The Trials and Tribulations of Harvesting my first Turkey

The wild turkey was my first experience learning and hunting on my own from scratch. The lessons learned chasing this ground nesting bird will remain with me for the rest of my life.

The wild turkey population in the United States is believed to have peaked in 2001 at around 6.7 million birds. That number has dipped 15% in the last 20 years, but the predicted wild turkey population still rings in at a healthy 6.2 million birds across 49 states. This is ten more states than when European settlers first made contact. From the perspective of an ignorant outside observer it would appear that the large numbers of available birds, paired with the preconceived notion these birds are dumber than a rock would make it such that getting a spring turkey ought to be equally certain as buying your Thanksgiving Butterball. At least that is the position I took on turkey hunting three years ago when I set out on my first wild turkey hunt in Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the spring of 2020.

I settled into my first spot just at shooting light and was almost immediately greeted by a preposterously loud sound, the likes of which I had never heard. It was unfathomably loud and unlike anything I had ever heard in the woods I couldn’t help but crack up laughing. Had you stumbled upon me you would have thought I was a mad man sitting alone in the dark hysterically laughing to myself each time a thundering gobble echoed through the woods, I loved it. However, witnessing this amazing tune turned out to be the only prize for this hunt, but it was enough, and I became obsessed with turkey hunting immediately.

Spring Turkey hunting in Maryland closes at noon each day. As lunch time rolled around and a turkey never gave me or my erratic calling the time of day. I brushed the chiggers off my pants legs and headed for home, humbled. I made it out a few more mornings that spring, but the plot of each hunt transpired in the same uneventful manner as the first.

In hindsight my humbling shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place. The entirety of my turkey hunting experience consisted of only a few YouTube videos. I had no reason to be anything but hopeful and ready to learn going into this hunt. Be that as it may, my consistent outcomes with only slight tweaks in strategy, made the lessons in my failures unapparent. Out of this I learned the importance of recording small details about your hunt. Jotting down conditions such as the weather, how talkative the birds were, where you heard gobbles, etc. can help you generate a trend line of turkey behavior. Unfortunately for me I didn’t realize the importance of this technique until a few springs later. It is a strategy not limited to turkey hunting, and something I will utilize in many outdoor endeavors to come.

Regardless of your data sample size it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, even the most experienced of turkey hunters get left puzzled by the behavior of these perplexing birds. This seemingly random behavior adds to the joy of hunting turkeys, so don’t beat yourself up over frustrating bird behavior. Enjoy the lack of rhyme or reason behind their behavior and it will just make the feeling of putting the bead on your first turkey that much sweeter.

I took two things away from this first season. Firstly, I called FAR TOO MUCH. Even a world class turkey caller has no business chatting up these turkeys as much as I attempted to that rookie season. I scratched my cheap slate for the first time in my life the night before my first outing. It seemed easy enough, and I thought myself to be the spitting image of a hen looking for love. My calling is in fact horrendous. I existed oblivious to the fact that you needed to sand the slate the same direction each time you resurfaced the call. When calling you must scratch perpendicular to this direction. Otherwise, like myself, you will end up sending a sound much like nails on a chalkboard through the woods when you least expect it.

Aside from the occasional horrendous sounds, I thought I developed a pretty presentable call. A sound I was later informed to be an alarm call. I had been sending a signal to all the birds in the area to get the hell out, danger is afoot. It is embarrassing how long I scratched away at the slate before figuring this out. Don’t waste your time, watch a video of what the various sounds mean before you head into the woods and practice as much as you can.

When you make it into the woods, and I know how tempting this can be in the moment, try giving those gobblers the silent treatment. Don’t get too overzealous with your first pot call recital, playing hard to get might be a good strategy after all. Lastly, positioning is key. Turkeys rely on their eyesight to keep them alive, so that ambush spot that is ideal for you, is also ideal for many other predators. This spring I put too much emphasis on a good place to hide without realizing the reason I had birds circling but refusing to come closer may have been fear of walking into the thick stuff they couldn’t see through.

My exposure to the world of turkey hunting after my first year, though slim, was enough to leave me obsessed. In the buildup to year two, I did much more research and preparation into the right decoy setup, where turkeys like to roost, and practiced calling constantly. I could finally get the calls (slate and now diaphragm) to make the right sounds on a consistent basis and was ready to put my newfound knowledge to the test.

Opening day of 2021 had become a redemption quest. Just as the season prior, I am hunting a small forty-acre property owned by a family friend in Talbot County, Maryland. Just as the sun begins to cover the pitch-black woods in a blanket of faint orange light, an eruption of gobbles surrounds me from all sides. With the closest gobble coming from a collection of tall pine trees about a hundred yards away, my positioning seemed ideal. I had my tom and hen decoy, positioned in an easily visible patch of sparse cover amongst the oak and white pine forest. Fifteen minutes after this eruption I can hear the bird fly off its roost, and gobble again, from the ground this time, seemingly working its way into my direction. I scratch out a fury of clucks and chirps from my slate before putting it down and popping the mouth call excitedly into place, before letting out a few more sounds in no particular pattern. Amongst this chaos of my now realized overused and ill-informed calling strategy, the bird works its way in now 70 yards away. Alerting me to his position with another gobble whilst still hidden from view behind a thick cluster of holly trees. Before I had a chance to overcall even further, a strong breeze and cold rain blew in out of nowhere, causing any sign of that bird to vanish into thin air just as suddenly as he had appeared. That bird had no idea the rollercoaster of emotions he had taken me on in that brief twenty minute window.

The successive outings that year resulted in little success other than a few gobbles returned to my minorly toned-down calling. Once again, I returned to the drawing board to analyze the relationship between the resulting outcomes of my hunts and my respective strategy each outing. I came to the following conclusion. My decoy positioning had improved. I hunted over a thinly wooded area at the center of a horseshoe shaped pattern of roosting trees, a great spot for a turkey to see a decoy from an ample distance, while feeling safe enough to approach. The flaw in this plan boiled down to execution. In my excitement I had blindly snaked my way underneath all the roosting trees in order to reach my planned spot in the morning. An obvious and ignorant oversight to most, I know. Who knows how many more birds I could have worked in had I acted with more stealth. Nevertheless, in the future I will be sure to creep around the perimeter of the property through the shorter and thicker holly patches, avoiding the roosting trees.

In addition to my flawed entrance, I was again humbled by my inadequate calling. Although I had familiarized myself better with the various sounds a turkey makes, I failed to make anything better than a squeak when first placing the diaphragm call in my mouth. Looking back, that squeak had often occurred while practicing. As if I needed a few “warmup” sounds before I could produce any worthwhile chirps and clucks. Yet again I allowed my excitement to overshadow an obvious mistake in the making. I should have focused less on the cool sounds coming off my call under perfect circumstances, and more on how I planned to use this tool when push came to shove, and a gobbler headed my way.

The 2021 was not a total failure, I had worked my first bird off the roost to a call. While I failed to bring home a turkey in the end, I still considered it the first positive feedback in my never-ending trial and error loop. I had to lick my wounds and prep for next year, no good has come of pouting.

As Spring 2022 began to round the bend my excitement to finally harvest my first turkey began swelling out of control again. In the off season, the management strategy of the property I previously hunted had changed quite drastically. A wooded property left to flourish at its leisure was remodeled with food plots and a more hands on approach to management. With an additional touch of remote trail cameras, I was receiving almost daily photos of turkeys in the clover plot. I had the blessing of harvestable turkeys in as predictable a pattern as their nature would allow, this time felt different.

Four weeks prior to the season opener I set up a ground blind on the far edge of the food plot. This was the first time I had put any work into scouting and preseason preparations on the property I planned to hunt. I wanted to get the blind in position and brushed with plenty of time for the birds to adjust to its presence. From what I have gathered the verdict appears to be out on whether or not turkeys react negatively to a new ground blind in their area of operations or if additional measures beyond setup the morning up really make a difference, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

The blind allowed me to bring the cover to the turkeys. In prior hunts I was either too thick in the brush for the turkeys to consider coming my way, or too out in the open that moving my finger to “click” off the safety would give me away. I was also able to position the blind in a way that I could sneak in the back of the property a safe distance from the most popular roosting trees. Now all I could do was wait for the opening morning.

After a walk around the perimeter of the forty-acre property I was settled into the blind with half an hour to kill before legal shooting light on opening morning. It was the earliest I had been set up before, my hen and tom decoy were blobs in the darkness each at 15 yards, 5 yards from one another. The rising sun would come up at my back, keeping the inside of the blind pitch black for at least an hour or so after sunup. As the sun peeked over the horizon more and more birds began gobbling from the roost, but all sounded well beyond the reaches of the property line. I was getting nervous. Had I spooked them? As doubt began creeping in, a flock of crows came by cawing right over head and a shock gobble echoed out from no more than a few hundred yards away. Having learned from my mistakes I only brought my pot call this hunt, to eliminate any temptation of becoming overzealous with my communication. Three quick chirps was all this gobbler received in return. I was committed to playing hard to get this morning. A few minutes passed and the crows circled back around and were welcomed by a second round of shock gobbles from this turkey. Who still seemed to be on his roost. Another few chirps. When the crows circle back a third time they were not greeted by a gobble. That turkey was on the ground.

As the minutes crawled by and I scratched out a few more clucks, I wondered what could have possibly gone wrong. What is taking so long? Why is this bird not gobbling anymore? My whirlwind of panic was brought to a dead stop as two black figures appeared at the edge of sight in the early morning light. At the edge of a clover covered food plot there stood two jake turkeys on a fallen log. The first wild turkeys I had ever seen in person. My heart raced causing the bead on my barrel to violently shake as I raised and tracked the birds. These turkeys were remarkably skittish, never quite leaving the safety of the tree line, milling just around the edge of the plot. That was until the lead bird caught sight of the hen decoy. The behavior of the birds then switched in an instance and the lust for love shot this jake out of the darkness on a bee line path for my hen decoy, closely followed by the second bird. In seconds he closed 50 yards and was in my lap. He stopped a few feet from the decoy giving me just enough time to put the bead just below his head and squeezed.

Fifteen minutes after sunrise my first morning of 2022 I had harvested my first turkey. After many failures, stupid mistakes, practice, research, and hours at the base of a tree my persistence had paid off. While he wasn’t a three-year-old rope dragger, it might as well have been to me. It seemed as though the turkeys were telling me that I just had to show them I was putting in the effort and only when I had exhausted and accounted for every error from my past seasons would they then reward me for my hard work. Or at least that’s what I am telling myself. At this point in my journey it would have been understandable for one to become discouraged after two full hunting seasons devoid of even a glimpse of a bird. It is important to come to terms and accept that you are going to have to experiment and fail in order to develop an effective strategy. My goal has never been to just get lucky and come home with a bird once, the objective has always been to understand this seemingly incomprehensible bird and become a prolific turkey hunter.

More important than my bird even was the knowledge I took away from my first successful hunt. It was the greatest example of positive feedback in my learning loop. My silent treatment theory was confirmed, my patience for sitting still on a roosted bird was rewarded, and the value in locating birds with crow calls was illuminated. While the property I took this turkey from is too small really to locate and stalk birds, as I move to vaster ranges where I can stalk birds, I will definitely be utilizing a crow call, in addition to my conservative calling strategy. Most of all, it showed that persistence always wins out in the end. It would have been easy for me to hang up my vest and give up on turkey hunting, but I stuck with it. Only through failure can you learn, and you can only fail if you set your alarm, get up early, and get in the woods.