Fall was the original turkey season. We eat turkey at Thanksgiving
, not Easter, yet the generation of hunters that came of age during the bird’s “great comeback” sees turkey hunting as a spring-only pursuit. Although many turkey hunters have never tried it, they’ll tell you the fall hunt is boring (“Turkey hunting is all about the gobble”) or wrong (“I’d never kill a hen”).
They’re missing out. Half a dozen lost turkeys converging on you from six different directions gets your heart going every bit as fast as a spring gobbler at 30 steps does. Shooting a hen is no more wrong than shooting an antlerless deer, and after you’ve had a 10-pound hen or even a 6-pound poult roasted whole for Thanksgiving, a Butterball will never satisfy you again. If you’re determined to shoot gobblers only, they’re out there in the fall, by the flock.
You already own the gear you need. You just have to adjust your attitude and learn a couple of new skills. Certainly there are plenty of turkeys out there for you to chase. If you complained about gobblers being henned up all spring, here’s your chance to do something about it by improving the local tom-to-hen ratio.
Fall Turkey Hunting Tactics
Bagging a fall bird is not as easy as getting a gobbler fired up, like you would in spring. Here are the best ways to get your turkey in the autumn season.
1. Pick Off a Loner
If you spot a turkey off by itself, get ahead of it. Set up and make soft purrs and clucks. It may come looking for company.
2. Scatter and Recall
This classic fall turkey tactic is also the most fun. You sneak close–almost within gun range–of a flock of hens and poults, then take your shells out of your gun and rush the birds, screaming, waving your arms, and trying to scatter turkeys in all directions. A good break is crucial. If the birds see you and run off together, all you’ve accomplished is scaring them away. But if they fly away, usually they fan out enough that you can go 100 to 200 yards in the direction they flew and set up. The perfect break, though, sends turkeys to all points of the compass.
The best flock busters are turkey dogs, where legal. They can cover more ground, smell out turkeys, and scatter flocks better than humans can. Sit down at the scatter point, wait a few minutes to let the woods settle, then start calling. Soon turkeys will surround you, calling to one another as they regroup. Chime in with kee kees and/or lost yelps of your own. You could have birds in range within 10 to 15 minutes.
3. Get Under a Roost
Once you locate a roost, you can sneak in and set up in the dark the next morning, as you would in spring. In one hour under a fall roost, you will hear more different turkey sounds than you will throughout an entire spring season, including gobbles. You may find 50 to 60 birds roosted together. When that many turkeys fly down, there’s a lot of calling back and forth as they sort themselves out to start the day. Yelp and cluck quietly. A decoy might help here, but it’s not essential.
4. Challenge a Flock
Turkeys are usually curious about new birds and how they fit into the pecking order. Walk along logging roads and ridgetops, near field edges, or where your scouting leads you to believe that turkeys are within earshot and call, yelping and cutting. Have a flock patterned? Set up between the roost and their breakfast, put out a hen decoy, and yelp occasionally. When you get an answer, call back with an aggressive response. Do it right and the whole flock will come running, ready to rumble.
5. Provoke a Gobbler
To call a fall gobbler, you have to sound like one. Use gobbler yelps to strike a bird. When you get a reply, come back with feisty yelps and angry purrs. Catch birds in the right mood, and they will treat you to a strutting and gobbling show that matches a spring hunt.
Turkey Calling Choices
Turkeys speak the same language in fall as they do in spring. The difference is, in fall you make female sounds to female turkeys and male sounds to male turkeys. Have these calls in your autumn repertoire:
1. Kee Kee Run
Kee kees are the go-to call after you break up a flock of hens and poults. They can also work as a locator. The kee kee is the sound a poult makes because it’s too young to “break” a yelp. It’s a high-pitched whistle that sounds like hurry, hurry, hurry or boy, boy, boy. To make the sound on a mouth call, simply draw out the high-pitched first half of the yelp. A yelp is kee-yoke. You’re just doing the kee part three or four times. Now and then, mix the kee kees with yelps.
2. Lost Yelp
A lost hen makes a series of as many as 10 to 15 plaintive yelps. This call works as a locator for flocks of hens and mixed flocks of hens and poults.
3. Gobbler Yelp
Gobblers make a low, hoarse yelp, delivered at a slow cadence. Often, gobblers will yelp just a couple of times rather than make longer runs. Use two to three yelps and occasionally add an aggressive purr as if you’re looking for a fight.
4. Gobble
If you’re having a hard time getting a tom to respond, try using a gobble to challenge a dominant bird or a flock of gobblers to charge in for a fight.
Fall Scouting Locations
Without wound-up gobblers sounding off, locating turkeys is a lot harder than in spring. Here’s the primer for how to find fall birds.
Turkeys are flocked up in fall, but not always in the same place you saw them in spring. Some fall flocks can be patterned to the minute; others are maddeningly random. Still, if you know where they roost and where they eat, you can figure out where they’re going to be throughout the day.
In the fall, adult gobblers patch up their breeding-season differences and band together, sometimes in flocks of a dozen or more. You’ll see hens and poults in groups as small as five or six or as large as 60. Here’s where to find them:
1. Open Areas
Until the first hard frosts of the year, turkeys feed on leafy browse and all the grasshoppers they can catch in fields of longer grasses. Seek out turkeys in pastures, too. An overturned cow pie is a sure sign the birds have been there; they’ll pick the corn out, then flip the patty to expose insects underneath. After the harvest, glass for turkeys in fields of corn, wheat, and beans.
2. Wooded Areas
As mast drops, look for V-shaped scratchings in the leaves as well as tracks and droppings in oak flats. A turkey-size depression in loose dirt indicates a dust bath, and if you see lots of feathers and droppings around, birds are probably using it regularly at midday.
3. Roosts
Turkeys will change roosts during the fall, depending on where they’re finding food. A roost tree may hold whole flocks, resulting in droppings and feathers piled barnyard-deep around the trunk. You can also pin down a roost as you would in spring, by sitting on a high spot on a calm evening and listening for the sound of big wings lifting heavy bodies into the air.
Fall Turkey Hunting Gear
What you use in spring will work in autumn. But if you’re looking to update or add to your turkey gear, here’s what to get:
1. Ammo
You don’t need as heavy a load in fall as you do in spring. If you’re shooting hens or poults, 1 ¾ ounces of size 6 shot is sufficient because the vitals are slightly smaller and the bones are not as tough.
2. Gun
You can hunt with your 12-gauge–I do–or a smaller gun. Most fall turkeys are less than half the size of a mature gobbler. A youth-model 20-gauge like the Remington Model 870 Express
or the Mossberg 500 Super Bantam Pump-Action Turkey
is enough gun and easier to tote through the woods than a 12-gauge. Shots are usually closer in fall, but stick with a supertight choke, as you may have to shoot one bird out of a bunch without hitting any others with stray pellets. Try the Winchester Supreme High Velocity Turkey 3-Inch Shotshells
.
3. Vest
The Red Head Bucklick Creek High-Back Turkey Lounger
strap vest with a built-in chair lets you sit anywhere in comfort, but it folds up for running and gunning.
4. Boots
Snakes or no snakes, Cabela’s Gore-Tex Cordura Snake Boots are wonderful turkey hunting boots: comfortable, supportive, and tall enough for you to wade small streams.
5. Binoculars
Light, compact, and with rubber armor coating, good glasses like the Zeiss Conquest 8×32
are fall essentials. Quality optics help you spot birds in fields and distinguish hens from gobblers.
6. Decoy
The Flambeau Masters Series Upright Hen
roll-up decoy weighs nothing in your gamebag and looks like a real hen. Put out one to represent a lost turkey, or a few to resemble birds regrouping after a scatter.
7. Calls
The following are especially well suited for the autumn season:
• **Lynch World Champion Box Call
.** This old favorite double-sided box makes hen yelps on one side, gobbler yelps on the other.
• **Quaker Boy Screamin’ Green World Champ
.** The best mouth call for fall gobblers is a three- or four-reed diaphragm that’s loosened up with age and use.The World Champ has four medium-thick reeds, great for making low-pitched gobbler yelps.
.** With two thin reeds, this diaphragm creates high-pitched whistles with ease.
Four More Fall Turkey Tricks
Turkey hunting in the fall isn’t just about sprinting into the midst of a bunch of young birds, screaming to scatter them to all points of the compass, and calling in the stragglers. There are other ways to raise your heart rate in the fall woods. Call in a flock of hens and poults and feel the adrenaline jolt that accompanies the racket of 20 pairs of large, scaly feet stampeding through the leaves. Provoke a gobbler, and he might treat you to a strutting display every bit as intense as any you saw last April.
What’s the difference between spring and fall hunting? Adult turkeys aren’t much interested in the opposite sex come autumn, but they’re keenly interested in turkeys of the same sex. (No, not that way.) Hens are always curious to see where the new girl fits into the local pecking order, and gobblers are often eager to chase off a rival. Young birds want to find each other, or their hens. Turkeys are vocal and gregarious and respond to calls year-round. Here are four ways to hunt fall turkeys without scattering them first.
1. Infiltrate a Roost
Like spring hunts, fall outings often begin in the dark. Get into the woods early and set up close to a roost full of hens, jakes, and jennies. At first light those turkeys hit the ground as a disorganized mob; sometimes it takes almost an hour for a big bunch to shake itself into order. Play the part of one more turkey looking for its flock by imitating the calls you hear, which could include sleepy clucks, yelps, angry cackles, kee kee whistles, and even jake gobbles.
2. Find a Flock
After fly-down time, walk quietly, looking, listening, and occasionally yelping. If you don’t strike birds in your travels, you may hear them walking. Turkeys make even more noise plodding through the fall leaves than we do. If you hunt near a reservoir, a good method of spotting turkeys is to cruise the shoreline in a boat, watching for birds in the strip of land between woods and water. Once you locate turkeys, ease ahead of their direction of travel and begin yelping. When birds answer aggressively, mimic their calls. Be insistent; aggravate them sufficiently, and they’ll come bustling in to run you off. If the birds aren’t in a fighting mood, be patient and call softly as they feed their way toward you.
3. Lay an Ambush
While scouting, you may have found a travel route or feeding area that turkeys use on a regular basis. Get there before they do and put out decoys. If you’re hunting smaller groups of turkeys, put out one or two hens and a standing jake. In situations where many flocks congregate (as, say, in Midwestern cornfields late in the season), set up a rival crowd. A couple of half-strut jakes and five or six hens make a statement: This field isn’t big enough for all of us.
4. Goad a Gobbler
Most people kill hens and young birds in the fall because they hunt where the hens are and make hen sounds. To tag October longbeards, you have to target them specifically. Like mature whitetails, gobblers sleep, travel, and feed apart from the women and kids. Look for big tracks and J-shaped droppings, then set up shop as the new gobbler in the woods. Make low, drawn-out yelps with a slower rhythm, or try a fighting purr. You may bring the flock in, strutting, gobbling, and ready to fight with you. Don’t worry. The only beating you’re going to get is the fast thump of your heart against your ribs.
