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This week will be a busy one for hunters. Fall turkey season opens Saturday and runs one week until Nov. 6.
That is a much shorter season than we are used to. Perhaps that is because of the reported decline in the turkey population in the last couple years. Many other management areas have longer open seasons this year than we have in 4D, so check it out in your hunting digest.
Hunting turkey can be a different and harder pursuit the second week. The flocks of hens and young that most hunters ran into in the early part of the season have become educated by all the scattering and phony calls they fell for the first week. They are much more sophisticated this week, approaching calls very warily, if at all. Now, the most successful tactic is a laid-back approach by the hunter.
If you have hunted turkeys a few times up to this point, you no doubt have some idea where the birds are hanging out. Now we play the waiting game. Go where you have located fresh sign of turkeys scratching for acorns or wild grapes and pitch your tent and wait for them to show up. If you have the patience to do that it works better than parading all over the woods hoping to locate a flock. They will scram quickly at the first hint of a hunter anywhere around.
I do my waiting in the one-man chair blind I often talk about. This blind is the perfect hide for a hunter waiting for fall turkeys to come feeding along. Easy to tote with you, sets up in 30 seconds and truly hides you from the turkey's radar vision.
While waiting, I waft out a few yelps and clucks every 15 minutes or so. However, the calls you make depend entirely on what kind of turkey you are trying to attract. The big, mature longbeards do not run with the flocks of young and hens as a rule and they are pretty quiet in the woods. Sometimes, as in a cornfield or a ridge polluted with acorns, all the turkeys in an area will intermingle as they feed. But usually the groups of hens and young are in one bunch and the larger gobblers are some distance away.
The woods themselves will reveal just what type of turkey is using a particular ridge. Since large gobblers are usually only in groups of two to four birds, their scratchings are more spread out, and often in a pretty straight line, and the scratch patches will be larger than those made by young birds and scratched right down to the bare ground. Large male birds love to scratch right on the edges of a log or tree. Their scratch patches are usually quite orderly and spaced far apart.
Young turkeys just scratch willy-nilly, in any and every direction so that a ridge will look as if someone worked it over with a hay rake. A flock scratching around together is not orderly about it so just by the size and spacing of scratchings you can usually discern what type of flock made them.
Once it is determined to whom you will be talking, set up your blind or pick out a tree to sit against, pull your face mask and gloves on and get out the calls. Your determination of which type of birds you are dealing with will tell you what calls to use.
Big old gobblers do most of their communication (if they talk at all) with slow, deep yelps and a few clucks and not much more. So over calling really does spook them, they simply seldom respond to it. A couple yelps and a couple clucks every 15 minutes is plenty to interest them. But keep your eyes open wide because these mature birds like to simply show up in front of you without having talked much.
Larger mixed flocks, however, are more vocal. Youngsters like to keep in touch with their flock mates as they feed. So they yelp, cluck or purr every so often just for good measure and if they hear some yelps or clucks from afar, they often answer and slowly edge their way in your direction to have a look.
So larger flocks will respond naturally to hen yelps and clucks or even kee-kees from your calling position so I send some on the wind, again every 15 minutes or so.
The last week of fall turkey season is when I play it cool; just call a bit and wait and watch in an area that I've seen they are using to feed or roost. If you are lucky enough to come upon a few mature gobblers and even manage to scatter them one from another, the tactics are different for calling them back together again.
The big boys are usually not very upset if they get separated. They may try to find one another sometime later or maybe even tomorrow. And they seldom will broadcast their loneliness with a lot of calling. A few deep clucks and perhaps a yelp once in a while is about all you will ever hear.
The larger flocks of hens and young are boisterous about everything they do and when a bunch of turkeys-of-the-year get separated from the mother hen, they panic. They wail and screech -- we call that the kee-kee calls -- and keep up a din until they find her. She will pick a spot and begin to crank out what we call the Old Hen assembly yelp, which is a long series of yelps that will guide her young right to her.