Ep. 1022: Foundations – Dispelling the Gobbler Beliefs That Hold Turkey Hunters Back

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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.

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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Foundation’s podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about turkeys and what we believe about them that will keep us from killing a limb hager this spring. We’re still in Turkey Week here at Meat Eater, and we’re celebrating America’s favorite game bird and I’d even consider it America’s favorite bird. So take that, you stupid ass balld eagles with your scavenging and fish eating. You may have heard already, but if not, First Light has a new turkey kit out in a pattern called Darkwater that is ideal for a whole lot of different turkey hunting scenarios, and i’d guess might look awful appealing to someone my Southern turkey hunting brothers and sisters. You’ll also probably hear that we are running a Turkey Week sweepstakes where you can win a Texas turkey hunt in the spring of twenty seven for three people. Now, if you’ve never hunted rios, trust me, this one’s gonna be a lot of fun. They’re beautiful, they gobble their heads off all day, and they can be a hell of a lot more fun than easterns now. If you win, you’ll also get a prize pack worth over thirteen grand, which has a ton of killer hunting gear in Well, how do you win? You go to the mediater dot com and you buy some stuff and the more you spend, the more entries get dumped into the bucket, and someone is gonna win, So why not you? All Right, enough of that, As I said, I’m talking turkeys again today, and I’m going to address some of the myths and beliefs that we just need to forget about because all they do is hold us back. These exist in all types of outdoor pursuits and are prevalent in the turkey hunting space because a lot of our turkey hunting advice as well kind of old and outdated. If you struggle filling your spring tags or just want to reframe how you view your turkey hunts, listen up right now, because I’m going to drop some good old fashioned, realistic advice into the conversation about how to hunt turkeys today. When I drew my first turkey tag thirty two years ago, we didn’t have pop up blinds yet. We didn’t have ultra realistic decoys. We didn’t have trail cameras or you know, super turkey loads that come in a box of five for about the price you pay for a kidney on the black market. It was a truly different world then, and in pretty much the same way that turkey hunting gear has evolved, so have our turkey hunting tactics and strategies. Now. Before I actually hunted turkeys, I read a lot of field and stream articles about hunting turkeys. I read a lot of turkey hunting advice, and I heard that advice slip from the ether into my father’s brain, where it eventually became spoken words that all kind of said the same thing. And that thing was more than anything, that the old wild turkey was no louch. Now, some of those old writers really had a flare for the extravagant. I didn’t realize how far some outdoor writers would really take that until one time, one of them did a story on me, and to wrap up the article just made up a conversation that tied a nice bow on the piece but never happened. And that was one of those moments that I think about often because it shifted my worldview. Now, if you had read any of the old timers in their turkey wisdom, you would have not only read that your average Tom is basically the mensa member of the Avian world, but also that he doesn’t want to hear a lot of turkey calls. The typical advice you’d read, or you would have read or it would have heard, simply like this, yelp three times and then shut up. Then wait without moving for at least forty five minutes before you yelp three times again. Now I’m not saying create three series of yelps, but three actual yelps. They would then say that a Tom could hear a cotton ball dropped on a foam mattress from a half a mile away, and he can pinpoint if the exact location a sound originated from, like he has some supernatural auditory GPS system. So when I first started turkey hunting, I tried to follow that advice, but mostly only did when I was hunting with my dad, who was more of an adherent to those things than I was. I was way too easily bored to suffer through no turkey calling while turkey hunting. So when I got to hunt on my own at fifteen, I was both terrified to call and excited to totally control all the calling. And what I found was that you can call more than three yelps in an hour, and sometimes Tom’s and Jakes will come in, hence two. Being a contrarian at heart, I decided it would be a good idea to see how far I could take the whole calling thing. And now I believe something that you don’t hear very often. I don’t think you can overcall. Now there’s a caveat here. It’s that you absolutely can overcall. If you are not very good at turkey calling, if you don’t understand what you are saying and don’t understand how to add emotion to your calling sequences, you’re much better off, following the advice from the nineteen fifth fifties, if you know how to call and are confident in your calling, all you’re doing is making the sounds that turkeys make in a way in which they might make them. And you know what else I believe about that sometimes they need a lot of calling to commit. I believe this about deer too, although not very many people believe me when I say that. I truly think the snort wheeze is the best call out there, but only if you understand that it might take a whole lot of them to get a positive reaction out of a deer, and most people seem too scared to try that. The same thing happens with turkeys. But I can tell you one thing. This fella calls a lot. If I have a bird coming in on a string, I just work him with maybe an average amount of turkey talk, but not so much that it’s just stupid. But if I have a bird that is hung up, he’s going to get a lot of chatter from me. And if I don’t have any birds calling and I’m sitting at the bottom of the dead sea, I call a lot because I want to make something happen. I’ve watched turkeys cross fields in a matter of a few minutes, where you know the distance might be a quarter of a mile or a half a mile. I think about that a lot when I don’t have much going on, because at any moment a gobbler could walk from far away to close enough to get a response out of him. And if that’s the case, I want to get a response out of him. I also think you can take some birds, especially when it’s just kind of dead due to the weather or seasonal timing, and make them excited. You can activate them through calling, but you won’t do that by yelping one soft sequence and then just shutting up. It’s not going to cut it. They need to be riled up, and a good caller can do that, and a good caller can try that all day long. Now, this flies in the advice that you’re supposed to just kind of match what the turkeys are actually trying to say around you and what they’re doing. But what the actual turkeys often do is not call very much anywhere near us. On a typical day, we call like crazy when they are on the roost, and then a little bit afterwards, and then maybe not hardly call throughout the rest of the day. Thanks, and speaking of rus, there is another belief that kind of needs to die or needs to be explained much better. You have probably heard the saying roosted ain’t roasted. Well, It’s true. It wasn’t that long ago though, when there was a high level of importance placed on roosting a tom. After all, if you know where he’s going to sleep, you know where he’s going to wake up. And if you know where he’s going to wake up and you can be fairly close to him, you know, it stands to reason that you have higher odds of calling him in. In my experience, most of the time roosted definitely isn’t roasted. It takes the right bird. And I’ll tell you who that is. It’s the loaner tom. You know, probably the two year old that weighs twenty one pounds and has a nine inch beard. If we want to get real specific, If that bird spends the night all by himself, he is ripe for the picking in the morning. But a tom roosted with some hens, he’s a different story. A tom roosted with three of his buddies, different story. A tom roosted where he can hear other turkeys. Besides, you total toss up, but mostly you’ll lose to the real birds. Roosting the right bird is super fun. Roosting most birds and expecting to be tagged out when the sun is just resting on the eastern horizon. It’s just not how it’s mostly going to shake out. This might sound crazy, but if I had to pick a time frame to kill birds, you know, mostly it would be in the late afternoon for a variety of reasons, and throughout a lot of the season there’s just such a nice cruising window late in the day that the birds become super receptive during and it’s such a different game to get one to answer then now during the earliest part, you know, to the middle part of the season. I also really liked the lunch hour shift. The problem with that is that a lot of the film turkey content you are likely to see is filmed in places with a lot of unpressured birds, in settings that allow them to film gobblers strutting their way across green fields for a couple one hundred yards in the early morning sunlight. But if you hunt pressure birds or you just have limited time, the most gobbling you’ll hear will be off the roost. But the best gobbling you’ll hear in regards to callable birds will either be in the middle of the day or when they start to stage up to go to the roost. This is something bow hunting turkeys taught me because I did so many all day sits when I first started out. The truth about turkeys is they often have a pretty strict schedule in the morning for several hours, and if you can get where they want to be, you’re gonna win. But if not, your chances to work birds often really improves later in the day when that schedule opens up. This is often tied to the hens nesting, but also I think to gobblers who know they can do better than strut behind four other strutters who are all obsessed with a handful of hens, and who are going to stick it out all day. Now there is the question of when you get a gobbler with an eyesight, which brings up another belief that I have to address, and it involves decoys. A hell of a lot of people will tell you straight to your face that you don’t need expensive ultra realistic decoys, and you know what, they’re probably wrong. Now, look, we own Dave Smith decoys and all that, so take that how you want to. But nothing changed my turkey game quite like running their decoys, which I bought long before I had any association with them. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that while yes, you could run a cheap foam decoy and get a bird into shotgun range and maybe even bow range, your odds are significantly lower than they would be with ultra realistic decoys that convey some sort of turkey body language. I believe that with all of my turkey hunting heart, and while it stings to spend like one hundred and seventy five bucks on a single decoy, it doesn’t sting that much to have birds really commit to your spread and put on a show. And I’m convinced that a lot of the people who say that they don’t need high end decoys say this for a couple reasons. Either they’re hunting where the birds are just unpressured and kind of dumb, which you can still find in some places for sure, but more likely it stems from a somewhat frugal mindset that isn’t restricted to decoys. I’ve run into this my whole life in the outdoor industry, and it’s weird how often someone will say something like this two hundred dollars product is no different from a twenty dollars product in the same category, yet they are almost always dead wrong. That’s not to say that you can’t get by with the cheaper stuff, but it generally doesn’t work as well and often doesn’t last as long. The thing about this is that if you only shotgun hunt, and you do as much sneaking around trying to bushwhack a bird as anything, decoy choice is probably secondary. Now, if you need them in your spread because you’re bow hunting, or you’re not comfortable running and gunning, or you have somebody else along, or you hunt a small property and can’t really go anywhere, or you’re just really dealing with pressured birds, there’s no debate in my mind that quality decoys are worth the cost. Take that for however you want to. But I put good money on a bet that says quality decoys will elicit more positive responses out of real birds than cheapis will. Now, before you think I’m some elitist hunting snob, which is what this one guy in Minnesota called me when I wrote an article where I said I didn’t think illegal baiting was very cool, I’ll say this about turkeys. You can shoot them with about any shotgun and if you have any idea what you’re doing, they’re going to be super dead. The tricked out turkey guns paired with red dot sites and full of tungsten turkey loads are gobbler whacking machines, But so is the old Remington eight seventy with three inch fives that has been patterned correctly. The deal with turkeys and shooting them with a shotgun is that you have to know what loads your shotgun throws really well and how far they’ll throw them accurately. That’s kind of it in the old Peterson household, between my daughters and I and the last six years, we’ve killed a bunch of toms with four tens, a couple twenty gauges, and several different twelve gauges, not to mention all the bobirds other than a few oopsies when my daughters were little, and I’m positive wasn’t the gun or the shot shells fault. The birds that have crossed the magical effective range mark have mostly ended up with their beaks in the dirt. Look, it’s fun to play with that stuff, and i’d certainly never encourage someone to hunt with a weapon they didn’t have confidence in. But you can definitely go overboard with this stuff, and if you have enough patience to let the birds get into really good range, they rarely get away. Now, I will say this about shotgun loads. I’m a really big fan of something that isn’t led, but I’m also not opposed to shooting them with lead. Seeing the penetration performance and how they pattern kind of won me over with the tungsten and bismuth loads, and for a while I thought that’s what I’d always shoot. It turns out all it took was China to put a stranglehold on tungsten and the price per shell the sky rocket before I realize that I am a pay up to a point kind of fella, and then I’m back to shooting lead. Your mileage may vary, but the truth is just about any scatter gun we’ll get the job done just fine. Just make sure you send a few loads down range at paper turkey targets first, so that you not only know that’s true, but you know how far away that will stay true. And while a lot of people don’t do this, I recommend turkey hunters carry a range finder if they have one, especially newer turkey hunters or anyone traveling to a new environment to turkey hunt. A gobbler strutting in at sixty yards can look awful big, and awful tempting, and might seem a hell of a lot closer to some hunter who is I don’t know, used to setting up in the big woods, and then they suddenly get to chase longbeards on the prairie or out in the sand hills. But if that gun is good to forty and not much more, you might find yourself watching a bird fly away or worse kind of limp run off, and then you’ll realize that all you needed to do was wait another twenty second until he actually got into range. Now, I guess i’ll wrap this one up with this last train of thought here. I don’t know how many of you have trailed a wounded turkey, whether it was a shotgun hit or a bow hit, but I can tell you one thing. I’ve trailed a lot of them, And two things I’ve noticed that are very consistent are that wild turkeys can bleed a hell of a lot and not be laying stone dead anywhere near you, And that a wounded bird is a bird that can hide in ways we can hardly imagine they understand how to pancake themselves into the grass or in an open alfalfa field in a way that is so easy to overlook. It’s almost shocking when you figure out what you’ve done wrong. If they can get into the timber, they get a lot harder to locate. But if you are on a blood trail, you got to use your binoculars. You got to glass everything, because they are so good at tucking into dead falls and getting under cedar trees and just disappearing into the forest floor. They’ll also often crawl off and get sick to the point where you might have thought you saw a lightly wounded bird leaving, but that bird is out there dying and you might not know it. That’s the last belief I want to address. If you hit one, play it like a wounded deer for real. They are tough as nails, but they also sometimes just run off for a couple hundred yards and then hole up and either die or get sick enough where you can get up on them again. And whether they fly or run after the shot, don’t believe they are fine simply because they can fly or run. They often get through the escape on adrenaline and then they do what they need to in order to hide, and when they do, it’s almost always an education on turkey behavior. And on that note, that’s it for this week. Next week, I’m going to get back to talking about white tails, so don’t forget to tune in. All right, that’s it for this episode. Like I said in the beginning, like I said with yesterday’s episode, it is Turkey Week here at meat Eater. Head to the meat check it out. We are celebrating turkeys in a whole bunch of different ways. While you’re there, you might find some good deals. You might find some other podcasts you want to listen to. You might see a turkey film get dropped. Lots of content shows up on the medeater dot com every single day. Go check it out, Go check out Turkey Week, and as always, thank you so much for all of your support.