One of the things that appeals to me about spring gobbler hunting is how unorthodox it is.
Strange, even, but in a good way.
The tactics and techniques used in the pursuit of gobblers go against most hunting norms. Everything that we avoid doing when it comes to hunting for other quarry, it’s all perfectly fine during the spring gobbler season.
Take noise, for example. One of the biggest lessons we learn early in our hunting careers is to be quiet. Don’t talk, don’t snap a stick and by all means make sure the cellphone ringer is shut off.
However, with gobbler hunting, different forms of noise is a useful tool and necessity. We use boisterous owl and crow calls to locate roosted gobblers, blasting the silence of the early morning woods hoping to trigger a bird to reveal its location. Sometimes, louder is better when it comes to forcing a gobbler to sound off.
And of course, when a gobbler is ready to talk, we converse with a variety of calls loud enough to reach the bird’s ears. It’s not until a gobbler is approaching within range that we sit silent, but the hunt up until that point was predicated on, basically, making noise.
But there are other differences as well.
Wind direction and scent control – two crucial components for deer hunting – are non-issues during the spring gobbler season. The sense of smell is poorly developed in a turkey, so there’s no need to worry about washing hunting clothes in odorless soap and masking yourself with scent killer from head to toe.
Perhaps the biggest paradox of all when it comes to gobbler hunting is the most effective technique is one that goes against the order of nature. In the spring, a turkey gobbles to attract hens. They go to him.
When it comes to hunting, the opposite is true. We use hen calls in an attempt to draw a gobbler in, even though it doesn’t really work that way in nature. In my opinion, that’s what makes gobbler hunting so challenging.
And frustrating at times.
For all those hunts when vocal gobblers failed to materialize, perhaps my calling wasn’t to blame. It’s a tall order to reverse the roles of nature and convince a gobbler that it should go to the hen, and not the other way around.
When a gobbler hears a hen calling, whether it’s the real thing or from a hunter, they really don’t have a reason to gobble back other than to announce their presence and wait for a hen to approach. If we played by the natural order of things, that means hunters would be stalking gobblers all over the woods. That’s not safe nor is it legal, and that’s why we go against nature and attempt to call gobblers to a “hen.”
I think it’s also a reason why gobblers sometimes come in silent. On those occasions when a gobbler suddenly appears without announcing its approach, the bird did so because it was curious about the hen it heard calling earlier in the morning.
I once spent an early morning hunt talking to a pair of gobblers on the other side of a hollow for a half hour. The birds answered every yelp and cluck I scratched on my slate, but they wouldn’t move. Eventually, the gobbling stopped and I put the call away and sat for a while, enjoying the spring woods.
Nearly an hour later, two gobblers came racing up the hollow, necks outstretched and beards swinging, right for my location. I wasn’t ready and missed with a shot before the birds took to the air and were gone.
It wouldn’t be the only time that I had gobblers come in without making a sound, and it usually happens long after we had a conversation that went silent.
Still, no matter how different gobbler hunting is from every other season, there is one element that is common with everything else we hunt: excitement.
The adrenaline rush when a boss gobbler cautiously works its way within shotgun range is similar to what one experiences when a mature buck or monster black bear passes nearby.
Excitement is the common bond between every hunting season, but a spring gobbler hunt is one of the few times when it’s OK to be a little bit noisy in the woods.
