What is the biggest stumbling block that hunters have to overcome to put their tag around a wild turkey’s leg?
It’s not shooting, calling or woodsmanship. They rank down the list just a bit. If you asked turkey hunters, to a man they would give the same answer: hens.
Being “henned” is a rite of passion in the spring. You are trying to hook up with a gobbler, and he seems willing, when one of his girlfriends arrives on the scene and steals his heart away.
If your chances of taking at least one or two specific gobblers aren’t washed down the toilet by the intervention of a hen turkey, you haven’t been hunting – or you’re the luckiest man alive.
That might make me a normal hunter and Jeff Dennis of Charleston one of the luckiest men alive – at least for one morning.
Dennis and I hunted a tract of private land near the Robertville community in the Lowcountry last week, guests of George Knight of Salkehatchie River Outfitters. The short version is, I got henned, and Jeff killed a 21-pound gobbler.
But that doesn’t tell the story.
Knight set us up with a couple of veteran turkey hunters, Charlie Grill of Varnville and 84-year-old Charlie Hynes of Hampton. At dawn, we were hunkered down next to the Savannah River swamp, listening for barred owls, crows and turkeys to wake up. Hearing a few gobblers sound off from the roost at well-placed intervals, then go silent, was a clue that we had already met our match – hens roosting close to the gobblers.
Later in the morning, however, Grill and I were strolling up to a soggy food plot crisscrossed by hog tracks, when a gobbler sounded off about 250 yards away in a stand of planted pines. We hoofed it about 150 yards, setting up in a stand of open, older pines, and Grill’s first cuts on a box call were answered by a resounding gobble. They were also answered by hen yelps coming from both directions, yelps that faded the closer they got to the gobbler’s pine thicket.
At 10 o’clock, we got out of there, secure in the knowledge that the old boy in the pines wasn’t going to leave when he had hens at his beck and call. Maybe, Grill reasoned, we could go eat breakfast and let him finish his, er, reproductive duties, then come back and start over.
“There’s nothing you can do with one that’s got hens with him,” Grill said. “Sometimes you can get an old hen mad enough that she comes looking for you and he follows along, but most of the time, you’ve just got to wait until the hens leave him.”
Back at 11:30, we rolled up to the spot, and Grill suggested and Hynes and Dennis start at the spot we’d finished the morning, while we struck out in the direction of new territory.
Grill’s truck hadn’t travelled 200 yards before two turkeys – probably jakes – flew up from the edge of the gravel roads. And apparently, we hadn’t gone very far before things got interesting for Hynes and Dennis.
“When you guys left, your tires kicked up some gravel, and one gobbled,” Dennis said.
It was probably not the same bird we left that morning, because the gobble came from the other side of the road, at least 200 yards deep on a high “ridge” that led down into the swamp. For Midlands and Upstate hunters, a ridge in the Lowcountry is a place a foot or two higher than the surrounding areas – often the only place that isn’t wet.
It took not quite 90 minutes for the sweet melodies of Hynes’ homemade box call to bring the turkey into range. Check that, turkeys. The gobbler didn’t show up alone; he brought company.
“They came to us in a daisy chain,” said Dennis, probably the only person alive who could describe a turkey hunt using offshore fishing lingo. “The big gobbler came first, followed by a gobbler with a shorter beard, then a third gobbler, then four jakes. They were all in a single-file line.”
Gobbling about every 10 minutes, the lead bird finally got in range and presented himself in the open, and Dennis’ 12-gauge left him graveyard dead, not even quivering.
An examination of the bird showed a 9-1/2-inch beard, spurs that pushed the 1-inch mark, and a body weight of 21 pounds.
“That’s a nice 3-year-old bird,” Grill said, pronouncing it as a “satellite” gobbler – not the biggest turkey in the woods, but a longbeard no doubt.
Grill and Hynes patiently explained that satellite gobblers are often without hens, because the dominant gobbler won’t allow them to mate. So they stroll the forest, often in groups of two or three, hoping to luck up on a single girlfriend.
Instead, this gobbler had the worst luck of all.
So what’s a hunter to do when hens become a problem?
Wait them out – on several different levels. As the season progresses, more hens will go on the nest, and more gobblers will be out on the prowl. Your chances increase dramatically when the other woman isn’t in the picture. Or on a specific day, try and wait them out. If a gobbler has hens with him on the roost, they’ll usually split up late in the morning. If you can course his travels, you might be close enough that when his hen or hens leave, you can make a call at just the right moment and bring him jogging in, looking for a “nooner.”
Setting up at dawn between the gobbler and his hens is a possibility, but you take the chance of him detecting your presence, and you have to know exactly where all parties are spending the night. My best hunting buddy killed a nice gobbler the second week of the 2009 season after spending 10 days in total frustration. By accident, when he sat down in the dark one morning, he was dead in between the gobblers and the hens. There was yelping and gobbling all around, and when the interested parties hit the ground, he was still between them and able to point out a fatal mistake to a big longbeard.
The third solution? Yelp or cut aggressively at the hens, hoping to draw one into an argument. If you involve an old hen, there is a chance that she’ll head in your direction to seek out and teach a lesson to the shameless hussy who threatens to steal her boyfriend. If the boyfriend comes along for the ride, so much the better.
My son’s first turkey came that way, one of three longbeards marching in single file behind a hen who strolled across a broomstraw field, ostensibly to beat up our decoy. About the time she shoved out her breast and knocked the decoy down, my son’s 20-gauge double-barrel barked, followed by my 12-gauge, and two of the gobblers were flopping on the ground.
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