Scouting for Turkeys -- PT I

First off, I'd go out to a place and walk it during daylight and check for sign:

1) Tracks and scratchings
1) Feathers
3) Scat

As a rough rule of thumb, if you find turkey sign, you'll be within earshot the next morning of some turkeys on the roost. If you have the time, hunt around in the surrounding woods. You may find a roost, with a large helping of feathers and scat around it. If you back off and wait until late-afternoon, you might catch them coming back to the roost.

The next morning, go to the spot you found the sign and stand patiently beginning about 45 minutes before sunrise. By ten minutes after sunrise you should have heard something. Up here along the Ohio River, our gobblers don't start gobbling reliably until mid- March, but the hens are sounding off every morning. Wait until well after flydown and spend your time marking where the sounds are coming from and what directions the turkeys go after they come off the roost. You may or may not find a roost tree on the previous afternoon's scout. After the birds come off the roost, look around for it.

My method of scouting is less invasive than others. I don't use locator calls. I hunt in an area of farms, and there are enough natural sounds to make turkeys sound off on their own without further encouragement. It just requires patience. I also feel that crows, hawks, owls--owls especially, and woodpeckers are a good bellweather of turkeys. If I have a good year for owls on my farm, it's usually a good year for turkeys too. The same goes for coyotes. Crows? I don't know why this is, but when I hear crows calling in the morning I usually know turkeys are close by.

Before I hunted where I am now, I used to hunt in the Big South Fork region of KY/TN where it was about 90% public land. This was a completely different gig. The way I scouted was to go back on the gravel roads at sun-up and drive a couple minutes, and listen, drive a couple minutes and listen. The idea was to cover as much area as possible, listening for turkeys. After that, I'd get out and go look for sign-- usually there would be a spot along the road with a track or two and then I'd go from there. Then I'd mark up a topo map with all the info. Every turkey gobble I heard, I shot an azimuth with a lensatic compass and estimated the distance from the GPS waypoint I marked.

One reason I gave this up is that I'd do all this scouting and then come the Opener, I'd drive out to these spots and find every turn-out filled. The local guys had been doing the somewhat same thing as me.

During these trips, I used a barred owl call until the turkeys were off the roost, and then I would switch to a crow call. Once the sun comes up, you can get the local crows going by doing a wounded-crow or fighting crow or crow distress call. The crows in that whole area may respond and that in turn will set off otherwise recalcitrant gobblers left and right.

The shamanic Nuclear Option:

A bird watcher gave me a trick years ago for calling in every bird in the area:

1) Hawk call
2) Crow call -- That "Come here!" call
3) Squeak. Kiss the back of your hand like a small animal getting attacked.
4) Crow alert call followed close on by the Wounded Crow
5) Pish -- pishing is the sound a lot of little birds make when there's trouble in the woods. You just blow through your teeth and "Pish! Pish! Pish!" -- you do that a few times and then go silent.

What you've done is painted a sound picture of a predator coming into the woods, and gotten a curious crow interested. A crow goes to investigate and gets into trouble, and then alerted all the little birds that there is serious trouble. Crows, woodpeckers, hawks-- you name it will all come to investigate along with every other bird in the forest. I'm fairly certain I could go out right now and pull one of these runs off in my back yard in the burbs and have a murder of crows or a phished-off hawk close-in within 10 minutes. What this does for the turkey hunter is cause such an unholy ruckus in the woods that turkeys are bound to sound off if they're in the area. It have also seen it draw in curious deer and coyote-- you name it. This is also a fun trick to play in a public campground right around breakfast time.