We turkey hunters are our own worst enemies. We tend to make our sport much more difficult than it really has to be. I certainly made the sport much harder than I should have for years. I put turkeys on a pedestal because all of the old timers told me how difficult turkey hunting is. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that many of them told me that so I would stop hunting turkeys on the same land that they hunt. I think that because that is what I would do today. I heard so many times how difficult turkey hunting is because turkeys can see you blink when they are 100 yards away, turkeys have ESP, and turkeys can fly, and turkeys can fight forest fires. Despite the fact that all of those reasons are accurate, we turkey hunters make the sport of turkey hunting much harder on ourselves than it really should be.
Turkey hunters do give a mystique to the turkey that the bird, in all actuality, cannot live up to. We may do this because the turkey mystique helps to hide our turkey hunting weaknesses. But the truth of the matter is that a great deal of our success in the turkey woods is all about timing and location. Yep, being at the right place at the right time. Our success or failure while hunting is not about the bird. It is about us. Maybe we got to the turkey woods too late, or we got to the turkey woods too early. Maybe the turkey got hung up because we were in too much of a hurry and sat down in the wrong spot without giving thought to what is between us and the turkey before we sat down or where he wants to be. Maybe we were not aggressive enough to back out of where we were to get to where the turkey wanted to go.
There are a million reasons why we don’t kill turkeys on any given day, and 95% of those reasons are because of us – not the turkey. We do things wrong. We don’t stop to think about what the turkey will likely do based on our experiences and education. We turkey hunters are scared… so scared to do anything that we so often do nothing. By doing nothing we get nothing.
So, what do I recommend you do to kill more turkeys? Be a little more aggressive in the turkey woods. Move one tree closer than you think you should before you sit down to call a bird. Move one tree closer on that hung up bird or back out and circle his last known location. Get your gun into shooting position when you know it is your last opportunity. Talk to or whistle at the turkey to make him stop walking and stick his head up so you can get a shot before he walks off. Stay standing, or kneel, as the bird approaches you for a better field of view. Your brain should instantly switch to “kill mode” when that turkey sounds off the first time, and you should start thinking about killing the turkey and start taking action to make that happen.
I would personally rather be too aggressive and mess up a hunt on a turkey than I would be too cautious and not kill a bird because of that. There are too many obstacles in the way of a successful turkey hunt to let your hesitation add to the list. Hens, coyotes, bobcats, other hunters, etc are everywhere, and they are all attracted to your gobbling turkey. Don’t give that gobbler any more opportunity to get distracted or scared than he already has by setting up too far away from him. After all, in today’s turkey woods, we are blessed knowing that if we spook that gobbler there is another one fairly close by that we can hunt.
As always, NEVER risk your safety by being too aggressive. If there is another hunter in your area, don’t move and don’t make turkey sounds. Call out loudly and clearly to that hunter to let him or her know you are in the area. The last sentence in the above paragraph still holds true. If you mess up your hunt because you are safe and let another turkey hunter know you are in the area, then you have lived another day to hunt another gobbler.
If you have a story of how your aggressiveness helped you kill a turkey, then please leave that in the comments section below. We all benefit when you share your stories.