By Will Primos

I look at turkey hunting in two different ways. First, anybody can kill a turkey if you are in the right place at the right time. When that happens, it usually comes when you least expect it. Of course, neither you nor I would pass up the chance to be lucky and be in the right place at the right time.

The second way is to make it happen. This involves learning to be a good woodsman and being able to call well. Even if you had never hunted a particular place before, an understanding of how turkeys react at different times of year and in different types of cover or terrain can mean all the difference in the world at being successful or not.

You’ve probably heard this said before, but I think it’s a great analogy - Turkey hunting is a lot like chess. The only difference is you have an opponent who doesn’t know the rules. You try a certain call to see how a gobbler reacts. Then you either do it again or you don’t depending on how the gobbler reacts or should I say how you think he reacts. You see, you only know half of the story and that’s your half. If you can’t see the turkey and he doesn’t gobble back, you’re left guessing his reaction. He may react by strutting and drumming or folding his wings and getting suspicious.

Sometimes a turkey will respond to cutting quite aggressively. If you cut again, he’s likely to run you over. Other times you cut at him once and he responds and then when you cut at him again, he shuts up and you never see or hear from him again. Still other times, he shows up behind you having been completely silent the whole time he was circling you. That’s what makes it so much fun. It’s like a chess game except the opponent doesn’t play fair. He’s always cheating.

Attending shows and promotions like the one that Mark’s Outdoors puts together each spring has been a learning experience for me. You wouldn’t believe the stories I hear and the things that I learn. sometimes I try these things because somebody told me about their hunt and how they were successful in a certain situation. Hearing those stories gives me a lot to draw on. The one thing that I try to stay focused on whenever I’m headed into the turkey woods is that you can’t kill a turkey where he is unless you limb him! (If you do that, you’ve lowered yourself and you’ve cheated not only him, but yourself as well.) You have to hunt him as he’s looking for you. Unless of course you are going to bushwhack him, and that’s an art within itself that should be reserved for the most frustrating turkeys that must be taken out at all costs.

Probably the most important thing to remember about a gobbler is that he knows (or at least the ones that are over two years old know that when he’s gobbling he’s vulnerable. Every critter in the woods can hear him. The predators know where he is. That’s why you just hear some gobblers gobble every once in a while and that’s why those old smart gobblers don’t gobble very much as they come to you. That’s also why a lot of times they just gobble in one place and won’t come. What they’re saying is. “Come to me. You know where I am and you can walk right up to me and we c an have a great date together. Everybody knows where I am. If I start moving and gobbling to you, something’s liable to jump on me.” So, a gobbler usually picks one of those places where he can see pretty well. He’ll gobble a lot in a field for instance because he can see well. He’ll gobble ina nice pretty clearing in the woods or maybe in a small food plot that you planted for deer season because he can see well. He is more willing to do that because he can see if something is trying to sneak up on him.

With all of that in mind, one of my favorite tactics after I get a gobbler to respond is to scratch in the leaves. The more realistic it sounds, the better. I like to take a turkey’s wing and reach out like a rake using the wing to move the leaves. It sounds a lot like a turkey that’s scratching and backing up looking for what they’ve just uncovered. Maybe its an acorn left over from last fall or maybe a fresh green shoot coming through the forest floor.

All that I have just related to you is what I put under the umbrella of taking a turkey’s temperature. Thinking about what’s going on in the turkeys world at that point in the season and the terrain, I’m sizing up the turkey’s mood. Depending on how a turkey reacts tells me how much or how little I’m going to call to him. Some turkeys in open woods feel comfortable gobbling the whole way so if i’m in open woods I’m probably going to be more relaxed about calling a lot until I lay my eyes on him, I do that because I don’t want him knowing exactly where I am until I pull the trigger, In thicker woods I may not call as much allowing him to search for me while he sneaks in. With that said, I’m going to tell you the story about bucketmouth.

Bucketmouth was a gobbler that lived in Claiborne County, Mississippi. If I’m correct in knowing this turkey’s habits as well as I did, I hunted him for six years. He was at least two years old the first year that I hunted him. that sixth season i had given up on him. It was 1986, and I was with a good friend of mine, Boyd Burrow, who has now gone to his reward. We didn’t start hunting until 2:00 in the afternoon. At that time in the season, daylight savings time was already in place so it wasn’t getting dark until around 8:30. It was warm so we really didn’t expect to do anything but it was turkey season so we had to go.

We walked from the old house that we called a camp back to an overgrown filed with big pecan tree that we called the pecan grove. We stood on the edge of the pecan grove and I gobbled with my tube call. Immediately we got a response. We couldn’t see the far end of the pecan grove that had recently been bush hogged but I’m pretty sure that’s where the turkey was. If I was right there wasn’t supposed to be another turkey in this territory because bucketmouth wouldn’t let anyone else talk. I told Boyd, “If this is Bucketmouth, we’ll have fun but we ain’t gonna kill him.” Bucketmouth was known for staying in one place and gobbling al afternoon until fly up time.

We backed off into the woods and walked like a turkey, making noise in the leaves. You see, a turkey sounds a lot like a man when he walks if not identical. It’s one step then another. I would stop and scratch with my foot to add a little bit more realism to it. We were like two gobblers, maybe a gobbler and a jake, or possibly a gobbler and a hen that were at the edge of that pecan grove and now were moving off into the woods. We went about 30 yards, had a good view of the edge of the pecan grove and set up. I suggested to Boyd that we keep our mouths shut and he agreed so we just sat tight. I told Boyd, “If he comes, he comes. If he doesn’t we’ll just enjoy listening to him fly up this afternoon and we’ll know where not to go tomorrow morning.” You see if this was bucketmouth , I wasn’t wasting another morning on him. The only way I could imagine killing him was bushwhacking him, building a blind and waiting in ambush. I’m just not good at that.
As I recall, it had been 20-30 minutes. We were trying to sit as still as we could. We hadn’t heard a thing when all of a sudden I heard one of my favorite sounds in the woods. This gobbler was calling to the turkeys he thought were there by drumming. I eased my eyes over to Boyd without moving my head. I could see that he was slightly nodding his head like he heard it too. I wasn’t quite sure where it was coming from, but I focused my attention towards the pecan grove. Sure enough I heard it loud and clear and had a good course on it. He couldn’t be more than 40 yards away.

It was amazing how fast this turkey was coming when I saw him. he was in a half-strut wit his wings down and his head looking up and drumming. a lot of people don’t realize what drumming means, It is so important. Listen the next time you have a gobbler close to you. When you yelp to him and he doesn’t gobble back, listen and see if you hear him drum back. Drumming is another call gobblers use. Like I said before they know that everything in the woods knows where they are when they gobble. They use drumming as a call because it’s not as loud as gobbling. This gobbler was drumming and coming straight towards where we had walked in the woods while making sounds like two turkeys in the leaves. He was looking for those turkeys. Obviously this turkey was lonely, by himself it was the latter part of the season, and he was still interested in friendship. Remember he had only gobbled that one time in response to my gobbling on a tube call.

I didn’t have a clear shot until this gobbler was about 15 yards away. when I had a clean shooting lane, I poured it to him.

As I stood over the gobbler with the instep of right foot firmly planted on top of his neck, I leaned over to grab a leg to look at his spurs. Boy were they nice - 1 6/8 inch curved with a little bit of an Ivory tip. It was a turkey hunter’s trophy for sure. Was it Bucketmouth? Well, we didn’t hear anything in that part of the country the next morning or the next. On the fourth day of our hunt, three turkeys sounded off. I guess they were now free to gobble their heads off and to start a new chain of command because Bucketmouth had cheated at his last game of “Turkey Chess.”