00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson. I want to deviate from deer this week to talk about turkeys once more before we get out of this season, but specifically late season turkeys. What I want to talk about and how most hunters get everything wrong when trying to beat a buzzer beater bird. Look, I know that down south, some turkey seasons are already wrapped up, while up here in the North Country there’s quite a bit of life left in the spring season for anyone still sitting on some turkey tags. You know, with some days left to chase them. The late season is going to become a reality one way.
00:00:54
Speaker 3: Or the other.
00:00:55
Speaker 2: This is the least desirable part of the season for most hunters, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it, just can’t approach it like earlier hunts, which is what I’m going to talk about right now. If you look at the stats from most states, probably all of them, at least all of them with turkeys, you’ll see that the earliest parts of the turkey season are all front loaded with pressure. Harvest reports bear this out, and it’s also just not all that hard to anecdotally come to that conclusion. It’s kind of like how most whitetail hunters will take their rut caation the first week of November and not the third. It only makes sense on paper, but in the real world it’s not so simple.
00:01:36
Speaker 3: What if you’d rather be.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: The only hunter out there who’s working the birds versus being one of many.
00:01:41
Speaker 3: There’s validity to that.
00:01:43
Speaker 2: What if you’d rather hunt birds in better weather, or when the food is everywhere and the hens are guaranteed to be nesting and the long beers need to cover a lot of ground every day before the equivalent of turkey bar clothes and it’s off to sleep on a limb I’ll buy themselves for another night. Look, I’m not saying that hunting the late season is more than hunting the early season anymore than I try to convince you that you know you’re better off starting your rut cation on Thanksgiving instead of Halloween, at least in most places. But I’m also not going to say that this time of year sucks for turkeys. It just requires a different approach. When I first started turkey hunting way back in the nineteen hundreds, we didn’t have very many birds, but we had many people who wanted to hunt them. Here in Minnesota, we had a lottery system to draw one of several seasons, and as you can guess, the first season was the top priority for most hunters. So when I turned twelve, which was the legal age I could start, I applied for that season and didn’t draw, which means I didn’t hunt. Then I turned thirteen, and I applied for that season, and I didn’t draw, which means I didn’t hunt. Then when I was fourteen, I did draw, and I did hunt. And by golly, the lonely two year old, on the fourth day of my five day season that came strutting right in after flydown and ended up well within range. My little twenty gage represented the culmination of a long wait on my part and a much longer wait on my dad’s part. Problem then, was I had gotten a taste of turkey hunting, and boy, did I like it now. We weren’t the kind of people who traveled to seven states from April to May to chase another Grand Slam, if you get my drift. So I looked at that draw odds and I realized that I would have to wait at least two more years for another first season TAG, or I could apply for a last season TAG and hunt every season like a lot of us.
00:03:26
Speaker 3: I’m the kind of fellow.
00:03:27
Speaker 2: Who would rather hunt and have a potentially shitty hunt than not hunt and have a potentially easier hunt. So I applied for a last season TAG, drew it and killed a big tom my first morning out. That bird, unlike my first, was not very fired up. He saw my decoys and he heard my calling, and he didn’t care until I ramped things up a little bit with my push button yelper. The following year, I applied for the last season again, and the birds that I called in the first morning I was hunting came in on a string. What I realized was that a lot of people didn’t want to hunt them, but the birds were still doing their thing, and it was actually easier to kill them than it was in the first season. That was a small sample size. My friends and my views have changed a lot since then. But the lesson here is this, I just wanted when I could, and it worked out. It’s no different than when I was, you know, that same age, trying to arrow my first deer and carrying a steel chain on stand into the woods and out of the woods almost every day. I didn’t know a different way, and it almost always put me around deer, even if I couldn’t hit them to save my life. I didn’t start out with a fear of mobile hunting anymore than starting out my turkey career, you know, with a disdain for the late season, because I didn’t know any better. Sometimes when we just don’t know better, it’s actually a really really good thing. This comes up in my hunting life all the time, and I think it’s one of the things that holds most hunters back. They think they know better than to do this or that, or make this call or hunt these days, and they really don’t. Eventually, in Minnesota, I figured out that if I applied for the turkey season that fell on the same weekend as the Walleye opener, I could hunt earlier in May and draw every year.
00:05:06
Speaker 3: I killed birds every year and.
00:05:08
Speaker 2: It was always a gift to get to hunt somewhere earlier, but it didn’t really matter. Again, the birds were out there and they were workable, but you have to understand what is going on with them. Look, the field edge thing is still real and it could still happen. It happened all season long, but it’s generally just less effective than it is earlier in the season. I believe there’s a couple of reasons for this. The first is that, just like with bow hunting white tails, the field edges draw most of the hunting pressure. That doesn’t totally negate the effectiveness of sitting a field edge, but it definitely nullifies it some.
00:05:41
Speaker 3: But then you have the food factor.
00:05:44
Speaker 2: I called in a hen in Nebraska this spring that spent some time feeding in front of me on a warm April afternoon, and I washed her eat some broad leaf greenery that looked like maybe it could be dandy lyons, and then I washed her pickoff some foxtail seeds, which I always look for when I’m hunting doves Sember, although I don’t know why I feel the need to tell you that. Then I saw her post up over a gopher mound and start picking away. Since she was only like fifteen yards from my blind, I could pull up my SIGs in glass and see kind of what she was munching on, which I’m pretty sure we’re ants.
00:06:17
Speaker 3: It was some kind of insect. Anyway.
00:06:19
Speaker 2: Now fast forward a couple of weeks, when every type of plant on the land is all greened up and lush, and every insect that is going to be out is out tossing some snails and some frogs, and some snakes and some mice and anything that a turkey can catch, which is a lot of stuff, and you realize they.
00:06:35
Speaker 3: Have a ton of options.
00:06:37
Speaker 2: Hens need to eat about three hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty calories a day to maintain weight, which ramps up when they are producing eggs and then nesting, which they certainly are in most places right now. They are going to go not only where the variety of food is highest, but that the high protein food is most available. This generally doesn’t jive with fields that have been picked over by deer and turkeys since fall of last year unless it’s been raining a whole bunch and the crawlers and the worms are out, then fields can be money, but mostly the cover is where it’s at, And yes, they’ll definitely feed along logging roads and throughout meadows where the grasshoppers are thick. You don’t just have to stare at a total wall of vegetation in some mature bucks betting area to whack a late season tom, but you often need to get off the fields. One of the last times I hunted mid May here in Minnesota, I fell into that field edge trap and I had some birds gobble, and I had some birds show themselves, but I mostly listened to them pingponging around through the woods. Now, I had taken a fellow out for his first time turkey hunting ever that season, so I felt like it would just be easiest for us to hop on a field edge and cross our fingers. Didn’t work out, and the morning after he had at home, I had a half a day to fill my tay, And after sitting the first two hours and listening to a repeat of the same turkey activity, I slipped into the woods in the direction of a tom that was gobbling just often enough to tell me he was spending some time on a benched out ridge. Now, when I got to the lip of it, I called and he gobbled very close. I didn’t really have time to set up, so I just hid behind a tree on one knee embraced myself. It didn’t take long before I saw his fan, and then I saw his girlfriend as they both moved my way. She gave me a quick crash course on turkey feeding behavior as she picked her way through the woods and not only grabbed a leaf for a blade of grass here or there, but clearly spotted different bugs and tried to munch on them. Killing her boyfriend was one of those lessons that just stuck. And I think about that hunt all of the time when I’m struggling for a buzzer beater bird. But it’s not just enough to get into the cover. You have to understand how to call and decoylates he’s and birds as well. And I know I’ve talked about my decoy strategy from early April to the end of May a lot, so I won’t go down that rabbit hole again other than to say I follow the general vibe of the actual birds. Early on, they’re flocked up and using the same food sources and roosts. As the season progresses, the flocks break up and they have many more options for feeding and roosting. They have also figured out their dominance hierarchies and are much more interested in love than fighting. This means my full strutter decoy stays home, and often all of my jake decoys too. I like a single hend or two because that’s what the birds expect to encounter. There is also a safety aspect here, you know it’s worth touching on it. I hunt a lot of public land and a lot of private land that has other hunters on it. The late season woods are tough to see through, and having a decoy with a bright redhead or a bright white head in front of me while I can’t see fifty yards away doesn’t make me feel great in a lot of situations. And the same goes for reaping, which looks really cool on Instagram reels, but is not something I’d be comfortable doing after spring greenup, and to be honest, I’m not all that comfortable with it at any time. It’s just really not my jam either way. The point stands, though, think about your safety because things are different out there now than they were a month ago.
00:10:14
Speaker 3: Now.
00:10:14
Speaker 2: As for calling, I go pretty hard. I’ve come more and more to the realization that I have to make animals believe they have no choice but to come check me out when I’m calling. I do this for deer a lot, and while it doesn’t always work, it works for me more than you know, soft conservative calling does.
00:10:33
Speaker 3: Most of the time. It’s not even really that close.
00:10:36
Speaker 2: I think most hunters call too little and aren’t confident in their calling. I think during the last couple of weeks of the season this gets further amplified by the thought that the whole thing is winding down and the birds have been pressured enough already. I also think there is something too trying out different calls. Years ago, I hunted rio grand turkeys in Texas with an outdoor writer named Bob Humphrey. He’s the kind of fellow who takes turkey hunting real seriously, and when I saw what he had in his turkey vest I asked him why he had so many calls with him. His answer was something to the effect of that he could get a bird to gobble just about no matter what by cycling through as many different styles of calls as he could, and I kind of believe he was right. Now, I have a Phelps call with me that I can kind of key key to start my yelping sequence, so it’s real high pitch and then drops into a rasp byelp and a lot of the birds I’ve encountered this spring will go nuts over it. It cuts through the wind really well and just elicits responses. But when it doesn’t, I go with something even rasp beer. And when that doesn’t work, I go the other way and I take out a couple different slate calls. It’s not magic, but it works better than not doing it, so I’m going to keep doing it. This also allows me to really sell a scene with my calling, which is real important to getting late season gobblers to commit. Think about it this way. If you were hunting in late November and had a doe in front of you just feeding away, and then you look in the far corner of the field and you see one hundred and fifty inchest standing there, you would think he might come over to that dough, but you probably wouldn’t believe it because you know that a feeding dough just doesn’t really give off Estra’s vibes. Now, you see that same buck in the corner, but the dough in front of you does that little doe prance, and then she squats to pee while looking around.
00:12:23
Speaker 3: The whole thing.
00:12:24
Speaker 2: Suddenly shifts same dough, same distance from the buck. But her body language tells a different story, and it’s one he likes to read. Take that to the late May Turkey woods. Those toms have heard three or five or seven note yelping sequences hundreds of times throughout the spring, and when he was all fired up in the early season, that might have been all he needed to hear. But now he’s run down, he’s over it, and he needs just a little more coaxing. I look at it like you have nothing to lose, and if he won’t commit to conservative calling, give him something to think about. If he hears two hens or thinks he two hens yapping back and forth, that’s a different thing. If he hears a hen cutting her heart out, that’s different. If he hears a hen yelping with all of her might, that’s different. I firmly believe you need to give them something to think about, and then you have to do something really, really difficult.
00:13:17
Speaker 3: You have to be patient.
00:13:19
Speaker 2: A late season bird might Gobble has had off coming in, but mostly he probably won’t. He’s probably had enough sketchy encounters to know that his best bet is to go into stealth mode and take a long look around from as safe of a distance as he can get. The hunter who gets antsy after twenty minutes and tries to go creeping is the hunter who will hear the dreaded putt or see a redhead bobbing away through the brush, and who might be tempted to take, as my wife’s uncle likes to call it, a kiss my ass shot. That’s no bueno, but I know the feeling of impatience in the Turkey woods. What I do to keep my intrusive thoughts at bay is to set a hard time limit for myself, and I settle into a spot that used to be maybe half an hour to an hour, but now I sit longer. I like to give each set up at least an hour, and it’s crazy how often a bird will show up, like fifteen or twenty minutes after I’ve made my last call, and I’m seriously wondering what the view will be like farther down the ridge or deeper into the valley. Late season, birds often don’t run into your calling, and when it comes to a battle of wills and patience. They’ll beat almost every hunter almost every time. And if there is one point I think I’ll try to drive home with this podcast. More than anything, it’s that you don’t want to be like most hunters. You want to do things differently because the average results are just not all that appealing.
00:14:42
Speaker 3: Now.
00:14:43
Speaker 2: I get that it’s hard to sit tight when the woods are buzzing with mosquitoes and the ticks are everywhere, But if you’re dead set on hunting late season birds, you’re also going to have to deal with the reality of hunting late season birds spray down or treat your clothes for ticks. I’ve had a few buddies get Alpha Gael syndrome in the last couple years, and it scares the shit out of me, and it should scare you too. Not being able to eat red meat is no good and is still better than getting lime disease in a lot of cases, not as far as the mosquitoes go. If you don’t have one, go get yourself a thermoseel. This is probably my favorite piece of gear for late season turkey hunting, and it makes the whole thing so much more tolerable. It’s also the antidote to losing your mind and giving in to impatience. While it might not be the most appealing time to be out there hunting turkeys, try to focus on the positives of the late season. The hunting pressure will be as light as it’s going to be all season, which is a huge plus. The birds generally won’t be as vocal as they were earlier on, but if you get one to talk, you have one to work with, which is important. The hens are almost certainly nesting and almost certainly not interested in breeding, which means the toms are after a needle in a haystack, and they’ll cover a lot of ground to find it. They are receptive to calling a decoy, but you have to match the real bird situation and get them going, which is pretty fun when it works. It’s the last gasp of the season, so why not see what you can do with it before it’s too late and you have to wait another ten months to hear a gobble again. Get out there and fill your tags if you have them, and come back next week because I’m going to talk about hunting deer and why curious hunters are often the best hunters.
00:16:21
Speaker 3: That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson.
00:16:23
Speaker 2: This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you so much for listening and for all of your support. Every one of us here at meat Eatter we truly appreciate it. Without you guys showing up for us every week, we don’t have anythings, so thank you. If you want more whitetail hunting content, or maybe you want to see a cool film with clay and bear hunting bears in Alaska. Maybe you want to see doctor Randall in a film that well you just kind of got to go see it. Go look up his Big Buck Hunter video where he crashes this party. It’s crazy. It’s at the Meadeater dot com. I don’t want to say anything more about that because I don’t want to give it away, but you won’t regret watching it. We have tons of content at the mediator dot com. New podcasts, new films, new articles, conservation news, you name it, it’s all there. Go check it out and once again, thank you so much for your support
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