Beginner Fall Turkey Hunting – Lessons Learned
Two weekends ago, on short notice, Liam, Chad, and I figured we’d try our first fall turkey hunt. We are all total beginners when it comes to fall turkey hunting. Luckily, we had four pieces of information, three of them useful:
- Turkeys are grouped up in flocks at this time of year
- The traditional method is to charge in and bust up the flock, then call the birds back in
- Calling using decoys (a la spring hunting) still works
- If you go deer hunting, you will have lots of turkeys come into gun range when you aren’t after them.
That’s it, that’s all. We had two other things on our side. First, we knew the terrain since we were hunting the same farm as we did in spring. Second, there were 4 of us and, having learned from our mistakes in springtime, we spread out to cover lots of Terrain. Okay there was also a third thing, which is that the farmer once again informed us that she had seen turkeys scurrying about. So we knew they were there.
How do you figure it went? Well, not great. We did see turkeys, and they were certainly flocked up. But that flock was 200 yards downhill from where Chad and I had set up, along the edge of a conifer plantation.
The turkeys were downhill from us in sort of valley which held a recently-harvested potato field. Right in the open. With tons of space all around them to see us coming. In fact, we didn’t see them until, having seen nothing all morning, I ambled over and stuck my head over the hill to glass the area below. The whole setup looked something like this (note my accurate-to-season rendering of the fall colours):
Beginner Fall Turkey Hunting
As a result, we were stymied. Past experience told us that the birds would eventually move into the neighboring property, through a fence gap. We figured action was better than inaction, so I tried to sneak up on them along the line of deciduous trees at the top of the map. In an ideal world I would have circled wide through the neighboring property, with the cover of the trees, and set up waiting for them. This is not an ideal world. Well, you can guess what happened. The turkeys saw me from a mile off and hoofed it. That was that.
So what do we learn from this? Well, we know that the birds must be roosting and gathering together somewhere near where we first saw them. This means that a better strategy would have been to set up much further down the field in the deciduous trees you see at the top of the map. Perhaps with some decoys this time. The idea would be to attempt to cause the flock to congregate in gun range after they flew down from the roost. It also seems clear to me that the strategy of busting up a flock would work best in a wooded environment. In those circumstances, it seems to me you’d have a better shot at scattering the birds to the winds.
Still, I have to say this for fall turkey hunting: it is a lot less painful getting up at 5:30 than 3:30 (thank you tilted earth axis). We’ll get em next time!
