- [Male Narrator] Spring Turkey hunting in Minnesota has grown increasingly popular since the first season began in 1978.

Now nearly 60,000 Turkey tags are sold each spring as hunters chase gobblers with heavy shotguns and bows but also gaining popularity is the use of sub gauges or smaller shotguns, like a 28-gauge or a .410 for turkeys instead of the traditional 12-gauge.

Today we're with David Eckhardt.

David and his friends do an annual rabbit hunt around Thanksgiving and most of those guys use sub-gauges.

- [David] We started doing it when we were 16 me and a couple buddies and uh it just kind of became an annual thing and it's growin more and more every year.

And yeah, we've had sixteens a lot of us just use twenties and then I like using a .410 too.

- This gun has been in the Eckhardt family for a long time and it isn't your average .410 - So it was my great uncles and then my dad got it after he passed and then I just started using it for the rabbit hunt cuz it's a fun, fun little gun to shoot and it's short and it swings real fast for rabbits.

I think my great-uncle bought it new and that was probably in the '70's or '80's.

Yeah, it's got the single trigger and ejectors so it's kind of rare.

It's more a top end gun.

I don't know about rare, but it's the higher end model.

It got snowed on or rained on.

It got all wet and I didn't know how to take it apart so I brought it to the gunsmith and had him professionally clean it and I went and picked it back up and he's like that's a pretty sweet little gun.

I'm like, yeah, it's awesome for rabbits.

And he's like, you know what that's worth.

And he told me and like, I'm not gonna use that on the rabbit hunt anymore but shouldn't be trudging through sticks and groves and getting all scratched up.

So - This year the rabbit gun turned into a turkey gun for David because of the gun's age he had his brother-in-law Stan Isfeld load some custom shells to ensure they'd be effective and not harm the gun.

- So we are gonna be turning these .410 hulls into these show you how, let's see, we have our empty hull and new shotgun primer here.

So we're pushing that hull up into the shell holder to resize it back to original spec and we're gonna run it up into this decapping die, which is gonna knock out the old primer.

You may not have seen it but you can hear it.

So our powder has been dropped down into the hull.

Then we're gonna use 7.5 lead shot today which is a little large for .410.

So sometimes we gotta give it a little bit of a tap to convince it to drop through the tube.

But I think it's gonna give David the, just a little extra size compared to what's normally loaded in .410 target loads, generally eights or nines.

So we set it through our series of crimp dies and that's what we're left with - [Male Narrator] With the gun ready to rock.

David put together a plan for the morning hunt and we headed out to trick a tom.

- [David] Pretty quiet morning I was surprised we didn't hear any gobbles.

- [Male Narrator] However, with late season turkeys a quiet morning doesn't always mean a bad morning.

- [David] They came out right where I thought they would.

They have a few different roost trees on that property but I they'd come off of that one the other day so I figured they'd be back in that corner somewhere.

So they were just working up the hill right to the decoys and then they'd kind of turned and skirted around a little bit.

Then they turned and came towards us again and right before I shot they started to turn and head away and it all happened so quick.

I didn't have my call out of the box so I couldn't yelp at 'em to get 'em to stop.

I took the shot and missed Batter was a little wider I guess.

I was gonna say that it might not have been in the effective range for that .410 but I think I just flat out missed - Two clean misses no one ever said using an old subgauge would be easy although this hunt didn't pan out perfectly.

There are lots of things to do on a spring morning in Minnesota and David had another trick up his sleeve to salvage the hunt.

Morel Mushrooms.

- I know that there's some on that farm so we didn't have to go very far either.

We walked about 30 yards behind where we had the blind and there was a dead tree and we found a pretty good flush of them.

- Morels make for great table fair and you can cook them up a few different ways.

- The classic frying 'em in butter and then we tried a new recipe with cream and butter like kind of a cream sauce and put that over steak and that was really good.

I'm excited to try that again.

- You know it would've been great to have some fresh turkey to cook with these Morels but by no means was this a bad hunt.

- I just like getting out and enjoying the outdoors.

I mean, I'll deer hunt as much as I can and if I don't see a deer, I'm not mad.

It's fun you see so much cool stuff when you're out you know all the critters that are out walking around and it's fun to trick 'em when they don't know you're there and they're just doing what they normally do.

When you get to get a glimpse of that, that's pretty cool.

- David had a few more spots to check out before we called it quits today but the gobblers were tightlipped and tucked away so the .410 will have to wait for its chance at redemption.

- I may try it this fall on some pheasants or something and clean it good and put it back in the safe for the next time I want to go turkey hunting.