Outdoorsmen Adventures.com

With many years of turkey hunting under my belt, I’ve probably ran into just about every hunting condition and or problem a turkey hunter might encounter

Many of these are things could have been taken care of before heading for the woods and a little time spent before the opener on these things would have helped to make several of my hunts more successful.

One thing that many turkey hunters take for granted is the gun and the ammunition they are shooting.

As most of us know, for some reason or another, there are certain ammunition brands and shot size that just seems to pattern better in certain shotgun/chokes than others.

This is why it’s a good idea to test fire or pattern your gun before heading out each season.

This year, I’ll be using my new Escort 12 gauge, so I’m going to have to try several chokes and different loads at several distances to see which of these patterns best.

As far as shell’s over the last several years, I’ve had excellent luck with Winchester Xtended Range 5 Shot and will start with that using a Full choke.

I’ll start out by test firing my shotgun at 25-30-40 yards using a Shoot•N•C turkey head targets, making sure that I get the tightest pattern at different distances.

Another problem that turkey hunters run into is rainy weather as this makes many of the old stand by turkey calls useless as when they get wet some of them just don’t work well.

There are a couple of calls that I’ve used that work very well no matter what the weather and they are glass/slate calls and the box calls that doesn’t need chalking.

When slate gets wet, it soaks up, when you drag your sticker along the wet surface, instead of digging in and creating the call you want, it slides along the surface, making the call useless.

The glass surface on the glass/slate call doesn’t absorb water, so it is affected less by rain, and will work better in damp conditions.

Box calls that need chalk to work properly are a disaster when it rains as the chalk gets wet and gums up, making many of the box calls useless.

There are several on the market that don’t require chalk allowing them to work when it’s wet.

Another problem that I would guess has plaqued most spring turkey hunters is a Tom that’s with hens and is henned up or refuses to leave them to look for another hen.

I’ve found the best thing to do in this circumstance is to be patient and once it looks as if the Tom is going to hang up, I’ll back off calling him and start working on the hens.

What you’re trying to do no is to make the Boss or Mama hen mad enough that she’ll come looking for the loud mouthed hen that’s trying to coax her man away.

We do this by getting loud and vocal, using a higher pitch call or a combination of calls, making her think that there are several hens out there that need their tail feathers kicked.

Most hens will only take so much of this before they come looking for the unwanted visitor.

Once the hens start moving towards the caller, it won’t take long for the Tom to follow as he doesn’t want to loose track of his harem.

Another thing that we’ve done during the later part of the season when Toms aren’t responding to the hen calls is to try and get them curious and to come in to see what’s going on.

One way to do this is to use a fighting purr call which is the noise turkeys make when they fight and turkeys are just like people always interested in a good fight.

There are several call manufacturers that make these calls, but we’ve found out that two callers using slate calls can sound as good as any other call.

To do this both callers start out by making two or three longer drawn out excited purrs and then going into your standard cal, only done at a little quicker pace, then back to the excited purrs, repeating the whole process several times.

At that point, it’s a good idea to pause for a minute or two so you can look around to see if a bird is or has snuck in while you were calling.

Don’t give up if you don’t get a whole lot of gobbling when using this call as many times, the Toms will come in quietly hoping to sneak in and sneak off with the hens while the Toms are too busy fighting to notice.

These tips along with a lot of patience will help you to get through some of your toughest days in the woods, hopefully helping you to bring a bird home when conditions are tough.