'We definitely have some different stories': Mom and daughter share family hunting tales

Sarah Schott never really knows what her family will eat on Thanksgiving Day.

One year, they made a Turducken, but used turkey, pheasant and wood duck.

"This wild game spin on your traditional Thanksgiving holiday meals is always fun," Sarah said.

The options include nearly every animal that can be harvested from the wild in Ohio.

"I can say, you know, I've gone to the store with my mom maybe twice and watched her buy beef," Sarah said. "We don't do that, we don't buy beef from the grocery store."

Hunting is their lifestyle. Family calendars are riddled with adventures planned across Ohio as well as anniversaries of memorable hunts from over the years. Holidays are for sharing their bounty.

"Our traditional, I guess, wild game Thanksgiving almost-appetizer would be smoked pheasant," Sarah said. "My dad smokes several pheasants for both sides of the family and then for us, and we kind of take those around and eat a lot of smoked pheasant for Thanksgiving and Christmas."

'He introduced me to hunting'

The family hunting tradition started decades ago when Sarah's father, Jim Schott, was still a boy. His family would head outside most years on Thanksgiving Day to hunt rabbits together. As he and his brothers grew older, they expanded their prey to include deer, turkey and grouse.

Jim went to college and met a young lady named Kelly who grew up fishing on Lake Erie.

"I did not hunt until I met my husband," Kelly Schott said. "We started dating and he introduced me to hunting. I shot my first gun and went from there."

The young couple both earned degrees in wildlife management from The Ohio State University, then moved northwest so that Jim could work for Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge and Kelly could work at Magee Marsh Wildlife Area.

Of course, high on the new husband's to-do list was to help his young bride finally bag her first kill.

"The first animal I harvested was a gray squirrel," Kelly said.

'A unique mother-daughter relationship'

Jim and Kelly have two children: Sarah and Jacob.

"I definitely grew up shooting guns," Sarah said. "I still have the very first pop can that I ever shot with a shotgun."

They have always hunted as a family, but the outings often end up with them split into pairs — Kelly and Sarah happily pick one another as hunting partners.

"I enjoy hunting with everybody in my family," Sarah explained. "Everybody has their unique characteristics, but whenever it's just me and my mom, we always say that we are the funnest two to be together."

They say those times together always lead to "a lot of laughs" and "a lot of interesting stories to tell."

"I guess that's a unique mother-daughter relationship that not a lot of people have," Sarah said. "We definitely have some different stories than other mother-daughter pairs."

'A neat way to start my official hunting career'

Memories were one of the primary reasons Jim and Kelly wanted their children to grow up hunting with them.

"Hunting and fishing is something we can do as a family," Kelly said.

She said it was a conscious decision they made when the children were still in diapers.

Sarah remembers going on hunts with her parents even before she was old enough to shoot a gun. In many ways, she has followed in her mother's footsteps.

"The first thing I ever harvested was also a squirrel," Sarah said. "Mom and I were actually hunting together on the same property that she was able to shoot her first squirrel. So that was kind of a neat way to start my official hunting career."

The mother-daughter duo were on the road again several years later, this time for a deer hunt in Portage County at Camp James A. Garfield, often referred to as Ravenna Arsenal.

They were in the woods together when a buck walked into Sarah's shooting lane.

"It was a very nice buck," Kelly said. "It went 70 yards and dropped over."

It was the first antlered deer Sarah ever harvested.

Followed same career path as her mother

Those memories with her mom are a big reason Sarah became the woman she is today.

"I forget exactly what my dad said at one point, but it was like, 'the apple didn't fall far from the tree,'" Sarah said. "Well, this apple literally, like, never fell off the tree."

That was something she realized at a young age.

"I still vividly remember my fifth grade, the stereotypical beginning of the school year," Sarah said. "What do you want to be when you grow up? Everybody was like firefighter, policeman, nurse, all those stereotypical things."

She told everyone then that she wanted to work for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. She followed through, too. She went to Ohio State and earned the same degree as both of her parents.

Now Sarah and Kelly have the same job, just in different counties. They're both wildlife communications specialists. Sarah works for the ODNR District 1 office in Columbus, and Kelly at Magee Marsh.

"That's really the tradition," Sarah said. "The family aspect is what got me looking at this career."

'She really likes her domestic turkey'

Most holidays, the family of four drive southeast to Jim's family farm near the village of Caldwell in Noble County.

Some years there are hunts, but most years it's just food.

That's when the avid hunters — with their many freezers filled with wild turkeys, pheasants, grouse, deer and other game — realize they don't always agree on what to serve.

They've decided it's probably because of how different their diet is the rest of the year. Venison, to them, tastes much better than beef. That's where they all agree.

But they don't always see eye-to-eye on what's best to eat on holidays, or even on the rare occasions they go out to eat.

"I go to restaurants and I'm so excited to eat chicken," Sarah said. "Because we don't eat chicken."

She said her mother has usually had so much wild turkey by Thanksgiving that she's ready for a change of pace.

"Mom's Achilles heel, so to speak, when it comes to proteins, is that she really likes her domestic turkey," Sarah said.

That why, this Thanksgiving, she shouldn't be surprised if the family ends up eating a meal that includes dishes not too different from everyone else's this holiday season.

"Usually we come across a domestic turkey because someone gives one to us," Sarah said. "The past couple of years, that's how that's happened."

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This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Ohio family shares stories of hunting traditions over Thanksgiving Day