I spent the last four days of the fall turkey season chasing birds across mountains and through farmland and wondered one thing: Why don’t more hunters do this?
While most hunters opt for a bow, or crossbow, during the fall, I choose to pick up a shotgun and trek after turkeys. When it comes to options, they are plentiful in the fall turkey season.
You can walk, stalk, sit, and call. There’s no confinement in a treestand or concern about scent control and wind direction. A fall turkey hunt can be an action-packed affair and you can even use a dog.
But most hunters in the November woods are drawn to the allure of bagging a trophy buck with an arrow or a bolt. I can’t blame them, as the fall archery season during the rut brings excitement that’s hard to beat.
Archery hunting can be an addicting affair, but it’s not the only game in town.
Unfortunately, I think hunters are limiting themselves by focusing solely on archery season. Personally, I don’t mind forgoing the change to hunt for a buck during the rut – I can tag antlers in the rifle season.
For me, there’s just too many other things to do in the fall.
Turkey hunting tops the list, but there’s also plenty of small game opportunities and trapping for furbearers in their prime, winter coats. You can also hunt foxes, coyotes and raccoons at night and try to bag a bruin with a muzzleloader for a week in October.
But all of those fall season opportunities clearly take a backseat to archery hunting as far as participation.
And for myself, being a fall turkey hunter and not a bowhunter, I’m clearly in the minority – a segment of hunters that is rapidly dwindling.
According to PGC figures, there were approximately 200,000 fall turkey hunters in 2013 and 2014.
Last year, the agency estimates just 96,000 hunters pursued turkeys in the fall.
I don’t understand why there’s a mass exodus from a sport that offers so much, but the decline is very noticeable. I spend as much time as I can hunting birds in the fall, and I can’t remember the last time I bumped into another turkey hunter.
I do, however, bump into plenty of archery hunters, perched in treestands or nestled in ground blinds – most of whom are using crossbows. The encounters are unintentional of course, but on occasion I’m met with a disgusted look because I interrupted a hunt.
But when you hunt for turkeys in the fall, it’s important to cover a lot of ground and, by doing so, running into an archery hunter or two is inevitable.
I often get a puzzled look when someone asks me how my archery season is going and I tell them I hunt turkeys, and not deer, in the fall. People don’t understand how I can forgo hunting for a buck during the rut in favor of a turkey that many believe is too tough to eat anyhow (they aren’t).
And I do understand the attraction of archery hunting and the thrill of being on stand during the peak of the rut. I don’t blame the majority of hunters that choose to spend the fall hunting for deer instead of anything else.
When it comes to making the case for fall turkey hunting, however, I’ll recap one day from a season past. I climbed a steep hillside in the predawn darkness and sat against a large tree overlooking the hollow below. As the sun rose, I listened to a group of vocal gobblers in the hollow and answered with a few yelps.
The gobblers replied, and we conversed for the next hour. All of a sudden I heard a commotion on the hill above me and turned to see three young gobblers racing in to my calls. I slowly contorted myself around the tree, maneuvered my shotgun into position and shot at one of the birds as it stepped into an opening.
I missed.
But the day was far from over.
After inspecting the area where the bird was, I slowly walked back down the hill to my original position. About halfway there, the call of a gobbler boomed from the hollow, and the birds that I was talking to earlier were quickly heading my way. I grabbed a seat against the nearest tree – a small oak – and started to yelp. All at once a group of four longbeards ran up from the hollow, making a beeline for my position. At 30 yards away, the gobblers abruptly stopped behind a cluster of trees and I raised my shotgun and froze, waiting for a bird to step out. After several minutes, one of the gobblers clucked nervously and the group ran back into the hollow. They had spotted me sitting against the thin tree, which was all the cover I could muster at a moment’s notice.
A few hours later I stillhunted across the top of the mountain and heard scratching in the leaves on the other side. As I slowly crested the top, about 20 turkeys raised their heads in unison and quickly took to the air, scattering in multiple directions.
Within minutes the birds started calling, so I joined in. Over the next hour several birds began closing the gap, and eventually a turkey cautiously approached within range and I tagged Thanksgiving dinner.
The eventful day in the woods featured a little bit of everything – sitting, calling, stillhunting, a miss and a second chance.
People tell me I don’t know what I’m missing by forgoing the archery season. But my message to them is the same when it comes to missing out on all the other hunting opportunities the fall season offers. Sure, the rut is an exciting time to hunt, but I’ll take an action-packed day in the turkey woods anytime.
