Last season tips

[blue_healer_guy]

Hunting this weekend. 2nd year of turkey hunting, Didn't get one last year. Any tips, using a jake good idea? The most frustrating thing for me last year was while dark hearing the tom, but losing him as shooting time came. When do you start calling the birds when you hear them before shooting hours?

[Borch]

The biggest tip is to do your scouting before the season to see where the birds tend to end up. The key is to be where the toms want to be in the first place. You may get less gobbling from them during last season. Although I've had a few times where birds gobbled a lot and responded very well to calling the last season.

Also hunt late into the day when you can. Toms will respond better to calling once their hens have gone to nest. As far as decoys go I don't use them unless I have an early season. I would definitely avoid the jake as toms are pretty wore down by late season and tend to avoid confrontation more late season.

Set up in places where you have seen birds routinely spenting time. Settle in and do some blind calling. Soft yelps, purrs and clucks with some leaf scratching tossed in. Gobblers will often sneak without making a peep so be ready.

Good Luck!

[Wallydog]

Don't forget that late in the season you can encounter bachelor groups of jakes and older toms. They will often vocalize readily yelping back to your calling. If you have not encountered this you might think you have hens calling back and continue calling trying to mimic the "girls" with limited success. I have had success several times making a short "jake" gobble on a Red Woods gobbler shaker followed by 3-4 slow coarse yelps with a diaphram that I cut in on the back end of the gobble. It will sometimes break the bunch and bring a tom looking for the newbie.

But as Borch says there is absolutey no better situation than being where the birds simply want to go!

[Powerstroke]

I am currently hunting with my archery only tag and what Borch has said rings so true. I hunted 4 days this past weekend and there was very little gobbling and even less response to my calling. Still, I saw several birds, many more than other people around me, including the guy who set me up there.

By day 2 I figured out where the birds were heading to feed and socialize. I had the biggest gobbler of my life come to 45-50 yds but I'm bow hunting and he completely disregarded my hen decoy and my calling so no shot.

Like was said they are very social right now. ALso there seems to be an incrediable abundance of birds. Must have been a very good hatch last year with a soft winter. I've never seen so many birds in one place. There's a lot of competition from other birds.

The best advice I have is try to spend as many hours in the field as possible. I hunted from 5am-5pm, full length of shooting hours. Some of my best sightings were from 2pm-5pm. Because of that I was able to pattern the birds in 2 full days. THe rest is a bit of luck.

[blue_healer_guy]

Thanks guys, I know where they are (scouting) but a friend of mine has been hunting this season and says they are not interested in nothing. Cross my fingers and maybe by friday their moods will change.

[Powerstroke]

I can agree with what your buddy said. The only thing that has worked for me is to get on their travel routes. Its just like deer hunting now except turkeys don't make the large game trails to follow.

[mntraveler]

That's exactly what we ran into this weekend and unfortunately did not do near enough scouting....each time in the field a lesson is learned.