% of birds ???

[rp2210]

  just wanting some input on the subject of roosting birds, or locating them in the evening..... how many birds do you think really gobble in the evening?... i here alot of guys say thats the only way to hunt, to locate at night and set up on em in morning. myself ive had trouble getting birds to talk in the evening alot of times. 

[Happy]

I don't bother with roosting to much. That being said, I am usually pretty familiar with where the birds like to roost in the areas I hunt. I think knowledge of the area is sufficient in a lot of cases. However if I was to be hunting a new area I would be trying my best to do some roosting. Personally preseason scouting is more important than roosting in my humble opinion.

[SteelerFan]

I don't bother with roosting to much. That being said, I am usually pretty familiar with where the birds like to roost in the areas I hunt. I think knowledge of the area is sufficient in a lot of cases. However if I was to be hunting a new area I would be trying my best to do some roosting. Personally preseason scouting is more important than roosting in my humble opinion.

What he said... ^^^^ 

[Greg Massey]

At my place we know were all the turkeys roost and we never try and bump them on the roost. These older turkeys through the years have raised the younger turkeys at these roost spots so we don't want take a change of running them off from these areas.            I also agree with what Happy said.. you need to know your hunting area. We don't worry about roosting.

[gergg]

When I was younger I used to roost every night before I hunted, it really is a big advantage to know where they are sleeping. I grew up hunting in Florida, and those birds would gobble frequently in the evening. If I didn't actually see or hear them fly up getting them to gobble was almost as good. Yeah, I knew the general area they roosted so I could have just waiting on them in the morning and set up accordingly, but to get in close like I like to do, roosting was the way to go.

[TRG3]

Like others have posted, I don't try to roost birds since I can only hear/see them a couple of hundred yards away and, besides, they tend to roost in the same general area nightly. Instead, I try to learn where they are going after fly down and be there. This way I don't shoot up the roost area and spook them out of there. In addition, in all of my years of bow hunting close to the roost area, I don't ever recall hearing a gobble, at least in the fall of the year.

[tomstopper]

If I can, I like to roost them the night before. Gives me a slight advantage or so I think...lol. I will say that when I have tried to roost them in the woods, I have spooked a couple out of the trees on my way out. I like to try and roost them when I have access to logging roads or field edges to walk down.

[hobbes]

When I hunted Illinois Easterns on a regular basis, I'd try to roost if I had time.  Most birds I hunted where in Shawnee National Forest and I was seldom hunting any particular bird and they tended to roost in random locations.  On occasion I'd locate a bird that would roost the same location (at least area) several days in a row, but having the ridge one was on narrowed down was always an advantage.   I liked setting up before he started gobbling and an early arrival ahead of any other hunter while definitely not fool proof was the best I could do to claim the bird.  That doesn't work on some guys and there is nothing you can do about it, but there are guys out there that will honor the fact that you were there first (they may not even stop their truck).  I roosted either from forest service trails that followed ridge tops or from vantage points on the road that had produced in previous years using an owl call.  I had spent a lot of time in these areas, so even if the bird gobbled a long way off I was fairly certain of at least the ridge he was on.

I had a couple places that I would hunt private land and I usually had a good idea where they were roosted but I'd try to roost them there also because of the open fields.  At one of those spots in particular they'd randomly decide to move to roost at 2 or 3 locations.  A couple of the locations presented a problem if you had already crossed the field to the most used spot under the cover of darkness and didn't know that they had decided to move until they started gobbling.  There was a good chance that you couldn't cross back across the field before it got light enough for them to spot you and this was riverbottom country so the woods down the sides typically had standing water in them and required wading usually resulting in a very slow process of moving and wet feet.  I rarely went into the woods here to roost them so I wouldn't spook them, but instead stood out in the field on the ridge and owl hooted.

As a result of the above...........I preferred to try and roost because of the advantage that I felt it offered me, but probably only did it 50% of the time.  I know there were a lot of birds that were hearing my efforts that never said a word.  There were a lot of days that it never poduced a gobble but they'd still be somewhere the next morning.  I'd bet the number of toms within close proximity that responded during the evening was between 10 and 20% of the birds that would readily gobble in the morning (at least from the roost).

I hunt mostly Merriam's now and believe they gobble more readily on the roost. I use an owl and a coyote howler here.  I'll try to roost a bird if I'm staying in close proximity to the area I'm hunting.  A lot of mornings I'm driving three hours to hunt and wasn't close enough the previous evening to try and roost a bird.  If that's the case, I start from a good vantage point before day break and hope for no wind.  You'd be amazed how far you can hear a bird out here early in the morning if there is no wind.

I really like to have one roosted because it gives me more confidence in what the morning holds (especially in the big country out here), but the majority of birds I've killed out west are birds I've located well after flydown.  That probably holds true for Easterns also.

[gergg]

The thing about roosting them.....I was often very close to them when they flew up, so you need to wait until it is dark-thirty before leaving the woods or you can spook them.

[stinkpickle]

Evening gobbling doesn't happen much most places I hunt.  I'm guessing maybe 10-15% of the time.  I don't bother anymore unless I'm actually hunting evenings.

[J.D. Shellnut]

I don't hear many birds in the evenings in the areas I hunt. But opening morning I heard seven and none the evening before. But I still enjoy cracking a cold one on the tailgate and listening while watching the sun go down. So I go anyway. A gobble is just a bonus to me.

[VaTuRkStOmPeR]

just wanting some input on the subject of roosting birds, or locating them in the evening..... how many birds do you think really gobble in the evening?... i here alot of guys say thats the only way to hunt, to locate at night and set up on em in morning. myself ive had trouble getting birds to talk in the evening alot of times. 

I think a lot depends on where they are in the breeding cycle.

Early in the season, when gobblers are fighting a lot and beginning to establish dominance, they gobble a lot going to roost.

Then, as they start to claim hen flocks, I notice the gobbling activity both on the limb and going to the roost decreases.  That being said, they will still gobble. It's just fewer times.

Later in the season, as they begin to lose hens, the gobbling begins to escalate and a larger percentage of birds gobble in the evenings.

The above seems to be accurate for me based on my travels to areas where the turkeys tend to gobble on the roost in the evenings.

There are some places I hunt, and have hunted enough over the years to have been there through different phases of the breeding cycle where they really just don't gobble.

Overall, as a percentage, I'd say it's less than 30% that will gobble in the evenings but you only need 1!

[rp2210]

thanks everyone.... alot of helpful info.!!