Sudden Success
Hunters Sharing the Harvest founder scores on Greene County gobbler
Ben Moyer
John Plowman, 83, of Harrisburg is a friend, and a founder of Hunters Sharing the Harvest (HSH), the program that encourages hunters to donate a deer to help feed hungry Pennsylvanians. After its founding, Plowman led HSH as director for over 30 years. Since 1991, Hunters Sharing the Harvest has channeled 2.5 million pounds of venison to food banks, community centers, churches, and organizations that distribute the ground meat to those in need. Those 2.5 million pounds of nutritious venison protein would have cost humanitarian agencies tens of millions of dollars to replace in the form of ground beef, far beyond their budgets.
Local agencies that have received donated venison from HSH’s corps of participating butchers, then distributed it to the food-insecure include Salvation Army, St. Vincent Depaul Center, Fayette County Food Bank, Greene County Food Bank, City Mission, Mountain Citizens Action Group, and Genesis House. Plowman’s vision and commitment made that possible.
John Plowman also loves to hunt wild turkeys. And since Plowman’s life-work took him all over Pennsylvania and beyond, I’m proud to say that he especially enjoys hunting, fishing, and searching for morels in the woods of southwestern Pennsylvania.
“It’s just a different and beautiful landscape around this part of the state that a lot of people where I’m from don’t know about,” Plowman said. “But I do, and I keep coming back.”
He’s been traveling here from Harrisburg every May for years. On his earlier visits we combined turkey hunting with morel gathering and found enough for Plowman to share with friends back home who had never seen or tasted anything so delicious. In recent years, we’ve been less successful in fungi foraging.
We’ve also fished for trout in Meadow Run and enjoyed a special invitation session on Beaver Creek. But turkey hunting is Plowman’s thing. People who know him well agree he “lives for spring gobbler season.”
This year a family commitment shortened Plowman’s trip west to only two days. We started Friday morning, May 9, hunting in Greene County, getting into the woods before dawn. It was overcast but still and quiet, the kind of morning that turkeys often gobble with abandon. But not that morning. The woods were silent except for the far-off mooing of cattle and a raucous gathering of crows. By 11 a.m. we hadn’t heard a gobble, and our enthusiasm wilted. We returned to the truck and drove some back roads, noting gobblers strutting in the open in places we couldn’t reach.
On Saturday, we hunted in the Fayette County mountains. Frost crusted the windshield, and it was just as cold in the woods. Waiting to hear a turkey gobble felt like sitting on stand in December, watching for a deer, except that we hadn’t dressed in preparation. After we’d shivered enough, we decided to return to Greene County and warmer lowlands, hoping a gobbler might respond to late-morning calls.
John insisted we stop first at Fuel Works Coffee in Farmington, where he loves to indulge in coffee and pastry, and to banter with owners Holly and Sean, with whom he’s forged a special friendship, renewed each spring on his turkey-hunting visit.
Back in Greene, I helped John get all his gear to his favorite spot, an ancient apple tree surrounded by a multi-flora rose thicket that forms an island in grassy pasture. Sometimes gobblers strut in those fields, and John knows that if he’s lucky — really lucky — one might be lured into range.
After John was in place, I could not direct my attention to hunting. I was trying to arrange a “Plan B” Mother’s Day brunch reservation after our family’s initial choice had to cancel. Cell service was sketchy, so I had to drive around the township to find a place I could make calls to pull the next morning together.
We had agreed I’d return to John’s position at 1 p.m. to help him haul his decoys, special favorite turkey-hunting seat, shotgun, and other accessories back to the truck.
When I first peered into the shade under John’s apple tree, my first impression was: “That’s the most realistic turkey decoy I’ve ever seen.”
Then the dawning realization — that was no decoy. A huge longbeard gobbler lay on the grass within my friend’s concealing thicket. Sometime, while I was driving around seeking cell service, John heard a gobble behind him. He stroked a “yelp” on his box call and the turkey gobbled back. A few minutes later, as John related, that turkey gobbled “right behind me.”
John had to shift his favorite hunting seat quickly and quietly to the opposite direction. He’d barely completed that maneuver when the gobbler stepped into one of the narrow shooting lanes John had cut through the thicket with snippers I’d provided. The successful hunter texted me several photos, but I hadn’t received them in the cell-service void that entombed my phone.
On the scale that weighs deer carcasses in my workshop, John’s gobbler pulled the needle down to 24 pounds. I told him the scale was somewhat crude, and I couldn’t vouch for its accuracy on critters smaller than deer. He just stared, declaring the scale reliably precise, and demanding my concurrence. That gobbler would “live on” as a 24-pounder in all John’s recounts of the day.
Congratulations on a great hunt, John. Looking forward to next year’s visit.