Killing turkeys on a deadline
An idiot, it’s been said, is someone who keeps doing the same thing, over and over, expecting a different outcome.
Welcome to the world of late-season turkey hunting.
With South Carolina’s season ending April 30 in most of the state and May 10 in several Upstate counties, and with North Carolina hunters ready to trade shotguns and mouth calls for baitcasting rods and spinnerbaits after May 7, it bears noting that, well, some hunters might qualify as idiots. Having hunted the same turkey, or turkeys, for the better part of a month, showing up at the same time, in the same place, blowing or striking the same call, what’s going to make that turkey suddenly turn stupid, come running in and drop down in a strut within shotgun range?
Yeah, probably nothing short of a major miracle.
So hunters who have a tag left to use, or who want to call a bird in for a hunting buddy, had better draw up a new game plan if they want to put that wild butterball on somebody’s Thanksgiving table.
“If it hasn’t worked the first part of the season, what makes you think it’s going to work the second part of the season?” asked Mitchell Johnson of Purlear, N.C., owner of Dead End Game Calls.
“You’ve got to change what you do toward the end of the season,” said Brandon Rich of Pfafftown, N.C., a pro-staff member of Hanks Game Calls. “The key is finding ways to do things different when you get ready to set up.”
Here are some tips Johnson and Rich have for hunters with a tag to fill and only a few days to do so.
Don’t give up
Johnson said that a frustrating early season can often cause a hunter to question just how much he wants to get up early enough to be in the woods before 0-Dark-30, waiting for the owls or crows to crank up a gobbler.
“A lot of it is the desire to go,” he said. “A lot of hunters give up after the first two weeks. You hear them every year. They’re done. But the last two weeks are when I kill my very oldest, biggest birds – because they’re the ones that are left.
“They get done breeding all the hens, and they’re looking. They’re roaming around, trying to strike up one more hen,” Johnson said. So willing toms are available.
With fewer hens roaming the woods, clucking, yelping and purring to their suitors, gobblers can get, well, randy when it comes to putting another notch in their spurs.
Change your calls
“You have educated, pressured gobblers out there,” Rich said. “Most of them have been shot at, or seen their buddies die. So the key is finding ways to do something different: the way you call, the calls you use. This is when trumpet or tube calls really work, because by late in the season, birds have heard every pot call, every box call, every mouth call there is.
“It might be something as simple as changing the striker you use with a pot call. A change in the tone of a call might be enough to set one off.”
Change your approach
Johnson remembers a hunter who had been frustrated over and over by one gobbler asking him to come call the bird in for him. When he surveyed the hunter’s set-up, it took only one big change to put the turkey in range.
“This guy was hunting a field, and he had a makeshift blind set up watching this field,” Johnson said. “I took him, and we went to the opposite side of the field and set up in a new place. And the bird came into the field, strutted right across the field, right to us, and he shot him.”
Rich said heavily pressured birds will often move to completely different areas after two or three weeks of hearing hunters yelp, cutt and cluck in their direction.
“I think if they’re pressured, they’ll move and change their patterns,” he said. “If they hear a guy with an owl call at the same place every morning, if they hear somebody check them with a box call at the same place, it gets to them. So I try to come in from a different way. A lot of public land is around lakes. So a boat or a kayak can give you a great way to approach a bird from a different direction.”
Johnson said that the strutting zones you’ve located on preseason scouting trips that were great places to set up the first week of the season are worth giving another look the last week of the season.
“You need to go back and hunt those strut zones you identified early in the season,” he said. “When the gobblers get off the hens, that’s where they’ll go. And you can call turkeys in anywhere they already want to go.”
Stay later, be patient
Rich said that the mid-morning and early afternoon are always great times to be in the woods, especially as the season wanes.
“I have a lot more luck in midday in the late season, because the hens are getting scarce and going to the nest. And the gobblers are out looking that time of day,” he said. “If you catch a gobbler by himself, late in the season, odds are, you’ll be able to call that bird in.
“But you have to be patient. A lot of these birds will come in silent. You might get them to gobble coming in when the season first starts. But by now, they might gobble at you once or twice, but they won’t gobble again as they come to your setup. You might have to wait on them a little longer.”
Johnson said that, all in all, you have a better chance, percentage wise, of killing a bird that you get to gobble as the season’s end approaches than on opening day.
“You have to keep after ‘em,” he said. “You might not hear as many turkeys gobbling late in the season, but when they do, they’re coming. Also, you have to gauge the bird. It depends on the bird. Some of them will gobble their heads off, and some of them will gobble two or three times and shut up. You have to have more patience. He’s maxed-out on hunting pressure, and pressure has got them quiet.”
Reach out and touch one
The 22-pound, 5-ounce gobbler had been dead for a good two hours. I laid him on the concrete outside my garage door and went inside to get the proper equipment for turning him into Gobbler McNuggets.
When I came back out, a pool of blood had formed under the tom’s big, white head. After dropping him like a rock at 37 yards, I had counted better than two-dozen marks where shot had entered his head and neck. And he was still bleeding out. Clearly, he was graveyard dead about the time the latest “new” piece of turkey hunting gear “arrived.”
It doesn’t make any noise as the gobbler approaches, doesn’t make you harder to see in the woods, doesn’t make it easier to hear a gobbler walking – but it makes them “easier” to kill.
Tungsten Super Shot, aka TSS, is this latest wonder. It uses a tungsten alloy that weighs 18 grams per cubic centimeter, which is one-fifth higher than standard tungsten shot and 56% denser than lead. Dense shot carries its velocity out farther than standard lead of other “hevi” shots. The hard, dense pellets are round, smooth and uniform; they won’t change shape on the way to the target.
.410 shotguns with TSS are highly effective for turkeys
TSS opens up a turkey hunter’s world to loads filled with smaller pieces of shot – hundreds more in a 3-inch load. Many hunters use lead or copper-plated shot in Nos. 4, 5 and 6. But with TSS, you’re looking at 7s, 8s and 9s. The 2¾-inch, 12-gauge TSS load that turned my gobbler’s head into a bloody mess was a load of No. 9s. The pattern it threw at 40 yards was frightening; the bird’s head and neck just disappeared.
TSS loads are expensive but add dozens of yards to a 12-gauge shotgun’s effective range. And they can turn smaller gauges – 20 and .410 – into effective turkey guns. This can bring plenty of younger hunters into the game long before they’re able to shoulder a 12-gauge.
Last season, late on opening morning, my son and I set up on two birds we stumbled on, gobbling, strutting, spitting and drumming at just about every noise we made. They were, in my mind, still 5 or 6 yards too far to kill when my son touched his trigger. The closer bird collapsed like he’d been hit by lightning. He weighed 24 pounds, 12 ounces, stone dead at 54 yards.
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