Braxton Taylor
Before I learned to call a turkey, actually shooting a bird always felt out of reach. I could never work a box call just right, my slate calls sounded like a pitchfork on a chalkboard, and mouth calling seemed utterly impossible. I settled for a push-button call and ended my first spring season with two unpunched tags in my pocket.
Calling is one of the most intimidating things for a new turkey hunter to wrap their head around. But who says you need to know how to call in a gobbler to kill it? Every spring, hunters shoot a number of birds without making so much as a cluck. To help illustrate this point, I sat down with Rick Grubbs, a South Carolina turkey expert and owner of Waccamaw Hunting Services. Rick and his son Will are third- and fourth-generation turkey guides who help hunters bag mature eastern gobblers all spring. They also travel the south hunting birds from Florida to West Virginia.
Rick typically hunts turkeys with calls, but I asked him what he would do if I took all of his calls away. He wasn’t phased. He not only knows how to kill a tom without a call, he’s got an all-day strategy for no-call turkey hunting. Here’s how he’d get it done.
Early Morning: Hunt the Roost
Your best crack at a gobbler is to hunt them at the crack of dawn. It’s not only because you know where he is, but you can really paint a picture to fool him as he comes off the roost. After locating roosted birds the night before, Rick says he’d go in quietly and set up near the roosting tree. “I’d use the terrain to get in on him as close as I could,” he said. “Then I’d just let him gobble and gobble until he felt it was time to fly down.”
Rick said that birds get quiet before they fly down, and that’s your cue. “Take your hat, and beat it on your right or left thigh to simulate the sound of a hen’s beating wings coming off of the roost. At that point, he’ll probably think to himself, I haven’t heard any hens fly down, but I just heard one over there, so I’m going to fly down that way.”
After hearing the bird hit the ground, Rick said he’d switch things up. “I’d then do some light scratching in the leaves. If he heard that and gobbled, I know that he knows exactly where I’m at.”
When you hear that gobble, the next thing you should do is nothing at all. “Just wait,” Rick said. “I’ve seen many turkeys just stand there, gobble, and never move when they hear a mouth or slate call off of the roost. When you shut up, it’ll break that bird. He’ll come right to you. They just cannot stand it.”
Mid-Morning to Mid-day: Go Where the Hens Go
If your roost hunt didn’t work out or you couldn’t locate a bird in the first place, your next best move is to find ground where turkeys like to go. This requires homework and a bit of woodsmanship. Rick stresses that the key to his turkey season, calls or not, comes down to scouting. He knows where birds want to go after they fly down, and a big part of that is locating food sources and turkey sign like scratch marks, tracks, and signs of strutting.
“After sunrise, I’d go set up on a chufa patch, an old ag field, or a food plot,” he said. In the days before his hunt, Rick would’ve scouted and glassed to figure out where birds were going and what they were eating. Note the time of day you see the birds on your scouting missions, and try to beat them to their favorite hotspots when you hunt.
“If I’ve got no calls, I’m going to try to get ahead of them,” he said. “I’m going to watch the hens, especially because that’s where the gobblers are going to go. Don’t get me wrong. We don’t usually ambush or bushwhack birds this way, but if you take my calls away, I’m going to try to do exactly that.”
Once you’ve located roosting trees and food sources and figured out where birds like to spend their morning, you can use tools like onX to plot the turkeys’ path. After that, all you need to do is wait and maybe add a little leaf scratching for realism.
Afternoon: Bump and Dump With a Set of Decoys
In South Carolina, you can hunt turkeys in the afternoon, but that might not be allowed in your home state. That said, there are still some lessons to take from Rick’s afternoon strategy.
Just as with mid-day, Rick would focus on where he’d seen birds and bird sign before. The difference is, this time of day, he likes to use decoys to match what he’s seen of birds in the field before. For example, if he’s scouted an aggressive tom pushing jakes around, he’ll go with a half-strut jake decoy and a hen. When he’s located an ideal afternoon spot and picks the right spread of dekes to go with, he eases into the field in his truck.
“Usually, we’ll have a driver to drop me or the hunters off,” he said. “If there aren’t birds there, I’ll set up, make a brush blind, and put out the decoys. If there are birds there, we’ll bump them out of the field with the vehicle, then set up and wait for them to come back.”
Rick says that if the turkeys see him walking into the field instead of driving, there’s a good chance they’ll get spooked and won’t come back. But with a vehicle, they usually return after it’s gone and Rick or one of his hunters is in position. Once the trap is set, Rick just needs to wait for a gobbler to step into the field and see his spread.
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