By Will Primos

Producing The TRUTH“ TV Series and the many other video products that Primos Hunting Calls puts out each year is definitely a labor of love. It is fun to hunt turkeys in the mountains or in places that have a different terrain than you do at home and to chase the different species of turkeys (ex. the Osceola in Florida, the Merriam and Rio Grande of the Midwest and Western states and the Eastern, in Eastern United States). However, that there is still no place like home when it comes to turkey hunting.

I consider Mississippi and Alabama my home turkey hunting turf. I enjoy the rolling pine forests and the hardwood bottoms here. Sitting down to an Eastern gobbler, laying out a yelp, having him answer back, and waiting those sometimes long minutes for his next move is another labor of love. There is something about the gobble of an Eastern wild turkey that seems so loud and so ferocious that you think there is no way that sound can be coming from a bird.

I have heard many people describe hunts, but I rarely hear them say that a Mississippi or Alabama turkey gobbled back. I’ve heard people say, “He hollered back.” I’ve heard people say, “He roared back.” I have to say that when I’m in a hollow with a gobbler and he lets out his mating call at the top of his lungs, it definitely sounds like a roar. It is one of the most intriguing springtime sounds that you’ll ever want to hear.

One year I got permission to hunt a 900-acre tract of property that no one was hunting that particular spring. There were a lot of turkeys there on this old home place. I very quickly latched on to what I thought was the biggest gobbler in the whole woods. I found this turkey roosting on the edge of a hill within a hundred yard area every morning. I approached him from every direction imaginable for the eight days that I hunted him. He gobbled well on the roost and on the ground. He always stood his ground. He stayed in one place gobbling or end up going off. He never came to me. He answered almost everything that I threw at him. Sometimes he went silent and then I really had to yelp hard, cackle, or cut to get him to roar back so I’d know he was still there.

On the eighth day I stood there listening to that turkey holler on the hillside and thought, “I ain’t gonna say a word to this turkey. I’m going to go find another one.” I know you’ve been there too. I walked away from that turkey, crossing an open pasture that was about 30 acres and went down the hill on the other side of the pasture to look for another gobbler. I stood at the edge of the woods with that turkey hollering on the hillside behind me, just roaring his head off. I let out a yelp into a bottom to see if I could locate another turkey when lo and behold, that turkey that I had walked away from some 400 yards ago gobbled three times in a row like I’d never heard him do in the seven days previous. I immediately sat down against a tree and looked slightly uphill into the pasture. I put my gun on my knee and decided I wasn’t going to say anything else. Maybe he would come to me this time.

I’m not sure how much time went by, but it was at least five to 10 minutes before his head popped up over the edge of the hill. I didn’t dare move a muscle. I just stood my ground to see if he would keep coming. Well, he kept coming.
Then I saw another head appear five yards behind the first gobbler. I had two gobblers coming to me even though I had only heard one in the area. I wasn’t sure where this other turkey came from. As they got closer, I looked harder and realized that they were both jakes!

All of a sudden, a pileated woodpecker let loose and both of those turkeys gobbled at the exact same time. I witnessed it with my own two eyes. If I had had my eyes closed, I would have said it was one monstrous turkey that definitely knew how to gobble. Instead it was two jakes gobbling simultaneously.

I’m not one who usually tries to kill a jake, but I surely wasn’t going to pass up this opportunity. After eight mornings chasing what turned out to be two jakes, one of them had it coming! When the first turkey finally got to about 20 yards, I poured it to him – a full load of copper plated number fours “in the face” as we say. I had what I call a “super jake” – a beard that was three and a half to five inches long, more than mere nubs for spurs and weighed about 14 pounds. The other turkey took to the air and sailed into the bottom.

I got to thinking, “I’m going back tomorrow morning, making it nine days in a row that I’ve listened in this area. I’m going to see if that jake is gobbling on his own in that same area.” Well, I never heard another peep from that area, proving to me that those two jakes were buddies. They were gobbling simultaneously, making me think that they were one big old gobbler. Now that one jake had found his way to the roasting pan, the other jake just wouldn’t gobble alone.

There is still no place like home when it comes to turkey hunting and there’s no gobble like the roar of an Eastern even if it is two jakes gobbling together.