Col. Tom Kelly, the U.S. Navy and Army veteran and legendary hunter whose book Tenth Legion inspired generations of turkey hunters, died Friday Oct. 2. He was 99.
The news was confirmed by Kelly’s daughter, Laura Kelly Bates, in a short video posted to Kelly’s website.
“This weekend we lost one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation, Tom Kelly,” Bates said. “The Colonel, Daddy to me, and Old Tom to his grandchildren. No words can express what he has meant to me, to our family and friends, to his troops, and to his loyal legion of followers in the turkey hunting community.”
Bates did not cite a cause of death, but noted that Kelly hadn’t been able to turkey hunt the last few years. Even so, she said, his writing and family helped sustain him.
“He was 99. That sounds old for a man, but for Tom Kelly, you could almost believe he would live forever,” she said. “This was a man who killed his last turkey three weeks shy of his 96th birthday.”
Bates was with her father on that hunt, says Mossy Oak’s Daniel Haas, who was close with Kelly and ultimately helped create a documentary about the turkey hunter, his own grandfather Fox Haas, and their shared legacy of turkey hunting and conservation.
“The Colonel killed one last turkey with Laura sitting beside him, when she hadn’t gotten to turkey hunt with him in many years. It’s amazing his daughter got to be with him for one last hunt,” says Haas, 36, who also quoted Kelly’s own line that the Colonel was “just glad he got to see it one more time.”
Thomas Henry Kelly, Jr. was born in Mobile, Alabama on May 15, 1927. He grew up around the salt flats of Mobile Bay. He had his first library card at the age of four and skipped kindergarten, according to his daughter.
At the age of 17, Kelly persuaded his uncle to forge his entry into the U.S. Navy against his mother’s wishes. Kelly became an aerial tailgunner and international morse code operator in the final days of WWII. After the war ended, Kelly earned a degree in forestry from Auburn University and later served in Korea, ultimately retiring from the U.S. Army as a Colonel after 30 years.
Beyond his military service, Kelly led a rich and eclectic life while working in the timber industry for decades. He played minor league baseball, sculpted, and built furniture. In 2024 he was awarded The Monroeville Literary Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors outstanding literary contributions by Alabama authors.
“He was as comfortable quoting Shakespeare as he was talking to sawhands,” said Bates. “And despite all his talents and accomplishments, he was grounded and self deprecating. He was just as likely to tell a story about something stupid he did as he was to weave a great hunting tale. He had a kind heart, a generous spirit, a wicked sense of humor, and a sharp tongue.”
While working as a forester, Kelly also turkey hunted and wrote stories about those hunts. His wife, Helen, suggested he turn those snippets into a book. That collection, a slim self-published volume of essays on turkey hunting in the South, appeared in 1973. Tenth Legion is unequivocally the best-known book on turkey hunting ever been written.
To understand how seriously Kelly took turkey hunting, you can start with his book title. The Tenth Legion was the most dedicated, disciplined, and loyal unit in Julius Caesar’s Roman empire. And this is how Kelly viewed the Southern turkey hunters of the day.
“The first turkey that ever came to me on the ground did it a long time ago. I sat there with my hands shaking and my breath short and my heart hammering so hard I could not understand why he could not hear it,” wrote Kelly. “The last turkey that came to me last spring had exactly the same effect, and the day that this does not happen to me is the day that I quit. The last one that ever does come to me will call forth the same emotion that the second one did. I will sit there waiting, gun up, and heart thundering, and say to myself what I have said on every single occasion since the second one. ‘I’m glad I lived to see it — one more time.’”
Though Tenth Legion became his best-known work and he’ll be forever remembered as a true turkey hunter, Kelly would go on to write 30 books, many of which were about hunting and which were recently remastered into audiobooks. He contributed at least three stories to Outdoor Life magazine over the years. Those include a column on turkey hunting (which is republished below), a piece on upland bird hunting, and a feature essay in 1979 about teaching Bates to hunt and shoot a shotgun.
After Kelly’s wife passed away, he moved to the Washington D.C. area to be closer to his daughter. In her video, Bates also quoted a passage that Kelly wrote in “Faces in the Crowd,” about serving as a pallbearer at his best friend’s funeral.
“I am feeling the weight of fifty eight years of priceless memories with my dad,” she said. “And I know his friends and followers in the Tenth Legion are carrying the weight of their own memories of him as well. Tom Kelly was truly one of a kind. Irreplaceable. And we will miss him dearly.”
Haas says Kelly was truly the last torchbearer for the old days of turkey hunting.
“Back when Tom Kelly started writing, there was one hundred percent purity in turkey hunting. There was no clout to be gained, there was no social media for recognition,” says Haas. “You have an entire generation of guys like him, who were down to a few thousand hunters. If it weren’t for them, turkey hunting would have ceased to exist. And because of them there are now millions of turkeys. We take for granted that the old-school woodsmanship he embodied will continue to exist. The biggest lesson with Tom Kelly is the importance of passing on the tradition and culture of turkey hunting.”
Turkey Trauma, a Story from the OL Archives Written by Colonel Tom Kelly
This story, “Turkey Trauma,” appeared in the February 1978 issue of Outdoor Life.
Fall turkey hunting is fun. It is as gay and bright and frothy as light summer literature. It smells good and it looks good and it feels good but, like making love to chorus girls, there’s no depth to it.
Fall hunting is maneuvers.
Spring hunting is war.
In my latitude, 31° north, as the equinox approaches and the earth begins to tilt, increasing day length triggers sexual activity in turkeys. Light indirectly activates the reproductive organs in both male and female by first stimulating the pituitary through the nervous system. The initial stimulus is received through the skin as well as through the eyes.
Yearling gobblers, who by now weigh 12 pounds, are of course affected along with other turkeys. But in this, their first spring, they gobble little if at all. Substantial evidence exists to the effect that they are not yet sexually mature and that they are incapable of fertilizing eggs.
The over-winter droves break up, and the hens begin to go off singly or in small groups. The yearling gobblers break off into little droves by themselves, and they hush.
This group of yearling gobblers, the same turkeys that two months ago were vocal to the point of rudeness, become the most reticent. They creep about like wraiths and, like well behaved small boys, are seen but seldom heard.
Gobblers that are in their second year or older begin to seek out and establish gobbling grounds, areas technically known as leks. And these turkeys, two months previously almost sphinxlike in their silence, become the most vocal of all. They are vocal for exactly one reason. They are thinking of girls.
Dignity not only drops from his shoulders, he uses it to wipe his feet. The wattles at the base of his neck swell and grow red. Instead of standing still he shifts his weight from one foot to the other all the time, as if the ground were hot. The set of his head upon his neck is different — it leans forward, looking for something. If he had eyebrows, one eyebrow would be raised all the time.
His feathers brighten and take on an iridescence they have not shown previously. He approaches the world and everything in it with the thought processes of a 20-year-old who has been at sea for 18 months.
Girls for breakfast, girls for lunch, girls in the middle of the afternoon. Girls for tea and girls for dinner and girls before he goes to bed. And when he does go to bed, he flies up and cranes his neck in all directions to pick out the roosting places of nearby girls so that he will not take a single step in the wrong direction when getting an early start on tomorrow’s girls.
None of this interferes with his native caution or with his ingrained suspicion in any way, rather one set of emotions is overlain upon the other; or one instinct upon the other, if you prefer.
The two emotions experienced concurrently makes him almost vibrate. I suspect that close to, he hums, like high-voltage lines.
So single-functioned and so dedicated is he in his purpose now, he frequently neglects to eat. A gobbler that means it and is tending to his business (and during this time of the year it is difficult to find a gobbler that is not so occupied) will quite often lose two or three pounds during the spring — an amount that approaches 20 percent of his body weight.
He will strut and drum for as much as half an hour at a time. Strutting is technically supposed to be done to attract the female, and to do it he drops his wings until their ends drag upon the ground. I have seen turkeys that had worn off the outer four or five primaries, strutting, as cleanly as if they had been cut off with scissors. When he struts he stands the tail feathers upright and spreads them out in a fan. His head is drawn back in between what would be his shoulders, if he had shoulders, and he walks in a measured and stately manner.
He drums often. This sound, which Audubon calls the pulmonic puff, defies description. It is not, to me at any rate, audible at distances beyond 70 or 80 yards. A poor approximation of its sound is to say shut as quickly and as explosively as you can with the tongue against the front teeth, and then say varoom in two syllables, with the oom coming up out of the diaphragm and drawn out and resonated against the roof of the mouth as much as possible. When I hear it in the woods, I do not so much hear the sound as I feel it under my breast bone. It is ventriloquistic, pervading, and is a sensation partway between sound and vibration.
This sound is far from ridiculous. It personifies wildness and solitude and lonely places. Nothing in my experience approaches it in this respect except the wild, far-off calling of geese at night.
It is at this point that the season opens and it is in this month that you are allowed to seek him out on his own ground and try to kill him. And it is principally because of what he is now that it is so shameful to ambush him at long range with a rifle or to murder him from a vehicle.
He will now stake out his own territory, his lek, and restrict his movements largely to that location. He may move away some from time to time, go off to visit maybe, but it is not at all uncommon to find the same turkey gobbling on the same five acres every morning and roosting there at night too.
He will gobble a little in the afternoon. He often gobbles once after he flies up to roost at night, but he gobbles primarily first thing in the morning. And he will begin to gobble sometimes as much as 15 or 20 minutes before daylight.
River swamp turkeys for some reason begin to gobble noticeably earlier on any given morning than do hill turkeys. And from the standpoint of the hunter it is fortunate that they do so. As clean and open as a big river swamp can be, you would never be able to get close enough to call him if he waited till daylight to begin. He would see you coming, and hush, a long time before you got there, if you couldn’t go to him in the dark.
On any morning that you go to hunt you will be in the woods at daylight or preferably 15 minutes before. You will have left your car and will have walked to the place from which you intend to listen. And then you are going to prop your gun up against a tree and wait.
If you have got there as early as you should, the first thing you are going to hear is nothing. Nothing but you is up yet. The only birds awake are a few owls and an occasional tardy whippoorwill that hasn’t knocked off and gone home to bed. Deer are still abroad, and you will hear them shuffling off ahead of you or boiling in herds out of thickets with all the ill bred snorting and blowing of which they are capable. Possums and coons will still be prowling, and you will hear some of these. But all of these things are night creatures that are supposed to be up. The only day creature there is you.
Just as the sky in the east begins to change from black into a steely blue-white, the owls will begin to sound off, and then the cardinals, and late in the spring the yellow-billed cuckoos. These three birds make by far the most of the noise, though there are dozens and dozens of lesser bird noises.
I have no idea how far you can hear an owl — one that is really leaning into his hoot and means it. I sometimes think it is like the folk song, the one that says “you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles,” but it is a long way, and early in the morning like this, most of them sound as if they were calling from across the River Styx.
It is a lovely time of the year. There is as yet not much color to the woods, but there are some early hints and stirrings, mostly muted pastels or pale chalks with only two or three brights for contrast. The shrub form of buckeye is in full leaf and flower, and the red maple is in fruit. Both the buckeye flower and the maple seed are a bright red — a gaudy, primitive, barbaric red. Blackberry, sweetgum, and huckleberry will be in the beginning of early leaf in the understory, and witch hazel, tag alder, and river birch in the middle story with both stories in pale, pale greens. All the oaks are in catkins, the long fuzzy strings that come before the leaf, and make a background of pale buff and brown. Dogwood shows occasional streaks of sharp white, and in the river swamps the yellow top makes splashes of chromium yellow.
Only rarely, and then only early in the year, is there a hint of frost. Mostly the forest floor is a flat brown. Other than the floor, none of the colors are in masses but the catkins of the oaks. The sharper colors occur as isolated highlights.
When the owls come into full voice, just at daylight, turkeys will often gobble back at them. I don’t know why turkeys gobble at owls but they do, and most men who kill a lot of turkeys have learned to do at least a presentable imitation of an owl, and do it.
Turkeys gobble primarily for girls, either to attract them or to let other turkey gobblers know they are on the job; that the situation is comfortably in hand, and that they need no help in handling anything that comes up. They can handle all the girls in hearing, thank you. But they do have a proclivity for gobbling at sudden sounds. Sometimes I think they may do it for the same reason that a man shouts in the woods. For high spirits, just for the hell of it, to hear it ring down through the trees and hear the echo come back.
Turkeys, for I have heard them, will gobble at saw-mill whistles, at train and tugboat horns, at thunder, at owls as we said, at the slamming of a car door, at crows, and at each other. Once, on an artillery range, I heard two turkeys gobble at the sound of the first round arriving.
The purpose in hooting like an owl (I do not really recommend slamming car doors or firing off artillery pieces) is to get a turkey to gobble that didn’t really mean to.
There are mornings when every turkey in the county will begin to gobble at daylight, and will do it so much it sounds as if he were in danger of choking himself. The very next morning you can go and stand in yesterday’s footprints, so far as you can tell under identical conditions of wind, temperature, and barometric pressure, and you will stand in the midst of silence.
These are the days when you must trick him into gobbling, or surprise him into it, because until he gobbles you do not know where he is and so you cannot get him. You want to get within 200 yards of the tree he is sitting in, gobbling, before he flies down, to try to call him to you from there. You want, very badly, to get there before he flies down if you can, and you have absolutely no idea of how long that is going to be. Sometimes he will stay on the limb 15 minutes, sometimes an hour and a half, and since you never know ahead of time which one it will be you need to get there quickly. Since it is possible for you to hear him at half a mile or better, it makes for an awfully interesting athletic contest conducted at daylight in the woods on calm spring mornings. The fat businessman’s quarter mile dash, with gun.
The point is, though, that until he gobbles the first time, either on his own or until you have tricked him into it, you could be within 100 yards of a turkey in the dark, or be beyond three quarters of a mile from one and not know the difference. When you go into the woods you have the possibility of running turkeys off.
A turkey can gobble only one time and give you direction. But direction is only half of what you need. The other necessary element you need is distance, and unless he is very close when he first gobbles, you cannot tell exactly how far away he is. Experience will help you here to a degree, but a turkey can gobble at different levels of volume. If he is still on the roost when he gobbles he could be facing toward you, which makes it sound one way, or he could be looking in the other direction, which changes the level of the sound and helps to build confusion.
It is generally considered safest to start toward him the minute you hear him, and if he will gobble three or four more times at reasonably spaced intervals, you can get his location fixed and get to the proper place to try to kill him.
All kinds of things can happen during this procedure, which in military circles is called a movement to contact.
You can start toward a gobbling turkey that is so far away he does not gobble regularly enough for you to get there. This can be the most frustrating of all. You go as far as you dare, and then stand there shifting from one foot to the other. You don’t know whether to sit where you are and yelp at imagination, or to keep going in what you think is the proper direction at the very real risk of running him off or hushing him up.
I feel that in dealing with gobbling turkeys you will kill one for every three or four you work.
Some turkeys are just not going to come. No skill, no expertise in yelping, no combination of moves and countermoves is going to make the least particle of difference.
There just happen to be turkeys that will gobble on the roost 100 times. Turkeys you can get to quickly, and hide from easily, and do everything perfectly, and be at the right place at the right time. Turkeys that will then fly down and gobble 300 times on the ground over a period of two hours. Turkeys that will come to within 80 yards of where you sit and not one step farther. Turkeys that will parade and strut