Posts Tagged → call
Should you hen call now to gobblers?
Spring turkey season is just a few weeks away, and a TON of spring gobbler (male turkey) hunters are about to pee in their pants right now, with increasing anticipation and excitement, every time they think about being out in the woods and tangling with a long beard Tom.
In Pennsylvania, any wild turkey that has a beard of any length is a legal bird to take in the month of May. The way we hunt them here is the hunter takes up a stationary position and calls, in order to lure the mate-seeking Tom turkey into shotgun or bow range. Using hand-held tail fans and stalking birds is illegal in Pennsylvania, because we have a ton of hunters and these two methods – hiding behind a turkey tail fan and trying to sneak up on gobbling birds – is a sure fire way to end up wounded or dead. Better to err on the side of safety, and so we hunt from stationary places, either on our butts up against a tree or from inside a man-made blind.
Because of the growing excited anticipation and the desire to locate wary gobblers before the season starts, some guys, and yes, it’s always guys because women are too smart and too mature to behave this way, will go out into the woods or even drive up and down roads, calling out the window(s) of their vehicles. They are trying to get the gobblers to gobble back at them.
Why do they spend their time this way? The official reason is they are verrrry professional hunters trying to locate their quarry ahead of time, so they can be the first to hang their harvest tag on one. Because hunting is competitive, ya know… (and not fun).
The real reasons guys behave like this are [WARNING – Adult themes ahead] a) guys of all ages and incomes are easily capable of becoming temporary morons for the flimsiest reasons, and for some reason hunting and fishing seem to teem with these flimsy reasons, and b) guys like easy stimulation.
To wit, older people might remember the drive-in theaters that once littered the countryside of Pennsylvania, and how in the 1970s and 1980s in addition to showing family classics like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they also broadcast fully XXX-rated hardcore porn (often mockingly named after legit movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang…use your imagination here) on their gigantic screens for the entire township to see every weekend night. Sure, if you paid to enter the parking lot you got the best view of the giant drive-in movie screen. But if you were cheap, broke, especially rambunctious with your girlfriend, or usually just lonely, some guys would find parking spots outside of the drive-in perimeter where they could watch the no-no movies and ummmmm…pleasure themselves.
And this is exactly what is going on with guys calling to gobblers pre-season, particularly from their vehicles on public roads. Guys will drive by private land that has a field or two, or a good wood lot that can hold a Tom turkey, slow down, lean out their vehicle window, and start cackling or cutting hen sounds to try to elicit a mating response from a nearby gobbler. And when the gobbler responds they get into a sexually frenzied calling match that leaves both human and bird exhausted and confused, with nothing to show for it.
Don’t do it. It is embarrassing for the human, and worse, it makes the turkeys call-shy, which hurts all hunters. Because the more that gobbler hears and responds to hens that never materialize, or who are not there when he suddenly shows up to mate with them, the less inclined he is to believe subsequent calls when the season is actually in. The more wary he is likely to be, the less likely he is to come in to your calls.
Yeah, we know, you need some action now. Need to get your cheap jollies. Deer season ended in January and you’ve just been dyin‘ for something to happen ever since. Trout season doesn’t do it for you, and besides, you just get such a silly thrill when you hear those birds hammer back at your calls from the road. And that is the portrait of a guy, right there, in all of his pathetic weakness. Kind of like a gullible young Tom that runs right into gun range of a bad turkey caller.
On the other hand, women hunters are the stronger of our species. They are spending their time peeling potatoes, dicing carrots, mincing onions, and choosing white wine for their roast wild turkey they are going to harvest and cook. Because when the season finally opens, and women hunters step into the field to begin calling to gobblers, they will not be calling to birds they have foolishly turned call-shy ahead of time, and they will probably fill their tags right away.
Our dear friend, Don Heckman
Don Heckman needs little introduction in the sporting circles of Pennsylvania and the East Coast.
A founding member and long time leader of the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Wild Turkey Federation, Don’s cheerful, generous and kind personality and locomotive work ethic helped re-establish wild turkeys to Pennsylvania in the 1970s, when the conventional wisdom said it was impossible.
Don was also a powerful advocate for the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsman’s Clubs, the National Rifle Association, and many other similar groups to which he was a devoted life member.
He was a persuasive advocate for the continued success of the Pennsylvania Game Commission on the whole, and its land acquisition and science-based habitat management programs in particular.
Don was both an incredibly good hunter, and at times also exasperating to hunt with. This is because of his own unique standards: He refused to shoot a gobbler (male turkey), unless it was both strutting and gobbling at the same time. Sneaking toms, peeping toms, cautious toms, running or flying toms he would not shoot, no matter how close or in range of his gun. None of those were sporting birds, in his estimation. Only a completely unaware longbeard was worthy.
Don and I turkey hunted together a number of times over the years, mostly in the central Pennsylvania farmland we both love. While it would be easy to regale Don’s skill as a caller and hunter, two instances come to mind that sum up the attraction of having Don as your hunting partner.
First was his wry humor. He meant it with love, of course.
“Mmmmmm, uh huh. That sounds like a turkey,” was a frequent back handed compliment from Don as I was scratching away on a friction call, mostly slates.
He wouldn’t care that my calling had actually lured in a nice longbeard to within range. That was no inoculation against the compliment. For Don, it was important to remind me that my calling could always improve, whenever he had the chance. And he was right, of course, as much as I do not like to admit it. That’s what good teachers are about. He was, after all, a many time champion caller whose skill I could only marvel at and never hope to replicate.
And just to prove his point by spiking the ball, Don might decide to stand up and switch locations even as the gobbler was determinedly marching across a cut corn field directly to us.
Watching the alarmed bird take wing and sail to the other side of the valley, the now standing Don said to my sitting figure, “Yeah, he must’ve seen you move.”
Movement is the biggest no-no of all in turkey hunting, and rookies move a lot. Even veterans get caught moving their eyeballs by wary gobblers fifty yards out. To attribute the alarmed and rushed exit of a wild turkey to a hunter’s movement is a gentle way of saying “Your hunting skill needs some work.” Even if it didn’t at that very moment.
And then there was that truly exasperating standard of his, the one where he would only shoot a gobbler in full strut AND gobbling. That performance is like looking up in the sky and seeing the sun and moon align, because a longbeard gobbler that is both strutting and gobbling is completely in the moment. He feels no fear or wariness that usually accompanies most alluring hen calls by hunters.
As I am not ever going to approach Don’s skill as a turkey hunter (he has racked up more annual grand slam turkey hunts species-wise and across multiple states than anyone else I know), I feel fortunate to shoot any gobbler, strutting or not.
And it is a fact that my poor skill as a turkey caller usually results in birds sneaking in, peering in, or darting in for a quick look before running like hell to get out of Dodge, or “putting” (turkeys make a putt-putt alarm call when they are suspicious enough to flee) from 40 yards out, so that most of the gobblers I have killed were shot mid-stride to the next county.
Not in full strut AND gobbling, like Don would have.
One morning in Dauphin County about four or five years ago, Don and I were lying in a field while I called to turkeys below us. They came well within range, but the lead gobbler, a huge bruiser boss bird, stopped gobbling and was “only” fanned out and puffed up, strutting. Such an impressive performance was insufficient to move Don’s trigger finger backwards, despite my harsh whispers of expletive-laced encouragement.
Nope. Instead, Don stood up in plain view of the flock, maybe thirty yards away, with his shotgun trained on the head of the strutting gobbler, and he began simultaneously calling with his mouth diaphragm call.
Wild turkey hunters know that at the sight of a man standing up within two hundred yards, let alone thirty, wild turkeys scatter like dust in a hurricane. They are gone in the blink of an eye.
Not these birds. Don’s calling was so good, so realistic, so enticing that the entire flock turned to look at us with concern for the grossly misshapen hen addressing them, and then they calmly walked away.
Don never shot, though he would have easily bagged any of the gobblers there. He just said “Oh, well, let’s go try another spot.”
Don is now in another spot, a turkey chaser’s dream spot, I am sure. He was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor in late January this year, and he rode it out with the help of his devoted wife, Sandy, for the next few months, until he died on the night of May 17th, in the central Pennsylvania region he loved so much.
Like all of his friends and acquaintances, I will miss Don Heckman enormously. Sitting in a turkey blind I cried yesterday, thinking about his loss. Don died way too young, barely into his retirement, and not in time for me to prove to him that really, I can get a gobbler to strut AND gobble in range. But that is what I will continue to do, to aspire to, in Don’s memory, as representative as it was of one of the last great generational wildlife conservation leaders in Pennsylvania and in America.
Bye, old friend, boy do I miss you.
Wile-y Coyote, knows the way
On my way out the door this morning, a call came in: “I think you have a coyote,” he said.
Knowing how wiley those coyotes are, I was skeptical and hopeful.
Surely enough, when I arrived the sets were undisturbed, and a second call went like this: “Yeah, we figured out he was mousing, you know – pouncing on mice under the snow,” and then eating them with great pleasure.
So what had appeared like one behavior was in fact something else, entirely. The coyote had not been trapped, but rather had merrily and quite freely zig zagged his way across the snowy field, chasing tasty mouse morsels. Human perception has misunderstood things of far greater consequence before, and will again, but the symbolism was instructive.
Once again I am surprised to see how entrenched most people are in a single perspective, as if their own living place, their own community, their own home, their own food, whatever surrounds them, is in fact (and must, must be) a true reference point for everyone else. As if rural citizens relate to land the same as city slicker flatlanders, whose use for open land is a place to casually watch for deer as they serenely drive to their next appointment. As if the flatlanders exist for the sole benefit of the rural folks….
How often do we hear activists and religious leaders invoke “peace,” as though what they are doing will actually bring peace, or that they would even know what someone else would call peace. The take-away for me today was how entrenched in self most individual people are, and how they often (mistakenly) believe that their world view is dominant, “normal,” and correct. And I’d say that this applies across the board, to all people, and most assuredly to me.