Honey Holes

Okay. I'm ready to come out now and say what needed to be said about honey holes. To be honest with you, I didn't coin the term Honey Hole. It was coined by Brian Warner at Heirloom Turkey Calls. One night we were exchanging posts, and I was noticing that I kept coming back to the same spots over and over again to hunt turkeys. He said there was no such thing as a honey hole. Until then I didn't have an opinion one way or the other. I think there is.

It's like I tell KYHillChick: "You can understand what I'm saying if you hold your head just right." For one thing, you have to be in somewhat the same situation as me. The family farm I hunt is 200 acres in SW Bracken County, KY. I've been there 8 seasons now. It's owned by my family, and I'm usually the only hunter who hunts it. Right there, I'm not like a lot of guys. I'm not hunting public land. I'm not hitting a bunch of different venues in several states. It's just me and my turkeys. To a greater or lesser extent this may be similar to a lot of other hunters. However, the voices I usually hear in the turkey hunting world are guys who hunt vast stretches of public land, or jump from one state to another or one parcel to another, and they are not stuck like me on the same piece of ground.

Second, I'm out on the property all year round, and I have turkeys roosting within 200 yards of the front porch. I can glass in a few directions over 500 yards and still be looking at my own pastures. I also am blessed with a few structures that seem to attract turkey's attention. Some are real man made structures, like barns. Others? If you understand bass fishing you understand fishing structure. There are topographic structures, there are structures of timber and cover that seem to attract turkeys, and some do not. Whatever is there, a good part of it hasn't changed in 150 years.

The third part of this situation I've already mentioned: There are very few hunters on this property. Normally I've been the only one. However, my sons are starting to get going. #2 son is having his first solo season this year. #3 son is about to start his 3rd season as a Yute. I think you have to have flocks that are somewhat undisturbed. Human encroachment throws this off a lot. Right here, public land guys are going to feel lost. You're right.

If you have a stable situation, and you can watch the turkeys, you can start seeing patterns form. I don't mean day to day, or week to week kind of patterns. I mean season to season. It also doesn't mean that if a gobbler came out of this treeline on the first Tuesday of season back in 2002, he's going to be coming out the first Tuesday this season. Some of y'all have seen what I've seen, so you know this isn't a sure-bet sort of thing, but neither is structure fishing for bass. Turkey do have basic wants, needs and desires, however. If the land doesn't change much, they tend to move through the same fields, the same clearings, the same everything on a regular basis. Over time, you find yourself getting into similar situations.

Case in point: I've been driving the same bit of road for 8 years near my farm. There is a bend in the road a couple of miles from the house. It is wooded on both sides. The road is built on a knife-edge ridge and there is a steep dropoff to either side. What makes this place different from other spots on the road is that there is a bit of a dip in the road, a saddle. I can tell you for a fact that nearly every time I drive over that spot around noon time, any time of the year, I see turkeys. Coming home on Sunday, I ran into a nice 2 year old gobbler. In the summer we see hens and poults crossing-- you can usually gauge the hatch from counting the number of poults we see in July and August. This is the first spot where I saw turkeys as KYHillChick and I went to look at the farm for the first time. There is a big tree down the hill from the road, and I've often times fantasized about setting up there around 11 AM some day and just waiting. Of course that wouldn't be legal, I'd be poaching, but it still doesn't hurt to dream, right?

You see my point? Now I can see if the landowner knew about the spot and he was a turkey hunter, he'd come in on opening day, sit his butt down and bag himself a nice gobbler. The whole thing might get perturbed for a while, and I would not see the pattern. I can also bet that if farmer is a bad shot and he misses a few times, he will have screwed thing up royally for a good long while and the old gobblers and hens are going to shy away. It may take a generation or two for that effect to damp out. The good news is that turkeys can't read and write, and their oral tradition is somewhat limited. Eventually these guys are going to die, and the next young crew is going to be just as clueless as the others.

Another thing that folks don't realize about turkeys is how little they change from one generation to the next. We tend to think about ourselves as individuals and when we see individualistic behavior in turkeys we tend to fixate on it. I don't know how many times I've seen articles in magazine about that one special gobbler. Yeah, what you don't remember that even we as humans tend to run in the same ruts. There's always a class clown. There always seems to be an old geezer poisoning the squirrels and chasing the kids off his lawn. It is no different from turkeys. After a few years on the same ground, you get to know the characters. Starting in year 2 on the property we had a hen I named Blythe. She had the most gawdawful help. I named her for Blythe Danner, a 70's TV actress that had a bad case of perpetual gravel. Blythe would come up out of the woods and set up under an oak tree next to one of the barns. When she came into season, she'd just sit there and crank all morning-- sometimes for hours. It got so that if Blythe wasn't there, I would go sit under the same oak and drone monotonously with a push-pin call and had some success with the tactic. Blythe disappeared a few seasons ago. However, there is a new Blythe this year-- she's not as gravelly as the original, and she doesn't stay at the barn as long. However, I guess if you're a young turkey hen and somebody steps on your neck when you're a baby it sort of predisposes you to go crank under an old oak tree-- I dunno.

My point is, that for us guys who hunt the same plot of land every year, the same characters keep cropping up. There's Blythe, the hen. Silent Bob is a gobbler that perenially shows up in the same stretch of woods. He gobbles twice on the roost and then hops down and you never hear him again all morning. Silent Bob has been doing this for a few generations that I know of. Lord only knows how long there have been Bobs on that hillside. Bob is the comic foil of Mister Natural, the dominant bird on Gobbler's Knob. Natural does all the calling and strutting. Bob sits back and watches. I've been able to score once on Natural. Another Natural became my arch nemesis back in 2003. I have never been able to score on Bob. The Two Jakes round out this cast. Year after year, I see a Mister Natural strutting in one pasture in the afternoon. Bobs stand off to the side and the Two Jakes scuttle around the periphery giving Natural grief. It is as though the director of the play is handing out a script.

Of course none of this means anything if you can't hunt them. I have spots all over the farm where I've got good structure, a history of turkey sightings, and the third leg of this tripod: a good place from which to hunt. What makes a honey hole work is the big tree, or the fence line, or the log pile that can successfully support your set-up. What got me to thinking along these lines was that I found myself putting my butt down against the same few trees and in the same stretches of fence line year after year. When you find your spent hull or that of somebody else next to you on the ground, a light should go off in your head. You've been here before. The reason why is the turkeys were here before.

I had started to get this all down in detail for you all, and bringing in maps and such. I may do so yet. Maybe Brian will want me to develop this for the magazine. The point is that honey holes do exist out there. I am not going tell you to find one and camp out in it all season. I am not saying you should throw away your calls and become an ambush specialist. What I am saying is that after flydown hasn't worked for you, and the gobblers have clammed up, and you are stuck for a place to go, it may behoove you to start thinking down these lines. If you have a chance to get on your property before season, it might make sense to drag an extra branch or two in front of the old oak where you killed that gobbler last year. It might be a good idea to drop a boat cushion near the hole in the fence where you always see the flocks come through-- it might be a good place to sit and eat your lunch.

Somebody is going to say there is a problem with my ethics on this. "By calling alone"-- The way I see this, was that if the Cutt and Run guys had ever slowed down enough to figure this out, they'd have run over to their first honey hole and cutt like crazy. There is nothing in anyone's rule book that says you have to play dumb and act surprised when you see similarities. There is nothing poisonous to the sport if you go out on your 20 acre patch and see hens loafing in the same corner of the field two days out of seven for generations on end. These turkeys don't know that they are running over the same turf that turkeys have been running on since their great^nth grandaddy pooped in a mastodon track. They don't mind the idea that they get in a rut. Yes, they don't know what they're going to do from one minute to the next, and neither do you. However, if you have enough time on the same piece of land with the same flocks of turkeys, you'll find yourself looking at your watch and saying, "Hmmmm. Getting on towards Ten-- might want to go see if The Gobulator is over by the big oak."