Wherever turkeys live, their first order of business in the spring is procreation. It’s the reason for the raucous gobbling at daybreak, and why you can call in a gobbler when everything goes just right. Then again, turkey habitat varies widely. An Alabama hunter might be wading through a mosquito-infested swamp at the same time a Michigan turkey fanatic makes tracks in fresh snow, so to be successful you must adjust your strategies to the conditions that exist where you hunt. Here’s how three experienced turkey hunters from different parts of the country consistently put themselves and others in gun range of gobblers.
Mark Prudhomme
Georgetown, South Carolina
For the past 25 years, South Carolinian Mark Prudhomme has been a hunting guide and he helps manage a 2,500-acre private hunting area. Most of his turkey outings happen on leased land he shares with other hunters. These properties are hunted hard and often, partly because South Carolina allows five gobblers per hunter per season.
“Our birds get lots of pressure, so they’re always tough to deal with,” Prudhomme says.
The terrain Prudhomme hunts is flat, but the habitat is diversified, consisting of pine thickets, swamps and agriculture, mainly corn and wheat. When the turkeys roost, they usually fly up to trees that are surrounded by water in swamps.
The next morning, they fly down from the roost to slightly higher dry ground in the swamps. Early in the hunting season, the birds make their way out of the swamps and enter fields by mid-morning. Prudhomme and his clients usually score then by setting up on the edges of swamps and calling the gobblers out. However, this tactic soon falls apart.
Prudhomme explains that once the turkeys get wise to hunters, they tend to stay in the swamps all day and refuse to be lured out by hen yelps. The only option is to go into the swamps after the birds. The swamps are mostly water, but there are gentle knolls and ridges within them where turkeys walk on dry ground. Locating these high spots is the key to killing the gobblers.
Topographic maps are useless for this task, because the change in elevation is so slight that contour lines don’t reveal the islands. He claims that aerial photos also don’t help, as you can’t see the dry ground through the trees and brush. The only way to find the high ground is to search for it on foot.
Prudhomme dons knee-high rubber boots for his swamp scouting missions and usually returns with water sloshing in them. If he has found dry ground in the swamp that’s ripped apart with fresh scratchings, you’ll see a smile on his face as he wrings out his socks.
At this point, Prudhomme’s strategy becomes: get in before daylight and get close. Prudhomme sneaks into the swamp long before dawn and sets up 75 to 100 yards from a roost. Ideally, he puts himself where the turkeys are most likely to head once they hit the ground. He tries to determine this while scouting.
“You have to get close because so many things can mess you up in a swamp,” says Prudhomme. “If a gobbler flies down and there’s water or thick vegetation between you and the bird, you’re probably out of luck.”
Since Prudhomme normally has turkeys all around him when day breaks, soft yelps usually do the job. However, he won’t hesitate to get aggressive with his calling if that’s what it takes to get a gobbler riled enough to come hither.
He knows where most of the dry ground is located in the swamps because he has hunted the same areas for years. But a few seasons back, a pair of gobblers kept giving him the slip in a swamp that he believed to be completely covered by water. After a week of being duped, he finally scouted the swamp and found a 50-yard area of dry ground covered with cypress trees.
Before daylight the next morning, Prudhomme’s back was nestled against the trunk of a big cypress 75 yards from where the toms were roosted. The gobblers lit up the morning at daybreak, while nearby hens chimed in with tree talk. Prudhomme made a few soft yelps, and, minutes later, the toms were gobbling and strutting as they worked their way along the ridge toward him. He dropped the biggest of the swamp birds at 15 yards.
Mike Rex
Athens, Ohio
Over the past 22 years, Mike Rex has called hundreds of gobblers into gun range on public and private lands near his southeast Ohio home. He rarely shoots a gobbler himself because he gets more enjoyment from helping his friends and two sons, Ryan and Corey, tag their birds. A few years ago, he guided 22 successful hunters during a 30-day turkey season.
Rex keeps on the move, and he makes excited yelps and cutts with a mouth call until a gobbler answers. However, if a gobbler won’t respond at least two times, Rex doesn’t bother hunting it. He calls this, “the two-gobble rule.” And he says, “I’ve wasted a lifetime trying to call in birds that would only gobble one time.”
The reason Rex can be so selective is that he has permission to hunt some 5,000 acres of private lands that range from 15 to a few hundred acres in size. He also has several thousand more acres of public hunting lands at his disposal. “Turkey hunting areas are like money,” Rex says, “you can never have too much.”
To keep track of his hunting areas, Rex color-codes a plat map. One color highlights properties on which he has exclusive hunting permission, another color shows lands where he has shared hunting permission, and a third color highlights public hunting lands.
Rex heads out before daylight behind the wheel of his pickup truck with the plat map by his side. He pulls off the road at his first stop, and he and his hunting partner for that day hike in 100 yards or more. Ideally, Rex stops at the top of a ridge in this forested, Appalachian country where distant Toms can better hear his yelps and cutts.
If no gobbler answers, Rex backtracks to his truck and drives to the next stop marked on his plat map. He usually gets a hot tom to answer within the first four or five stops, but he has made 15 or more stops in a morning.
Once a gobbler answers two or more times, Rex closes the distance while using a crow call to keep track of the bird. He doesn’t use hen talk when moving in, because if he does the tom will think the hen is coming and stay put. Once Rex gets within 150 to 200 yards of the gobbler, depending on the terrain and the cover, he sets up and resumes talking turkey.
Rex’s run-and-gun strategy often pays off with two or more gobblers before noon, as it did four years ago when he took his sons hunting. Ryan, the eldest, was 12 then, and he was first up to bat that morning. Corey, age 10, stayed home to cop a few more hours of sleep. Ryan had already become proficient with a slate call, and he proved it when he and his dad soon set up 150 yards from a bird that was gobbling on the roost. Rex watched with pride as Ryan patiently worked the tom with his slate call, making soft yelps, clucks and purrs. It took only 20 minutes for Ryan to bring in two gobblers at full strut. Gobbler one was down.
Rex then stopped by the house to pick up Corey, and all three of them went looking for another gobbler. Rex got one to answer on the fourth stop at about 9 a.m. Then he and his sons slipped within 200 yards of the bird. This time, Ryan did the calling for Corey. It turned out to be a long-winded debate. The gobbler would alternate between being hot and vocal and going quiet. Ryan parried with every trick he knew, from soft clucks to hard cutting. The game went on for hours, and the boys, despite their youth, never gave up. Their persistence was rewarded when a pair of gobblers came strutting down an old logging road at 11 a.m. Corey popped the biggest of the two at 20 steps. It weighed 22 pounds.
Pat Muffler
Marquette, Michigan
Pat Muffler got hooked on turkey hunting two decades ago, and he’s been at it ever since. He has bagged gobblers in seven states and counting, but does most of his hunting near his Marquette home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Muffler makes his living as an upholsterer and supplements his income every spring by guiding turkey hunters. He is a member of the Hunter’s Specialties pro staff.
Turkey season in the Upper Peninsula usually opens on the third Monday in April and runs through May 31. The weather this far north stays cold well into May, which is why the best hunting happens during the last two weeks of the season. Earlier in the season, the gobblers are still running in groups, and there might be deep snow on the ground. This presents a unique challenge.
“Gobblers will breed when they’re flocked up, but they normally stick with their feeding routine,” Muffler says.
The public and private lands that Muffler hunts in the Upper Peninsula are a mix of rolling hills covered with hardwoods, flat farmlands and cedar swamps. The turkeys use all this habitat, but the bachelor groups tend to hang out near farms before they break up. Cattle farms are especially appealing to the turkeys because the birds like to peck through manure and snap up whatever grain the cattle miss. “Flocks of 200 to 300 birds will hang around a cattle farm all winter,” Muffler says.
Muffler keeps track of the turkey flocks throughout the fall and winter, and he usually finds them in the same places year after year. As the turkey season approaches, he pays special attention to where the gobblers feed at midday because he says they won’t roost far from their food.
Gobblers will answer a call when they’re running in bachelor groups, but they generally won’t come to it; however, you can occasionally lure a few subordinate gobblers to peel from the flock. Because he can’t count on calling, Muffler sets up along the route a flock travels as it moves from the roost to its midday feeding area. Muffler is usually in position well before daylight, partly because he has trouble sleeping the night before a turkey hunt. Since he can’t sleep, he figures he might as well be in the woods.
A typical early-season hunt goes much like the April morning Muffler spent with his hometown friend, Mike Anderson. Muffler had found where a flock of gobblers was roosting in beech trees on a hilltop. In the morning, they would fly down to small, grassy openings at the base of the hill and strut for two or three hours before heading to a nearby cattle farm to feed.
About 90 minutes before daylight, Muffler and Anderson hid themselves in brushy cover that bordered one of the clearings. They were only 60 yards from where the gobblers were roosting. The ground was frozen and covered with a dusting of snow.
“You can get that close if you sneak in early and take your time,” Muffler says. “The closer you get, the less likely it is that the flock will pass by out of gun range.”
Several of the birds gobbled on the roost at dawn, and they soon flew down to the clearing where Muffler and Anderson waited. Muffler did a little soft calling, but it really wasn’t necessary. At one point, there were 22 gobblers within 35 yards of them. They could have taken a shot at one of the bigger toms then, but the birds were too tightly grouped. The hunters stayed put and passed up shots at a pair of 2-year-old gobblers that ventured within 10 yards of them. About 45 minutes later, a 4-year-old bird gave them a clear shot at 12 yards. It had a 103/4-inch beard and its spurs measured 17/8 inches.
