2018 Wild Turkey Season

Its OVER!!!! for me.... these 3 am mornings are going to be the death of me eventually but that is turkey hunting. Heat has been brutal. Have been chasing one and he will not stick his beak out of 10 acres of rabbit warren. This morning starts with a flat tire on the bike, fine last night, pancake this am. Grab a bag of decoys and we're off.

Change of plan quick and grab the truck and head for a spot I have not been in a month but shot turkeys consistently in the spot. Hiking back lose my hat, walk almost back to the truck to find it. That baby has more luck in it than me and I need it to keep the hood of my suit out of my eyes. Get settled and dawn comes without a peep across the entire neighbourhood. Heat has slowed the birds way down and there was a nice SE breeze this morning.

7 am still not a sound, I am tired of staring at a freshly planted corn field for the last two hours so turn and look behind me thinking this is a sure way for a bird to come LOL. Turn back and ain't there a hen at about 125yds along the edge of the wheat. Then see two more fly/hopping across the wheat which is about a foot tall. Hens see the 3 hen and 1 jake spread and the race is on to the decoys. Tom comes around the edge of the wheat and cannot believe his hens are leaving. Full strut from 125 as fast as he could and at 40 had second thoughts about the jake. My dedicated 870 puts meat on the table again. I do love chasing these birds.

20lbs, 11" beard and 1/2"x3/4" spurs
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hunter148 said:
Its OVER!!!! for me.... these 3 am mornings are going to be the death of me eventually but that is turkey hunting. Heat has been brutal. Have been chasing one and he will not stick his beak out of 10 acres of rabbit warren. This morning starts with a flat tire on the bike, fine last night, pancake this am. Grab a bag of decoys and we're off.

Change of plan quick and grab the truck and head for a spot I have not been in a month but shot turkeys consistently in the spot. Hiking back lose my hat, walk almost back to the truck to find it. That baby has more luck in it than me and I need it to keep the hood of my suit out of my eyes. Get settled and dawn comes without a peep across the entire neighbourhood. Heat has slowed the birds way down and there was a nice SE breeze this morning.

7 am still not a sound, I am tired of staring at a freshly planted corn field for the last two hours so turn and look behind me thinking this is a sure way for a bird to come LOL. Turn back and ain't there a hen at about 125yds along the edge of the wheat. Then see two more fly/hopping across the wheat which is about a foot tall. Hens see the 3 hen and 1 jake spread and the race is on to the decoys. Tom comes around the edge of the wheat and cannot believe his hens are leaving. Full strut from 125 as fast as he could and at 40 had second thoughts about the jake. My dedicated 870 puts meat on the table again. I do love chasing these birds.

20lbs, 11" beard and 1/2"x3/4" spurs
K6de1bwl.jpg

p8eQzqvl.jpg
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Nicely done.

I debated on running down to fill the second tag on closing day tomorrow, but the 8 hour round trip and heat has me questioning the sanity of that idea.
 
With weather blowing through tonight and tomorrow it is a dice roll. I do love a thunder storm at dawn though to get them gobbling as they have been tight lipped since Friday.

Good luck to all. It is bitter sweet as I know I will be up at 3 am as usual for the last few weeks and I can almost count on having my coffee at dawn, on the deck, and seeing the one across the road I have been chasing, as now he seems to know I cut the tag with his name on it. He decides to come out for some sun every June 1 for the last 3 years. Only 11 months to wait.
 
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Killing a longbeard with your dad's 870 20 ga mag built in 1965..........priceless.

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I had the worst and most rewarding turkey season ever. Each time i made it out my hunt was disturbed by mostly deer and coyotes and my hunting partner standing in the field waving at me that 2 toms were headed my way...until they saw him. Its truely amazing how fast they can run
I got to see well over 100 deer and many new spotted fawns. 5 baby coons that came screaming and chirping into the brushpile i hid in.
Best of all i shot 5 coyotes. 2 badly mangy and 3 nice ones. Also got to finish a deer that destroyed a guys new popcan ford. I hunted the entire season and the only birds to come close enough to shoot during legal hours were hens. One of which was white and came to check out my decoys each time i hunted that bush
Maybe i shouldnt have used decoys. I generally dont and tag out early every year until this one
It was fun watching birds in roost with binoculars. The tom would fly several mins before legal light. The hens would stay another 30-50 minutes
 
A recap of my wild turkey hunting season from 2018 .... I hunt with a small group of folks, including my dad (very fair weather hunter), brother in law (dedicated hunter, but working away from home at the moment), father in law (keen hunter), and a younger friend of mine who just began hunting in 2016 when I introduced him to it. We had a great season again this spring. My "newbie" younger friend was able to take his first ever hunting game on opening day and I was was able to take a mature longbeard in late May. I had many other opportunities to take a second longbeard, but sometimes hunting truly is a "game of inches". Unfortunately, my father in law and brother in law were not able to hunt very much at this spring. The stories for those who are interested ...

My younger friend and I had roosted a flock of 10 birds (at least two longbeards) the night before opening day so we knew both where they were roosting and their preferred destination (He had been seeing the birds entering a certain field about 7:45 AM consistently.)

We were sitting down and set up shortly after 5:00 AM. I took a conservative approach and we stayed about 100 meters off where the longbeards were roosting because I wasn’t certain exactly where the hens were and didn’t want to bust the roost in the dark. Turned out to be a good decision as one hen was roosted quite close to us and we probably would have busted her had we pursued a most aggressive setup. I set up a standing hen about 40 meters to our left and a submissive hen / jake about 15 meters to our left. The hope was to draw the birds across in front of us as they moved into the decoys. I had the jake closest as I was pretty sure the male birds would go to it first.

Birds were very quiet in the morning, with the dominant longbeard only gobbling 3 – 4 times on the roost and the subordinate longbeard only once. They gobbled once to my tree yelp and I did not call again until the birds hit the ground. I simulated a fly down about 5:50 AM and shortly after the birds came down.

They quickly regrouped into a flock about 80 meters out from our setup. I cut/yelped on the slate, but the response was muted so I shut down my aggressive calling. Two hens took a quick tour through our decoys and then moved off. Unfortunately the "boss gobbler" didn't come inside 45 meters.

As the flock started moving toward the middle of the field around 6:10 AM, one bird broke from the year of the pack and began moving in. Sure enough, this was a jake. I did not call as he came in straight for the jake decoy. I purred/clucked to keep him interested while my friend positioned for the shot. He missed the first shot (probably 15 meter shot – not much margin for error at close range with tight full chokes) and the jake quickly moved off a bit. My calling slowed him down enough for him to rack the shotgun and drop him with authority at 35 meters. He was just elated – great hunt.

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Having spent the first few weeks of the season concentrating on calling for others and having a few "near things" myself with mature longbeards, I managed to notch my own tag in late May. A large flock consistently roosts on the edge of a woodlot before flying down to spend the majority of their day in relatively open fields. They are very difficult to hunt once in the open fields as they tend to be very reluctant to respond to calling/decoy setups. A strategy that has paid off for me in the past is what I call my "Delta Force" approach. I go solo, very early, and tuck in literally beside the roosting birds. With vegetation on the trees it allows me to slide in silently and be set up literally adjacent to their "bed room". Sure enough, I was able to accomplish this successfully and harvested a 19 lb longbeard (0.75 inch spurs, 9 inch beard) within the first few minutes of flydown.

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Another great season - felt awesome to help my friend take his first game and managed to extend my streak of taking a mature longbeard to six years. On to deer season!
 
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buckchaser said:
A recap of my wild turkey hunting season from 2018 ....

Another great season - felt awesome to help my friend take his first game and managed to extend my streak of taking a mature longbeard to six years. On to deer season!
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Do you hunt in Eastern Ontario? I took my two birds on day 1 and 3 of the season on a farm near Plantagenet. Had no problem pulling jakes onto decoys from a few fields over with amateurish calling. Only time we couldn't get the flock to come was when the males were travelling with the females, but even then we have always managed to get one or two to break off the pack.

The one thing me and my buddy continue to struggle with, is mature Toms. We have seen these elusive birds only a handful of times, and have never managed to get them past their hang ups to come in for the kill. All our birds in the last two years have been Jakes.

After I filled my tags I out with a friend, sat on the corner of a field about 100m square with trees on all sides. We had a Tom whose beard was so long when we first spotted him he looked like a tripod, and for an hour and a half this guy gobbled left and and right in a 90 degree arc in front of us, never coming within 75 yards of our decoy. Neither soft clucks and long silence, nor 10 minutes of constant screaming on the slate could get this guy to come in. He wouldn't leave, so we weren't that terrible, but he wouldn't come in either. He didn't even leave when a Coyote came trotting right through the field. After an hour and half of watching these guy we had tried everything we could think of, and had even started googling new strategies right there in the hide.

The worst part was after 1.5 hours, we had a group of four young jakes that eventually come in like a laser beam for our decoys, and we were very eager to take any bird we could get, but then the old Tom got in the way and actually ran the jakes out of the field without letting them near our decoys. Crazy. Beautiful day. Very puzzled.
 
I do hunt Eastern Ontario. Over the last decade or so I've targeted mature longbeards almost exclusively - here's a few things I've learned/experienced that might help.

*Scouting is crucial. Mature longbeards tend to have very distinct ways they use the landscape they live in. Knowing every travel corridor, strut zone, etc. helps put together the "entire picture"
*I find mature longbeards to have very polarized reactions to decoys. Some will immediately dash in to challenge the decoy (especially a full strut version) while others (most) tend to be very wary of them.
* Mature longbeards have tended to be more responsive to calling in the woods. Perhaps if you backed up your setups 50 meters into the woods you could have the longbeard hunting your location in the woods rather than being able to scan your setup from a distance in the open field.
*If a mature tom is with a group of hens your chances of pulling him away with calling are slim to none. I have tried this more times than I care to remember and the result has been dismal pretty much every time.
*Don't overlook the early roost ambush setup - what I called my "Delta Force" hunt above. Mature longbeards tend to be first down out of the tree. If you are set up tight to the roost you will have few minutes to hopefully coax the bird in to shooting range before the hens start raining out of the trees and drag him off.
*Less calling is almost always better. Once the bird is locked into your location, shut down the calling. Mature birds have an amazing ability to hone in on your calling from long range.
 
buckchaser said:
I do hunt Eastern Ontario. Over the last decade or so I've targeted mature longbeards almost exclusively - here's a few things I've learned/experienced that might help.

*Scouting is crucial. Mature longbeards tend to have very distinct ways they use the landscape they live in. Knowing every travel corridor, strut zone, etc. helps put together the "entire picture"
*I find mature longbeards to have very polarized reactions to decoys. Some will immediately dash in to challenge the decoy (especially a full strut version) while others (most) tend to be very wary of them.
* Mature longbeards have tended to be more responsive to calling in the woods. Perhaps if you backed up your setups 50 meters into the woods you could have the longbeard hunting your location in the woods rather than being able to scan your setup from a distance in the open field.
*If a mature tom is with a group of hens your chances of pulling him away with calling are slim to none. I have tried this more times than I care to remember and the result has been dismal pretty much every time.
*Don't overlook the early roost ambush setup - what I called my "Delta Force" hunt above. Mature longbeards tend to be first down out of the tree. If you are set up tight to the roost you will have few minutes to hopefully coax the bird in to shooting range before the hens start raining out of the trees and drag him off.
*Less calling is almost always better. Once the bird is locked into your location, shut down the calling. Mature birds have an amazing ability to hone in on your calling from long range.
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Thank you. I have two parcels of land, 100 acres each, that I have hunting permission on. One is almost exclusively fields, the other almost exclusively woods. After extensive scouting and consulting local farmers, it seems the most popular roost is out of bounds to us, but their mornings and evenings are trafficking across the fields into the woods.

Our typical plan is early morning set up on the traffic corridor, try and get them through our set up, and if we have nothing by about 930 pack up and move to the woods where they spend the hotter parts of the day. On rare occasions they have roosted in our accessible wood lot, and we have posted up on it. We have never found a good spot in the woods to set up our decoys, so one thing we are going to try next is hunting the woods without the decoys at all.

We learned long ago the best way to mitigate our terrible calling is to do less of it.

Question, what do you consider long range? I have been pouring over our maps and scouting data to get an appreciation for travel distances and speeds, and researching online about the effective range of certain calls, and few people seem willing to commit to any numerical values in terms of the range of certain calls, particularly on the long range side. Are we talking 200 yards? 300? 500? 1k?

Next time we go out camping we are going to bring our calls and radios and play a game of marco polo just to see how far away from each other we can hear various calls, just to test it out.
 
Turkeys can hear way better than you or I. I have had the same thoughts on how far can a bird actually here the average box call. My experience is far further than you can imagine and depends on foliage and amount thereof. I have one laminate call that sounds like the harshest, loudest, scratchiest, call you can imagine. Most of my buddies have gave me the stink eye when they first hear it but I have shot or been a party to, over 25 birds have came to it.

You sir are experiencing the thing that many folks never get over when turkey hunting. Turkeys doing what turkeys do, usually frustrate the @@@@@ out of you. Hunt later in the season as i find the big boys might ignore you the first few weeks and suddenly come running in the last few days. Or go cut your second tag, May 30 on a lesser bird, after a week of hunting one particular bird, and watch him for the next 3 days strutting, all day, from my living room window. Bugger has done that the last three years to me, Next spring it personal LOL.

In 21 years I have shot a fair number of jakes and two year olds and shot a jake for the first time in about 10 years spring before last. Felt just as good as a 25 lber and tastes way better. Keep at it and maybe sit the field for a day I have found another thing is usually the time I think I should move in the AM is the time the toms start to troll
 
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