I love turkey hunting, and I especially love turkey hunting in the morning. There’s something beautiful and peaceful about being in nature and listening to the woods wake up around you. At least it’s peaceful momentarily, until you hear the sound off in the distance you woke up so early to hear. Then the peace turns into adrenaline and excitement; as you listen intently to try to figure out what tree that sound came from, and how far away the sound came from.
There’s something about a turkey gobble that makes both the first time turkey hunter’s neck hair stand straight up, and the experienced turkey hunters heart rate increase dramatically, even though they’ve heard over a thousand gobbles in their life. Maybe because the sound is so distinct and different than any other bird, or maybe it’s the fact that knowing a gobbler is in the area just amps up the hunt so much more. Who knows, but what I do know is if I take someone turkey hunting for the first time, and they don’t get excited about hearing a roosted tom gobble his face off, then I’m going to think something is wrong with that person.
There is a lot of excitement in playing cat and mouse with a roosted gobbler, and trying to get him to fly down in your direction so you can get an opportunity to drop the hammer on him before he finds a hen to follow around for a few hours and completely ignore your calls. Once that tom starts heading in a direction away from you with his hens, then it’s usually a couple hour waiting game until he breaks off from the hens and you could have another opportunity in the late morning or middle of the day.
OR, you could take that waiting game out of the equation. For all the reasons I mentioned above, I love hunting turkeys early in the morning off the roost, BUT I also love sleeping in after waking up at 4am day after day in hopes that one time that gobbler flies down from his roost in my direction. When it comes down to mathematics, there’s only a small percentage chance that he will fly down right at you. Even if he hears your calling and is interested, if he catches a hen fly down before him, he will most likely follow her. If he’s been educated by you or other hunters before, he might fly away from your calls. Or he might fly down in the same direction every single morning no matter what the chatter is like around him. Lastly, if you don’t know exactly where he is roosted, you might get too close to his roosting tree and spook him trying to sneak in early in the morning (I’ve been guilty of that one numerous times.) At the end of the day, there are so many variables when it comes to trying to kill a turkey first thing in the morning, sometimes it’s best to skip the first couple hours of the morning altogether to increase your odds.
I notched my Michigan turkey tag on this beautiful gobbler last spring. Time of kill: 12:42 pm. He came sprinting into my decoys after I hit my slate call one time.
My advice to all the turkey hunters out there that are having a hard time killing birds in the early morning is simple: SLEEP IN. Sleep in, have a coffee and some breakfast, and hit the woods around 10 am and see if you can trick a tom in the middle of the day. The truth is, most gobblers are a lot more susceptible to calls in the late morning and middle of the day. Usually a tom will get with a hen or a few hens first thing in the morning, and spend a few hours following them around and showing himself off in full strut. Two things will happen, either he’ll end up breeding a hen, or they’ll make it clear they want nothing to do with him. Either of those outcomes will leave the tom by himself after he breeds a hen or she kicks him to the curb, and a lonely tom is just like a lonely single dude at a bar; desperate for love and highly likely to make stupid decisions to find it.
When a tom is on the prowl and looking for another hen, that is your best chance to entice him with your hen call and decoys, and usually by the late morning hours he’s all alone looking for another mate. A tom with hens might note your presence and check on you later, or he might avoid you altogether if he’s already with his ladies. A tom by himself though will be very interested in checking out the hen you’re pretending to be, and sometimes approach very aggressively if he’s already been shut down earlier that morning because he has one thing and one thing only on his mind; breeding any hen that will let him. I like a jake-hen decoy setup, it has worked well for me in the past because the last thing a tom wants to see is an adolescent male stealing away a hen that is ready to breed. However, sometimes these midday toms are so fired up and ready to breed that you don’t even need decoys to get the job done. Any sound of a hen will get them running in your direction without a thought and they’ll be in your lap before you know it.
Talk to any experienced turkey hunter, and more often than not they will tell you that they’ve killed most of their birds in the later hours of the morning, not right off the roost. Yes, listening to the woods wake up as the gobbles echo throughout the timber is one of the best parts of turkey hunting, but the BEST part about turkey hunting is notching your turkey tag on a big old gobbler that you fooled and called right into your lap. Not saying it won’t be challenging to kill a tom midday, but the chances of him making a mistake are much higher when he’s alone and looking for love.
I think we can all agree that those 4am alarm clocks sometimes go off a little too early, and 8 hours of sleep feels a hell of a lot better than 5 hours of sleep. Do yourself a favor this weekend, or the next day you hit the turkey woods; sleep in, have a coffee and some breakfast, take your time getting out into the woods, and drop the hammer on that tom you’ve been trying to kill off the roost the past couple weeks.
-Steve Crawford