With the May 1 opening of our month-long spring turkey hunting season rapidly approaching, many hunters are concerned with what effects the abnormally cool and wet weather of the last month may have on hunting and calling success.
Ideally, most hens won’t commence nesting until ground temperatures reach 45-50 degrees. If it’s colder than that, any eggs risk becoming chilled whenever the hen leaves the nest where her body temperature has kept the eggs sufficiently warm. Since hens only lay one egg per day, they often leave the nest to feed or look for gobblers to breed with, leaving the eggs susceptible to chilling or predation.
In a “normal year” hens starting nesting at different times – some in April and some later – which ensures more successful egg and poult survival, should the weather turn cold and wet at any given time. But this past month has been so miserable, weather-wise, that far fewer hens will start nesting until conditions improve. Evidence of the lateness is the number of flocks that are still a mixture of hens, last year’s poults, and gobblers. Normally these mixed sex and age flocks break up, with hens heading to seek nesting areas, and gobblers separating themselves to search for receptive hens to breed with.
Wild turkeys, especially hens, pay no attention to the calendar and only start nesting when their instincts tell them nest and egg survival odds have improved. Adult gobblers, on the other hand, will begin displaying far earlier, despite hens not being receptive yet. Much of the strutting and gobbling has more to do with establishing a gobbler “peeking order” than it does attracting hens.
It’s somewhat ironic that in some past springs, hunters sometimes complained that the best calling results occurred in mid-April and them dropped off once the May season arrived. That probably won’t be the case this year, and the best calling opportunities may not arrive until mid or even late season, depending on weather conditions between now and then.
Judging from recent flock sightings, it appears we didn’t lose as many turkeys to winterkill as was initially feared, and that’s a plus for the upcoming hunting season, but no guarantee that calling success will be high. And in recent years, gobblers have been less vocal in responding to calling. Blame it on acquired instinct, a high coyote population, or even too many hunters calling birds before the actual hunting season opened. These days, an approaching gobbler is apt to sneak in silently to check the area where the calls originated, thereby lessening the chances of his location being pinpointed by a hunter, be it a two-legged or four-legged hunter.
If I’ve never learned anything else after nearly 30 years of hunting spring gobblers, patience has been my best technique. Sure, it’s great to work a highly vocal gobbler all the way in to my location, but as often as not, the tom would suddenly go quiet, leaving me to wonder if he’d found real hens, been spooked, or simply wandered away. I then had to decide to change locations, or sit tight and wait. If I’d chosen good location and one I knew the turkeys frequented daily, my beat bet was to sit tight and wait. Just when I thought I’d made the wrong decision, I’d catch movement nearby, and here would come the gobbler, sneaking slowly in, looking for a hen.
