A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, or in the case of spring gobbler hunting … more than two in most cases. With our local toms progressively getting less vocal each year – arguably the result of increased hunting pressure and being stalked by coyotes – hearing a tom gobble on its roost at dawn doesn’t translate to an easy call-in and a bird in hand. For once that tom flies down, you may never hear it gobble again that day.
Whatever the reason, our local toms are just gobbling less and less with each passing year. What this means is that the classic spring turkey calling and hunting experience is changing. Time was, if you went spring gobbler hunting, you expected to hear vocalization by the toms, at least occasionally, giving away their location and giving the hunter the opportunity to set up and try to call that gobbler in. When toms don’t gobble, it becomes a dice roll since the hunter can’t be certain where they are and risks spooking them when he moves to look for a receptive gobbler.
In the past three or four years, the majority of the spring toms I’ve shot came in silent. If they gobbled at all, it was while they were some distance away. But once they decided to investigate the hen calls they heard, they shut up and literally came sneaking in, often circling before doing so. This meant I had to be observant of the surrounding area a full 360 degrees. More than once when I’ve slowly turned my head to look for any movement that might be an incoming gobbler, and in doing so, spooked a tom that was barely visible but scanning my setup area from just out of shotgun range.
About the only turkeys that seem to still occasionally gobble once they’re off the roost are the jakes, the one-year-old birds that apparently haven’t learned yet that gobbling gives away their location … to hunters and coyotes. This may be attributable to the fact that they often hang out in small bachelor flocks, and each is seemingly always trying to become the dominate one in that flock, and gobbling may be their way of exhibiting it to the other flock members.
The first gobbler I took this spring was rather typical of what spring hunters are dealing with in recent years. Since it’s been my experience to take my biggest gobblers late in the morning (I assume because their hens have left them to lay or nest), I didn’t start hunting until 7:30 that morning. Despite some good listening and calling setup locations, I never heard a gobble. So I opted to set up and call from a “strutting area” I knew of. An hour of soft then loud calling never produced a single gobble. Not sure where a gobbler might be, I decided to just wait, calling sparingly from that one location.
