acre chufa field, don’t expect to have any left in the spring,” he said. “They’ll dig it all up during the fall and winter.”

“Deer like chufas, too,” Page said. “I’ve seen them dig ’em up.”

Page said the way to plant chufas is to disk land with a harrow, broadcast the chufa plants, then disk them into the ground again. A properly-planted field usually will have 40-pounds of chufa seeds per acre, so a 50-pound bag will cover a little more than one acre (four seeds per square foot).

“A lot of people used to disk their land, broadcast chufas, then run a bedspring over them, but that doesn’t make them go deep enough (in the ground),” he said. “The ground needs to be disked from 1- to 1 1/2-inches deep. I set my disk at 3 or 4 inches and that pushes (the tubers) down good.”

Page applies 350 pounds of 10-10-10 or 13-13-13 fertilizer per ace to a field before he disks the first time.

“Sandy loam, like they have here in Northampton County, is the best type soil to grow chufa,” Page said. “You want the soil to have a ph of 5 to 7. If you don’t know your soil’s ph, you can put out a half-ton of lime per acre and that’ll usually work.”

Sometimes, for some reason, Spanish-origin chufa often will have a pesky weed called nut grass in it.

“My chufa doesn’t have nut grass,” Lassiter said.

Lassiter said a few local landowners began to plant chufa in Northampton County about 20 years ago but mainly for waterfowl.

“We didn’t have any wild turkeys around here until 10 or 12 years ago,” he said. “That’s when the Wildlife Commission started releasing turkeys.”

With chufa already being grown by some landowners who liked they way it attracted ducks, it wasn’t long before turkeys discovered it.

Northampton County has perhaps the best wild turkey habitat in the state with its mostly rural population — Rich Square, its largest town, has approximately 2,800 residents while Jackson has 2,600 — big farms and bigger swamps. With the addition of chufas, it has turned into a veritable wild turkey paradise.

The land Page and I hunted was basically the back side of a 50-acre field, divided from other fields of similar size by rows of longleaf pines that acted as wind rows. The field, planted in some crop (probably soybeans) and harvested the previous fall and replanted, now was green. A watery swamp bordered its southeast side. But at its east end, around a little curve,was a rectangular section about half a football field size that looked as if somebody had taken a garden tiller to it.

It was a chufa patch Lassiter had planted the previous year. Turkeys had scratched it bare.

“The turkeys roost in the swamp, then fly out at daylight and in the evening to feed in the fields,” Page said.

My setup was perfect for placing four decoys — two Wal-Mart flexible hens, plus a jake and a painted wooden turkey tail-feather fan nailed to a stake and driven in the soft ground (Page’s creation) — in the field in front of my blind.

The field’s edge, about 30 feet wide and overgrown with cat briars, broomsedge and stunted oaks, created perfect surroundings to place a camouflage net blind. I placed a camou camp stool inside the cloth blind (I carry a pocketful of clothespins to attach the camou cloth to anything that’ll hold it at eye level) for comfortable sitting. I also had a scrub oak at my back to hide me from the prying eyes in the swamp.

When the world just started to make sense visually at dawn, a gobbler boomed in the swamp. Pretty soon other gobblers were roaring challenges all around me.

The hair stood up on my neck like an electrical charge just before a lightning strike.

I like slate and box calls because they don’t require much hand movement (I confess I never got the hang of mouth calls), and I had a Cane Creek slate call and a Lynch box call in my hunting jacket pocket.

The slate call sounds a little more realistic to me than the box call and it’s more flexible — it’s easier to make feeding purrs, plus it easily produces clucks and yelps.

A old hen yelped somewhere close behind me, so I mimicked her yelp. She yelped again, longer, and I duplicated her call. Then she got mad, yelping rapidly. Each time she’d stop, I’d copycat her yelps at her.

I guess she thought one of the hen decoys in the field was trying to take over her position as leader of the flock because suddenly I heard the sound of beating wings. The hen sailed directly over my head and landed in the field near the decoys. Then the air was filled with turkeys coming in for a landing.

The hens, five or six, landed then milled about, eyeing the decoys. Then they began to peck at the grass.

I hoped a gobbler would see the commotion and investigate, but after about 30 minutes, the flock of gals lost interest and wandered toward the old chufa patch around the corner to my left.

About 10:30 a.m., a huge gobbler walked across the big field some 250 yards from me, but I couldn’t interest him with any of my calls.

Page had similar luck. He worked a gobbler with his hand-made wing-bone calls but the old boy was either with a flock of hens or headed toward a new girlfriend.

But the experience of learning about chufas and hunting N.C.’s turkey paradise more than made up for the lack of hunting success.

The nice thing about chufas is turkey hunters don’t have to own land in Northampton County (although that’d be ideal) because chufas will grow just about anywhere.

And, just like a candy store that attracts kids, turkeys will have their noses pressed up against the glass throughout the year.