What is your favorite tactics for hunting gobblers on WMA's, either hill Turkey's or big river swamp gobblers
Hunt through the week if you can do that. Be aware of other hunters. I see folks set up on field edges some, but wma fields get hammered. I'd rather set up in a good location in the woods. Dont overcall.....they can be skittish, but they also get lonely and pressure goes away last week of season. I've grown to minimally answer a gobbler. Lots of loud cutting and yelping sounds good on tv but soft and short yelps and single contact clucks are used often by birds that aren't real vocal. Good luck it's my favorite way to get after em!
I don't like to use locators unless I don't hear anything. Try to get as close as you can and give him that sweet talking if he's alone. If he's not alone try to call the hens or just maneuver on him and get a shot.
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Weekdays if you can, if you can't, good! I won't see you too! Kidding. I never use locator calls. Everybody else does. I hate it when public gobblers gobble. I try to prevent it. Very different way to hunt turkey. I guarantee it will translate to becoming a better all around turkey hunter. Very little calling. Get in early and leave late. Put in the time to scout.
Weekdays!
Went on my first weekend excursion this am.
Not going to lie. I heard 9 owls, 9 crows, 9 yotes, and 9 peacocks! Got kind of scary when a bird fired off in the bottom I was in. I went from excitement to worry quickly. Walked out by 4 hunters within 300 yards of each other. I'll go weekdays as I have been
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Scout,scout,scout. Walk like you are on an excursion. Listen to everything and look for turkey tracks, and people tracks. Search out the roosting areas. Get in early, very little calling. Favorite call most morning are the purr and leaf scratching. Usually keeps him from gobbling to much and comes in silent. Meaning no other hunters come trouncing in on you. If you keep yelping and cutting he keeps gobbling.
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Ten to Two.
Everyone has great info so far. I like to try to find the small isolated areas that maybe only have a bird or 2 on em vs the large tracts that are loaded with birds...as they bring in more hunters. Scout...know the likely roost areas before season so you can get in early without using locators like many have stated. I don't use decoys and I stay off the field edges like was mentioned. I go the route of shy quiet mystery type hen (soft stuff) vs the wild promiscuous type hen when I hunt public. A gobbling turkey is a bad thing on a large tract. Many hunters think "he's gobbling on his own" and those birds are typically easy targets.
Be prepared to walk away. I couldn't get away quick enough and had to scoot around the backside of a tree this year as i got one gobbling too much and pretty soon I could hear someone on a mouth call coming in from our side on the next ridge. It is possible to not sound like a turkey and get one shot too. He had to run him down after his 2nd round but Mike Singleterry would have been proud of the guy's tackle on the bird. Probably one of the craziest things I had ever witnessed.
Weekdays, hard to reach areas and the like are all great starting points. However a lot of guys are blowing right by turkeys trying to find a "hot" one. When hunting pressured turkeys I found slowing down, calling softer and less frequently is deadly. Also use your ears and eyes. I am by no means a master but i have found hunting smart is just as effective if not more effective than hunting hard. There are times to go fast and times to go slow. Recognizing when each is required has gone a long way for me. Not that I have perfected it by a long shot.
hunt the steepest public lands,,very few guys want to scale them from the road
Quote from: Double B on April 06, 2019, 07:57:35 AM
Lots of loud cutting and yelping sounds good on tv but soft and short yelps and single contact clucks are used often by birds that aren't real vocal. Good luck it's my favorite way to get after em!
That's a good point. I admit I like the loud cutting and yelps but it's probably not helping me.
I have found in most WWA there are a few areas with known good turkey populations. It's tempting to hunt these spots cuz you can almost always hear one gobbling but these birds get hunted everyday and almost never go to a hen unless they see it walking around first. For me its worked better to forget these spots and keep searching for that single tom or small group that no one has found yet, often you can get this tom killied in a day or two. Another good tactic if you do hunt the popular spots is that sometime you or another hunter bumps one-maybe missed a shot or something and the bird flies off a long ways-across a river or something similar; this bird will be super vulnerable for a day or two in his new spot-you want to get over there and hunt him right away or the next morning for sure. Even though this senerio doesn't happen often its pure money when it does.
Slow and patience
My favorite tactic.... get there early and go hunt. Haven't ran into another hunter yet on any of the public grounds we've hunted this spring. Saw 1 out of stater at 1 piece of public when we drove by headed to a different one to hunt. Otherwise, that's all we've seen since our first time out in early April. BTW, we've always been out Fridays and Saturdays.
This is an old topic, but thought it might be worth exploring again....
Public land hunting methods can vary a lot based on a number of factors,...size of the area, difficulty of access and terrain, turkey densities, and of course hunting pressure. My personal advice for someone hunting a very small public area that receives a lot of hunting pressure throughout the entire season is to go find somewhere else to hunt. I would rather drive a few hours to get to a less-hunted public area than compete with a pile of other hunters and have to use "deer hunting" tactics.
To me, the entire attraction of spring gobbler hunting is the vocal interaction with the bird. Quite honestly, if I had to hunt somewhere that I can't have a conversation with a gobbling turkey,...well, I would just quit hunting them,...or better yet, I will go find a place to hunt where I can.
Which brings me to my next point. There always seems to be a consensus among hunters that, in heavily-hunted public areas, you can't kill gobblers by hunting aggressively. The prevailing attitude of "you can't call too much to these birds or you will shut them down" creates a mind-set where hunters are stuck in the old "cluck and purr" mode and never try anything else.
Regardless of where you hunt, don't 'pigeon hole" yourself in your hunting style. I have hunted a number of places where the prevailing attitude was "you can't kill these birds if you call to them too much",...and the way we ended up killing our birds was to get really aggressive with them.
Now, I am not saying that the way to kill gobblers is to always be aggressive with them. I will also say that if you hunt a place where the woods are constantly full of other hunters then aggressive calling will likely attract them (which leads back to point 1: find a better place to hunt,...or hunt that place at a different time). What I am saying is that aggressive calling and hunting tactics will kill birds in some situations where a lot of hunters think they will not.
Again, the moral of the story: don't pigeon-hole yourself in your hunting and calling style.
Quote from: roberthyman14 on April 25, 2019, 09:08:18 PM
Scout,scout,scout. Walk like you are on an excursion. Listen to everything and look for turkey tracks, and people tracks. Search out the roosting areas. Get in early, very little calling. Favorite call most morning are the purr and leaf scratching. Usually keeps him from gobbling to much and comes in silent. Meaning no other hunters come trouncing in on you. If you keep yelping and cutting he keeps gobbling.
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^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Sometimes you have to hunt like you're being hunted when on hard pressured ground. Both from the turkeys and other hunters.
Not telling anyone where I'm hunting
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Think it's been said but scout scout scout......
Know the terrain, set up where they want to go, try different things, soft calls, no calling.
Go off beat, I once set up on a field gobbler that beat me 4 days in a row, he would pitch in the middle of a field with his girlfriends but would use a different exit every day.
Well day 5 I was in the middle of the field in a layout blind with one hen decoy....... he landed 10 steps away......... game over.
Hard hunted WMA, when I got him and blind back to where I parked there were 4 other vehicles and I had heard them all calling when he was gobbling on the roost....... I never uttered a sound.????
Growing up I used to hunt a central Florida WMA quite a bit. I don't know how many birds I killed over the years within walking distance from the check station, and never saw another person. Granted this was in the 70's and I'm sure its changed, but if I ever go back I'll definitely check it out. It used to tickle the guy and his wife who ran the check station that I killed birds where they could hear me shoot. I guess the tactic would be to try and find the obvious, hidden in plain sight. Not all turkeys are on the other side of the WMA, or deer for that matter.
I like to hunt week days, and I also like to hunt areas that have areas that can only be accessed by boat. That is a pretty common thing where I'm from to have a huge tract of land with locked gates, and the only way to access the biggest portion of the land and by boat. I have also had better luck with soft calling and leaf scratching.
Quote from: guesswho on February 14, 2020, 07:59:06 PM
Growing up I used to hunt a central Florida WMA quite a bit. I don't know how many birds I killed over the years within walking distance from the check station, and never saw another person. Granted this was in the 70's and I'm sure its changed, but if I ever go back I'll definitely check it out. It used to tickle the guy and his wife who ran the check station that I killed birds where they could hear me shoot. I guess the tactic would be to try and find the obvious, hidden in plain sight. Not all turkeys are on the other side of the WMA, or deer for that matter.
Same out here,...killed lots of gobblers within a few hundred yards of paved highways listening to the trucks of hunters screaming past headed for those remote areas that "supposedly" hold all the untouched birds. Sometimes it is better to outwit the competition than it is to have to outwit the gobblers!