Don’t blow your turkey hunt before it even starts this spring

With the spring turkey season now on my mind, I’m already gathering my gear and honing my calling with some newly acquired calls.

Around our house each spring, my wife’s eye rolls are frequent as Nicholas and I break out various types of calls and do our best to sound like lovesick hens, eager gobblers, or owls, crows and peacocks. In addition to the eye rolls, we may also get pushed outside onto the porch as she exclaims that she has heard enough of it throughout the last few weeks.

Oh well, being outside gives a better idea of how our calling will actually sound in the woods anyway. And I am sure that our calling will not bother our neighbor as much as it does Tracy anyway. Although our beagles do not seem all that thrilled with it either, and it is sometimes difficult to hear what our calls sound like over their howling.

Anyway, back to the moral of this story. Practicing your calling is important (and, yes, it is fun) so that you can masterfully replicate the sounds of the wild turkey as best you can when it becomes game time. There is a time and a place for everything, though. Just as calling inside the house can sometimes get on Tracy’s nerves and is not always the wisest and safest thing for us to do, calling in the areas that you plan on hunting in a few weeks is not so bright either, for different reasons.

Travel down any back road in April and you are sure to run into people pulling over on the side of the road and blowing on a turkey call in hopes of getting a gobbler to fire off. They do this to locate the tom and learn his whereabouts or roosting area prior to the opener. Little do they know that by doing so, they are making the hunting considerably tougher, not only for themselves, but for others as well.

Under no circumstance should you ever use a turkey call in the wild unless you are actually hunting and intent on killing a turkey. Every time you do, you run the risk of educating the birds in your area. Let’s say you are out scouting and just cannot resist giving a few yelps to see if anything responds. Whether a gobbler does or does not fire back, if he heard it and comes in to investigate, or worse yet, notices you, then you have pretty much just eliminated that bird from your hit list because the odds are long that he will readily come into a call again.

If you just have to try to make a tom gobble, only do so with the use of calls designed to “shock” him into gobbling, rather than ones designed to draw him in. A crow call, for example, is a commonly used locater call, which is designed to pierce the air and make a gobbler gobble. It is used to locate the bird but will not entice him to come investigate, and therefore is fairly harmless when used in this manner.

Be advised, though, that eventually turkeys can get used to such calls and respond less and less to them over time.

Honestly though, especially during early mornings and evenings as the birds are in the roost, gobblers will tend to gobble often enough on their own for you to be able to figure out their roosting areas.

And they will typically continue to gobble for a while after they fly down in the mornings and slightly prior to flying up to roost the evenings, enabling you to figure out their habits without the use of calls.

Part of the excitement of the spring turkey season is getting ready for it. The anticipation and locating birds gets your blood pumping and fills your head full of dreams that keep you from sleeping at night for several days before the season arrives.

Do not let this excitement spoil your chances at a longbeard this year by getting antsy and blowing your cover and educating the birds in your hunting area.