The first gobble on the first morning of Spring Turkey season, for a hunter, is a sound as sweet as the cork popping off a vintage bottle of champagne or the crack of a baseball leaving the bat for a walk off homerun for the home team.
That gobble will come next Saturday, and turkey hunters are gearing up for what they hope will be a bountiful season.
“You can’t predict the kind of harvest hunters will have, but the bird population seems to be doing well across the state,” said Bekah Nelson, public information coordinator for the Northwest Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission. “We offer 24 water management areas that lays out where people can hunt if they don’t have a place and there’s a map on our website (www.myfwc.com).”
Turkey hunters, particularly those who eschew deer hunting as being amateurish, are a different breed though. It is certainly a different kind of hunt if practiced in the traditional style of stalking and locating and finally luring in a heated up gobbler.
A deer hunter, and this is in very general terms, gets up well before sunrise and heads out just like a turkey hunter. But most are destined for stands of some sort set up near food plots and/or bait, and many are headed for fairly comfortable stands designed to offer nearly complete cover and comfort for hours, complete with padded chairs and windows.
The deer hunter sits and waits and stays quiet and checks his or her phone and maybe plays some games, hopeful a deer will venture into sight and shooting range on the food plot that has been so thoroughly tended to for months.
Often times the hunter will wear camo pants not because they have to – no beast could see into the stand or see anything below the hunter’s chest — but because it seems like the thing to do when hunting. They could just as well be wearing jeans or clown pants.
Turkey hunting, though, is different. While hunter can take advantage, and many do, of stable ground blinds, the turkey hunters looking for the real challenge venture out with, at best, a portable cloth-and-stick makeshift blind that might stand 18 inches high and provide cover for the boots of a hunter on the ground.
The turkey hunter will be in full camo garb, turkeys have keen eyesight and you are on the ground, with no exposed skin. If skin is exposed the turkey will likely see it, or worse, the mosquitoes will find it. He will be equipped with several different ways of calling the birds, from a turkey box to a mouthpiece to a slate friction call.
As the sun cracks, if a gobble isn’t heard, a light hen peck might be issued and if things carry on too long with no action he might bust out a crow call and try to get a “shock” gobble.
But a prepared turkey hunter has a general idea where the turkeys roost – turkeys sleep in trees, preferably over water — and can generally expect to be close enough that he will hear a gobble without doing anything. Having worked his way back against a nice pine or oak, seated and armed and still, the sound of that morning gobble will seemingly double the heart rate.
The hunter likely will be on the move, trying to find a place to next set up that will put him in the path of that bird or near enough to get its attention. He likely will move more than once, this is not a passive hunt.
There’s much debate about how to properly call in a gobbler looking for a hen, but the point is that it’s not easy and when you’ve tricked a nice gobbler into strutting within shooting range, generally 45 yards or less for a shotgun, you’ve earned it.
Because turkey hunting involves stealth on the move, as opposed to deer hunting where hunters generally stick to one spot, Nelson and the FWC reminder hunters to be particularly careful this time of year in the woods.
“Just always positively identify our target before pulling the trigger, that’s the biggest thing,” she said. “You can have multiple people out there hunting turkeys and some of these people are so good at the calling that you can’t tell if it’s the real thing or a sound made by another hunter, so you have to positively identify it. You can just shoot at sounds.”
Nelson also said hunters should be prepared to repel mosquitoes and should think about snake boots as protection against rattlesnakes. “Before you look before you step, and definitely before you sit down,” she said.