CWTF 2017 Inaugural Member's Edition Magazine

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oss hen and then match her, yelp for yelp, cluck for cluck. To be successful it is important that you exactly repeat every “word” she says, right down to the tone and frequency. Play that answering back game for a minute or two until you get her attention. Once she is onto you don’t wait until the hen is done talking: instead, be rude and interrupt her every time she is starting to talk. Nothing gets a hen more fired up then another hen cutting her off in mid sentence. Hens will get so angry that quite often they will come running looking for that disrespectful intruder and the tom will waddle busily after her. The rest is up to you to make it count. If you can’t bring the hens to you the next option is to ambush the gobbler. Put the calls away and observe in what direction the birds are travelling, using a good pair of binoculars if necessary. The turkeys, like all animals, have a natural tendency to follow the path of least resistance. Use this habit to your advantage and try to predict what route the birds are taking considering the terrain features. Carefully try to loop in a big arch around the birds and get ahead of them. Be fast but as quiet as you can and use every caution to stay undetected from the traveling turkeys. Set up an ambush that will take the turkeys past you and within shooting range. Another tactic that can also work very well is to rush the birds and scatter the flock. This is a very common tactic used during the fall season but can work great on spring turkeys as well. If you can’t get any closer than 70 to 100 yards, charge the flock, or where legal, send a hunting dog to scatter the flock. The idea is to separate the tom from the hens. Watch where the tom is flying or running and then following him as soon he is out of sight. After a while the gobbler will try to reunite with the hens or go and look for new company. Set up near where the tom settled and start calling. Since he lost his hens he may be willing to pay attention to your calling now. 3. THE ACCESS TO YOUR SET UP IS BLOCKED Many hunters have witnessed turkeys behaving very strangely at times. For example, a turkey doesn’t really mind flying across a river or ravine, walking across a small shallow creek, a road or slipping under barbwire fences, or navigating through a thicket to find food and shelter. But no matter how desperate a tom is for female company he will rarely if ever cross an obstacle to follow hen calls. This has to do with the fact that male turkeys are male chauvinists. They will go only so far and then fully expect the female to come the rest of the way to them. One time I watched a gobbler strutting back and forth along a field edge getting more and more agitated as his head turned from a purple red to a dark blue and back to fire red again. Each time I called he answered with more anger and frustration added to his thundering gobbles. But no matter how sweet my hen music must have sounded to his ears he would not come one step closer and kept pacing back and forth along that same path. About a half hour into that game and with no result I eventually got tired of it and had to find out what made that bird walk back and forth. There was a small shallow ditch he could have easily crossed but to the tom that was an obstacle he was not prepared to cross. Nobody knows why toms refuse to cross barriers, or even perceive such obstacles as barriers. By nature turkeys are good flyers and very agile on their feet. As mentioned before turkeys are used to flying and sometimes for great distances but not when they follow a hen call. Like I said, they are male chauvinists. The best solution to this problem is to avoid having any sort of barriers between you and the turkeys. Good preseason scouting helps you to pinpoint all possible barriers. When hunting on short notice on unfamiliar land, survey your surroundings before setting up to call. But no matter how careful you are, if you hunt 22 - canadian wild turkey federation conserve • enhance • protect cwtf.ca
turkeys long enough you’ll eventually get into a situation of facing the formidable task of trying to call a tom across a barrier. If the tom refuses to oblige despite your best calling, shut up. The tom will get either curious about the sudden silence and cross the barrier in a last ditch effort to get to a hen that, to his mind, has lost interest in him, or in most cases he looses interest and walks away. When this happens watch where he walks and then quickly and carefully move to a better place ahead of him and on his side of the barrier and then begin to call him again. Hunting the wily turkey is a challenge at the best of times and as more hunters take to the woods each spring in pursuit of North America’s largest game bird it will become an even bigger challenge. Turkeys are smart and by nature also highly paranoid. This can mean only one thing - we will see more and more gobblers hanging up just outside the effective range of a shotgun. Yes, they seem to know exactly how far a shotgun can send a load of pellets, and so we have to come up with tactics that get us closer to the tom or him closer to us. I hope that some of the tactics I outlined here will help you as much as they have me. canadian wild turkey federation the new face of conservation in canada cwtf.ca - 23
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