Despite my highest hopes and confidence in a textbook morning success, I’m always thinking a step ahead when it comes to the pursuit of meleagris gallopavo.
Wild turkeys are notorious for taking hunters on a ride. A lot of my best-planned morning roost hunts turn into all-day foot chases.
When I have a whole day reserved for chasing gobblers, I always start by locating a roosted bird. Ideally, I will have pinpointed a gobbler the prior evening, often doing what I refer to as, “power roosting.”Â
There’s roosting, and then there’s power roosting. There’s nothing casual about power roosting. I will get as aggressive as possible to nail down the bird’s precise location, oftentimes running toward him before he locks his beak and stops gobbling at bedtime.Â
I like to have a gobbler pinned in HuntStand to within a 50-yard radius. A hundred yards is not close enough. I will spend the evening, often lying in bed, using HuntStand to plot my approach. I’ll take into consideration terrain and weather to determine how early I need to arrive.
If it’s cloudy, windy, or rainy, I know the cover noise and clouded sunrise will allow for a few extra minutes of sleep. If it’s calm and clear, sleep will be limited. It’s not uncommon for me to arrive on location with enough time to be set up an hour before legal shooting light.Â
I’ll skip the fine details of how I work a bird at flydown, but if I don’t kill him shortly after flydown, the chase is on. As soon as the gobbler decides to move in a direction that doesn’t put him in front of me, I’ll immediately defer to HuntStand and start analyzing aerial imagery to figure out how I can get ahead of him.Â
Typically, this will involve a series of wide J-hooks. Some might say I’m excessive in the buffer I offer with my J-hooks, but detection is completely unacceptable.Â
I will always err on the side of caution, as I’ve learned to respect the sixth sense of our greatest game bird. I’ll use locator calls to keep him gobbling, God willing, if he’s not naturally gobbling.Â
I try my hardest to only use a turkey call during this search phase if I feel it’s possible to call him in, but I prefer to wait to call until I’m ahead of him in his direction of travel.Â
This game of cat and mouse can go on for hours. If he stops gobbling altogether, I’ll set up and blind call for an hour or so, or as long as my crumbling patience allows.Â
When a gobbler goes cold after flydown, he’s either with hens or he’s a shady character. Maybe he’s a spooky bird. Maybe he’s more focused on getting to a destination food source.Â
Maybe he’s just not in the mood. Or maybe he just forgets what he wants every 10 seconds. That’s turkey hunting. But one thing is for sure, if a gobbler goes cold and doesn’t cave to blind calling, you’re almost always better off giving him a break and returning later when – as the southern boys say – “he’s right.”
Thankfully, the National Wild Turkey Federation, and a whole lot of folks who love turkeys, work really hard to make sure we have plenty of birds to chase. So if you find a gobbler and he’s not right, go find one that is.Â
The midday grind involves running and gunning, aggressively broadcasting locator calls and turkey calls to try and strike a gobbler. Then it’s back to the same routine of J-hooking and committing to stationary setups.Â
Field edges can be a great place to hunt midday because they give you access to field strutters or timber creepers. You can use your binoculars to locate silent birds in the field, or dip back into the cover of the timber to continue on your mission.Â
As evening approaches, the challenge of getting a gobbler to play ball usually increases tenfold. Most late-afternoon turkeys seem to be focused on loafing, feeding, and getting back safely to their roost.Â
If I have a decent idea of where they might be roosting, I’ll try to plant myself in their path with hopes of calling them off their marching orders just enough to get a shot.Â
If it’s my last day to hunt, I’ll throw out all the stops. I’m not opposed to crawling on birds, or reaping/fanning (crawling behind a strutting decoy), but I’ve found both of those techniques to offer a very minimal success rate.Â
If I have more time with the birds in that area, I’ll chill out and let them peacefully go to roost so I can get back into their bubble the next morning and play the game again – all day long. Â
Watch the hunt below with Josh Dahlke on an all-day turkey hunting grind.
