Joel Nelson

If you were lucky enough to cut your teeth on turkey hunting in the 1990s-era Midwest, your glasses are rose-colored – for good reason.
Turkey populations were booming, expanding into new areas and bolstered where they already existed. In my neck of the woods, while turkeys certainly weren’t dumb, they were plentiful and new enough to the area that they hadn’t had a decade’s-worth (or more) of education on the ways of whitetail hunters who’d converted to gobbler-getters.

Hunt turkeys enough, and you start to see some patterns develop, especially in the case of eager gobblers. Each year in the woods, I do my best to think like a gobbler. I fly down from the roost, gobble to gather, and keep walking and gobbling my way to a usual strut zone until I can get some hens to join along.
With that in mind, it’s helpful to consider that on the hunter’s end of the equation, you, a stationary hunter, may just be too slow or otherwise too immobile to interest a bird with a purpose. But there’s a technique for killing birds that keep creating greater distance.