Photo by Pat Reeve

By Vic Attardo

As a friend says about turkeys, if their brain is only the size of a pea, why, then, are they so hard to hunt?

It may be because the birds, at least the older, mature and war-weary gobblers, have heard it all before. Their brains may be small, but their instincts are as sharp as a tack.

For the hunter hoping for success, this means knowing a little something extra that the turkeys don't. It all comes down to versatility in calling and new strategies in delivering those calls. Sometimes it means invention, and sometimes it means reinventing the wheel.

Even in grade school we are taught that perseverance is an admirable trait. At the time, few of us knew that this would apply to turkey hunting, but it certainly does.

By combining perseverance with a variety of calling tactics, I was once able to take a bird that had eluded me for eight days. The experience demonstrated that in today's heavily pressured turkey hunting, it's often important to reach deeper into the bag of calling tricks.

I was working a large wooded area in mid-season. The oak, maple and beech trees across the ridge and ravines in the rolling terrain were leafed out. I had found what I thought to be a magnificent bird, and like an arrow intent on a target, this was the turkey I wanted.

For over a week, I entered the woods and tried to tease this gobbler close enough for a shot. He was, as we say, "henned-up," with a ready harem of females to keep him company. The best I could do with my selection of mouth, box, slate and tube calls was to bring him within 50 yards, even with close-in decoys.

Through this period, my repertoire consisted of the usual hen yelps, putts and fly-down cackles. I changed position each day but thought it unwise to move around during the hunt.

Each day after I knew I'd been defeated, I slowly and carefully backed out of the woods. Because he seemed to be hung along one particular ridge, I thought it important not to walk through his territory. This was clearly the boss gobbler of the ridge. Anytime some 2-year-old upstart approached his kingdom, he warred with him unmercifully.

Other hunters tried working this bird from other directions in the woods, but he would not approach them, either. The talk of the valley was that this bird was impossible to attract. A few of the other hunters had taken some of the defeated jakes, but no one had fooled the boss.

On the ninth day, when no other hunters were in the woods, I set up without decoys. While I was leaving the cabin that morning, I picked up a gobbler shaker that imitates the gobble of a boss tom. Of course, it has a different sound and tone than most other friction and mouth calls.

At first light, I gobbled hard with the shaker. This was something he had never heard before, and the old tom came in on a string. He was looking for a younger bird so he could beat up on it, and before he realized his mistake I gave him the last fight he was ever going to see.

When agricultural fields are available to woodland turkeys, the birds often respond to bad weather by heading towards open land. It's believed that turkeys don't like to be in the woods during a rainstorm because one of their keenest senses (hearing) is obstructed by the rain beating on the leaves. This makes it harder for them to detect the sounds of approaching predators.

On numerous occasions, I've seen individual birds and flocks looking forlorn at the edge of a farm field during a pouring rain. And I've picked off toms that were in the open during substantial storms.

One thing about those successes took me a while to realize, though it now seems so obvious that it's laughable. To get to an open field for their rain response, the birds must travel through the woods. This makes the edges of woodland, and the known turkey trails along its edges, key ambush points.

On the second day of a recent spring season, the trees in the woods were dense with leaves. When a solid rain hit the fresh, full leaves soon after sunrise, it sounded like an overflowing gutter spout. In the vernacular, it was "raining cats and dogs."

That day, I had started into the rolling woodland before the skies opened up. I made a few tentative early-morning tree yelps with a pushpin call, which is a very soft call. I heard no response, but because of the density of the birds in the area, I still believed I was working near a roost.

Of course, I could have started with an owl call to get an initial response, but I had heard many other hunters working the owl trick while they scouted during the pre-season, and I thought the birds were becoming wary of it. I also opted for the pushpin call because other hunters were using box calls and mouth calls on the first day, and there had been heavy shooting in the woods.

Just about full sunrise, the skies opened up and a typhoon let loose. As I was getting drenched, I thought about the birds' probable march to open land. I also thought I should be waiting some distance back from the woodland edge to intercept their commute.

I was making my way to the edge of the woods when the birds began calling to each other. I sat down and responded with some yelps from a loud mouth call. A couple of birds immediately responded with gobbles. I purred and clucked again, but this time heard only silence. I added a series of putts, an exited yelp that tells gobblers the hen is hot and ready to breed, but the gobblers did not respond. My instincts were telling me that the weather, and the probability the gobblers had found hens, was conspiring against me.

Still, considering the effects of the storm, I liked my position about 70 yards into the woods from the edge of a large rolling field where I had seen birds before the start of the season.

Over the course of the next 20 minutes, I made only a few soft purrs and clucks. The birds weren't making much noise in the rain, so I simply imitated what they were doing.

Sure enough, as the wind continued to blow and the deluge poured down, along came two mature toms and a jake. They were heading toward the open field and me. As they came into view, I continued with a smattering of soft sounds and then got ready to shoot.

I gave them one more series of soft purrs and clucks, and this was enough to bring one bird in to my sights. I shot it at 56 yards, a distance later checked with a range-finder.

The taking of "Typhoon Tom," as I later called this gobbler, was a combination of calling and weather-related tactics. The rain had the birds acting shy, and I doubt they would have responded with more-aggressive calling.

This was not a day to make assertive sounds, which might have alerted the incoming birds. Often, good calling tactics are a matter of imitating what you hear at the moment, and in bad weather the birds act the way some humans feel on a lazy, rainy Sunday.