The Myth of Hunting Pressure

[shaman]

I have had an idea rolling around in my head for some time, and I have finally gotten it to gel.  I thought I would throw it up here, and have y'all comment on it.

First off, let me throw out two basic statements:
1)  There is no such thing as hunting pressure when it comes to turkeys.
2)  There are only a few days every season where gobblers are huntable by conventional methods.

Here is my reasoning for these statements.

I hunt a single 200 acre parcel in SW Bracken County, Kentucky.  I will be starting my 14th season on the property this year.  When I got there in 2001, I still had my head filled with the standard catechisms of turkey hunting. It took me most of the early years to get those ideas out of my head and start seeing things for myself.  Chief among them was the idea of hunting pressure.  If you look back at my writing at that time, you will see that I often attributed the frequent recalcitrance of the turkeys to hunting pressure.  Indeed, I would go out on the Opener and hear a bunch of guns going off around me, and figure that had pretty well wrecked the birds for the season.  I also had to deal with the reality that my place had previously been wide open to hunting for 20 years, and local folks thought of it as kind of an unoffical WMA. When I was not there, it was a favorite spot to go.   Over time that changed, but the turkeys did not.

My main reason for coming to believe that hunting pressure is illusory is that I have realized turkey have very little memory.  I have a great spot on the back of the house, and we can sit out there and listen to turkeys on the roost as well as see turkeys out in our pastures.  Even though we are out there day after day and night after night, we continually have close encounters with turkeys.  In one episode, I had three gobblers come inside 100 yards of the house  three nights running.  The dominant gobbler and two acolytes came up the main N/S road and came closer every night only to suddenly discover my family enjoying Happy Hour on the back of the house.  The experience was fresh to them each time, and they showed complete surprise and utter terror.  Those sorts of things happen all the time at our place. I cannot count the number of times I have come in from scouting or hunting to find fresh gobbler tracks crossing mine in the curtilage. I do not think turkeys have the capacity to brain out the idea of a string of similar events having a pattern. If they do, it is far more attenuated than our own.

I do not mean to say that turkeys do not clam up and adjust their habits.  I am just saying hunters do not cause it as much as we think. What does cause it?   I am not sure.  Bear with me while I explain my second statement.

I have never been enamored with my own calling prowess.  Some folks think I am a pretty good caller, but I always feel like I am like a foreign tourist stumbling with a phrase book.  I need to find the toilet and I end up asking for the nearest brothel.  Accept that assessment for a moment. Take it as given that I am not that great a caller.  There are still a few days out of the season where I can bring them in on a string. How can this be?  I have called up gobblers while suffering from what turned out to be pneumonia, coughing hard enough to pass out.  I have heard of fellows calling in gobblers with a rusty nail and a flower pot.  How can this be?  My assessment is that there are only a few days out of the season when gobblers get this way. On those days, nearly anything will work.  The rest of the time nothing works.  A skillful caller might be able to squeeze a couple days out of a season, but the turkeys are either going to come or not. Mostly, they are not going to come.  That is how the illusion of hunting pressure works its way into our minds. 

I have 3-4 active groups of turkeys on my place during season.  I say groups, because there are more than 1 flock involved in each group. They act somewhat independently of each other. That is to say the group at the north eastern corner of the farm my be "ON" while those on the southwest may be "OFF."  The effect of being "ON" can be very localized.  In talking with my neighbors who hunt properties away from our ridge, I know that my turkeys can be totally OFF while turkey as little as a few miles away can be ON.   If you are a normal sort of hunter, it would be easy to ascribe this to hunting pressure.  What happens when you go out and find the turkeys in an OFF mode?  You go elsewhere, right?  For some it means going to a different farm or different WMA.  For some it means packing off to the next state.

However, what happens to that OFF property?  I only hunt that one 200 acre plot, so I am stuck with finding out that answer.  What I find is that once you remove the idea of hunting pressure from the mix, you see something far more complicated.  Flocks and gobblers do not get wrecked for the season in that way.  Instead, they may switch back ON at any time.  It can be very limited too.  I have seen it be bad in the morning and then get hot in the afternoon.  I have seen one end of the farm dead while the other is seething with turkey lust.

I have gotten a lot of flak over the past few years as I tried to state these ideas.  Guys will tell me I'm crazy.  One fellow did so and then went on to say that he would go out and take the turkey's temperature and if it was not to his liking, go home and drink coffee.  Isn't this what I was just saying? I have also had fellows claim they could call in a gobbler any day during season. It was just knowing how, and then come up with a list of exceptions and provisos a mile long explaining why they did not and could not bag a bird every time they went out.  Top of these guys' lists are funky weather and hunting pressure. For me, that sounds like point and match.

What can ON be like?  Usually, I can say that for where I am, these ON episodes are most likely to occur before our spring season usually starts.  Kentucky does not allow calling before season, but I have had gobblers run across the field, because they heard my knees and boot tops moving in the leaves.  I have had a flock of gobblers come to me and go into full strut while I was sitting on a boat cushion, drinking coffee in a field. I have seen lone gobblers roaming the fields gobbling down the tops of hollows. This is that early breeding season just after the big late winter super flocks break up.  After that, the switch from OFF to ON can happen any time.  In general, I find warmer-than-usual days are the most likely.   However, I've seen it happen after a late season snow with 25 MPH winds. Go figure. 

Assume what I am saying is true, what difference does it make?  The biggest difference is once you remove hunting pressure from your list of assumptions, the possibility of hunting heavily hunted grounds makes sense.  Just because you drove out to one plot or one WMA and heard nothing the Monday after the Opener does not mean that place is played out for the rest of the season.  It might turn ON at any time. If you buy into what I am saying, it means you have to be content to be satisfied with  a couple-three days a year to hunt with conventional "by calling alone" methods or think about something else.  For me, I will not call it "ambushing," because it is not.  However, most days I try to set up where I think turkeys are going to come later in the day and then wait. I call, but location and set-up are my primary focus. The most important thing is to not give up. A given property may turn ON on any given day. It should not find you at home watching Netflix.

One other thing my theory means is that the idea of hunting a mature gobbler may not be such the great feat we claim.  If you look back on my weblog, you will see I have my share of 2 year-olds, jakes, and a few old veterans. Truth told, the old ones got fooled just as quickly and completely as the sophomores. Their ON switch was just as certain. I am not saying there are not wary turkeys out there, but I think they could be wary by nature and not experience.

Please feel free to rip this theory apart.  I'd love it it if someone set me straight. 

[Struthunter]

lost me at    here is my reasoning

[FullChoke]

100% right on the absolute button! The best advise is to go and go often. Excellent essay.

[Bowguy]

I'm not gonna rip you apart but I believe pressure is real, obviously felt and changes habits. Turkeys in my opinion react to pressure on them. Early season it's very very easy to watch them in a field. They display, feed and fight in plain view. After a bunch of knuckleheads mess w them from that road they often stay further away from the road at the least n often move off when they see you.
Now if your reasoning is correct, since they gobble so easy at a kid with a box call sitting in his truck before the season than they will do that even after it's been done a bunch of times. Well by me that don't happen.
I agree with the on and off again thing.,there are days every guy you know kills a bird. They were easy to call. Some days it's tough. But go have a bunch of guys in a calling contest around them, shooting too far, in general just screwing them up n you have different birds.
Now doing tv shows why do you think they leave farms alone til the "killer" gets there? Be it deer, turks, beaver or even coons being trapped. Dumber is better in my opinion. Goes for every single animal. If it didn't theyd soon go extinct.
Turks may not have a giant brain but in my opinion they do respond to pressure put on them

[Bowguy]

Another thing to think about. At my other place I had a flock that woukd come n go. I enjoyed seeing them n would never hunt there. I used to put some feed out for them. Got to the point if I was on the deck grilling and hadn't yet set the feed they'd come out of the woods to the spot, then approach me. Got to where I could feed them from feet away.
The minute anyone else showed up, my wife, that miserable woman, ok she's gone so back to the story, a friend could show up etc n they'd take off for the woods. Why? They were never harmed near my place, why'd they feel comfortable with just me? I believe at least some small reasoning powers gave them a sense of security. The same reasoning could obviously make em  feel the "pressure" of someone or a bunch of someones trying to kill them. Why are "public" birds tougher than ones behind someone's place that have never been hunted?
To me it shows they do feel the pressure

[MACHINIST]

100% right on the absolute button! The best advise is to go and go often. Excellent essay.

This is how I have been hunting the last few year,only come out for a little bite to eat then right back in.It takes a lot of patients because towards the end of the year but the second you get a response its all worth it.The more time you put in the more chances you have.

[Uncle Tom]

Shaman, that last statement got me...wary by nature and not experience. Have you ever seen a old, mature, heavy looking at a distance, thick long rope dragging ground, other toms staying there distance from him and think he got that way by not being wary and paying no attention to hunting pressure put on him, I want to come over and hunt some with you and just see one of these birds for myself. I have been at this thing for a long time and when you get ole big boy to show up, it is always a little different experience and most of the time you will get "out smarted again"....why?...because he is old, smart in his own way, and in most cases knows something just don't seem right...better not go over there...call it pressure, wary, not my day to breed that hen, just will play hard to get today, whatever....that is just a turkey being a turkey as Tom Kelly says. Sure, there are certain days of the season that all "hell breaks lose" and birds gobbling every where...exactly why I will be out there tomorrow because yesterday was a bust....happens every season..on every track...pressure or no pressure...but that does not mean that I will sit back and try to figure which days are no good to go today because of whatever.....enjoy all of them to the very last day because the older you get you will realize that next year you may not be able and I want to get all of this I can, while I can. Good hunting and let the young ones walk...you need some seed for next year.

[Ihuntoldschool]

I agree with Bowguy and Uncle Tom. If anything pressure affects turkeys MORE not less than most people estimate in my opinion. The longer you hunt and the more experience you have the more this is true in my experience.  I am talking hard hunted Easterns/Osceolas here. It may be different for Rios/Merriams, I do not know. I think pressure affects them more with each passing year. The longer they have been hunted the more it will affect them in a given area, making them harder to hunt.

Some of the guys with 30/40/50 years plus chime in on this please.

[owlhoot]

Have you ever been to a state park? county park? Where turkeys are but cannot be hunted.
You can call them to your truck bumper, walk right by them on a trail. Sit in a picnic shelter and they will feed right by you.
You don't have that happen in a WMA or where you can hunt on private land. That has any real pressure year to year.
Same thing with deer or even tree rats.

[dejake]

I believe they have memory capacity.  I don't think they find a pile of corn every day by happenstance.

[shaman]

I am sure I'm not going to give anyone an epiphany here.  I just figure we all need to try to see things in our own way and speak it the way we see it.  Otherwise, I'd still be trying to hunt turkeys like an old Ben Lee tape.

Let me address the mature gobbler issue first.  Yes, I've hunted some very mature birds. Some I know exactly how old they were, because I hunted their granddaddies.  What I've seen is that that tough old unhuntable bird often has tough unhuntable progeny.  That's sometimes a guess, I know.  However, After 13 seasons, I see patterns.  There is a bird (or more precisely a family line) that will take up residence in a tree behind our tobacco barn.  When they do, they will waste your whole  season.  On the other hand, when I've bagged a mature old man, he's seemed to fall for my calls every bit as much as the youngsters. Maybe I'm missing a subtlety, but  a gobbler's been totally had if he's strutting inside 15 yards of the end of my barrel, regardless of age.

There's one new blood line on our ridge that showed up about 2007, Mister Moto.  I'm probably hunting Moto's grandchildren this season.  I call him Moto, because of his motor mouth-- gobbles all day, 365 days a year.  He also never comes to calls.  The original Mister Moto used to roost on my neighbor's property, but now the Moto clan has moved south onto mine and the other surrounding farms.  He's good for hunting, because he's a natural shock call.  On the other hand, if you know where one of the Motos roost, you know to stay clear.  They gobble and strut, gobble and strut, but will not come to calls.   I   had exactly one encounter with the original Mister Moto.  He caught me napping one day, mid-afternoon. He busted me from 80 yards out.  I can't believe Moto sat his children down one day and explained things to them. However, all the mini-Motos have had this extreme wariness.  Eventually I hope Moto ends up breeding with more gullible bloodlines.  There was a hint of that last spring.  We had what could have been a Moto decendent come to a call for my son. More likely it was another gobbler who heard my son conversing with the recalcitrant gob and interjected himself.

I will admit that I have less experience with public land and  heavily trafficked property.  However, I have seen instances where my neighbors have really mucked things up with things like over-calling, leaving the plug out and blasting 5 rounds at fleeing birds, and running and gunning all over the place.  By the next weekend, I've bagged one of those same birds.  On the other hand, I have gone all season with birds in the OFF mode on my ridge and no calling, no how, no way, would bring them in.  Whether you disregard the idea of hunting pressure, or not the important thing to remember that you should not count the birds out. 

[shaman]

I believe they have memory capacity.  I don't think they find a pile of corn every day by happenstance.

That's a good point, and dusting places are another thing that draws them.  I have an old barn that my turkeys use  for dusting.  I've sat inside one door while turkeys were dusting just inside the other.  If they had no memory, they would not be able to find the door every day.

I have an answer, and that is that I think turkeys can play by very simple rules. Let's say I'm right for a moment.  A turkey could discover a certain place (food, dusting, pond, etc) and then retire from there to a roost tree. The next morning, they flop down, follow simple rules to look for food and at some point the food, the dusting place, whatever appears. From there, they have a simple rule of where to go when they are done. That leads to the roost tree eventually and the process starts over again.  The rules are set by instinct.

The best defense of this way of looking at turkey behavior is what I see on the farm.  Terrain and structure seems to dictate turkey behavior more than anything.  I will see generation after generation of turkey do the exact same thing. They come out of the trees at the same spot, move across a given pasture, feeding is just the same way, and then disappear into another treeline.  Probably the location of the barns, the pastures, and such have not changed in a century and a half.  Another thing that happens is I get generation after generation of the same cast of characters.  Mister Natural struts in the strut zone of his forefathers while Silent Bob and the 2 (sometimes 3 ) Jakes  stay at the bottom of the pasture and watch.  They roost in the same trees. They feed in the same fields.  It is like watching Hamlet or Macbeth over and over again -- different actors playing the same roles.

[shaman]

Years later, one of my family members developed a piece of this land to build a house..and he built a house, had kids, they ran 4 wheelers all over, had a target range and done a bunch of shooting of guns etc...the turkey hunting went down hill big time in a matter of a few years...all due to pressuring birds.

Okay.  I'll buy that, but on the other hand,I've seen  turkeys roosting close to freshly plowed fields.  What's up with that?  I can't believe they can tell the difference between farm machinery and  recreational vehicles.   Turkeys can become fast friends of a tractor. I've also seen turkeys feeding on a rifle range. There's got to be something odd going on there.   

To answer your question,  my immediate next door neighbors for several years were absolute cretins.  They ran ATV's everywhere, killed every large tree within 100 yards of their house, shot guns with negligent abandon and generally raped what had been  prime turkey property.  All through this dark decade, the turkeys roosted in the same trees on their property and on the adjoining plots.  I could call to them, and they would answer. The best answer for the difference between your experience and what happened with my neighbors is that my neighbors had the sense to throw out seed for food plots as they were pillaging the land. The new owner evicted this trash a few years ago, bulldozed their shack and started using the property as a weekend retreat. If the turkeys ever got tired of humans, they never showed it.

[Ihuntoldschool]

Most people use tractors to farm and do not generally hunt from them. Target shooters are at the rifle range and pose no threat to turkeys, no reason to fear that area.  None of this seems odd to me at all.

Turkeys like other wild animals identify predatory behaviors vs. recreational behavior and respond accordingly.

[GobbleNut]

We have had this and similar discussions on OG,...and every other turkey hunting forum there ever was, has been, or will be,...before.  They are usually under the guise of "call-shyness" in one form or another.  It is usually the same sides chosen up,...and I can pretty much summarize the "human psychology" involved,...which I will leave for a future post, if this gets to the point where it is needed.  Suffice it to say,...it is not pretty,...and would get some folks feathers ruffled.

Here, however, is the summation and gist of the matter (forgive me in advance for repeating myself again in this thread as I have done so many times before): 
Human studies on animals/living organisms have shown, without the slightest chance of question, that pretty much every living organism (and members of the animal kingdom, in particular) are capable of learning.  That learning is often simply a function of "positive" or "negative" reinforcement,..."something good happens, I'll do it again,...something bad happens, I won't do that again".

That is how species survive,...and turkeys are no different.  To state that turkeys are incapable on learning to associate distant turkey calling or other interactions with humans after they have had one or more negative interactions with those, is absurd.  Anybody that makes that statement is denying science, period. 

I can,...however, give a pretty accurate explanation as to why some here choose to do that.  Like I said, if I do so, it will ruffle some feathers,...and likely start another war here that is not needed,...and is hopeless.

Finally, this is not to totally discredit some of the fundamental ideas presented by others on this topic.  Fundamental truths are not always without exceptions.  Just make sure not to dispute "undisputed scientific facts" when pointing those exceptions out.

The End