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ALTITUDE - Features
Open-Terrain Turkeys
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Into the great wide open,
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open
A rebel without a clue
—Tom Petty
Sometimes you have to drop down to them. Sometimes you have to climb up. Other times they make you go sideways, or plunk your butt down on your seat cushion and sit tight.
Clueless or not, with open-terrain turkeys, sometimes you have to defy the conventional way of doing things.
Drop Down
Thunder. Lightning. Gloom of day. Snow. This Wyoming hunt had everything but a spring gobbler by the feet. We were so high up I was pretty sure that was Montana in the distance.
The booming sound produced by rapidly expanding air along the path of the electrical discharge of lightning helped find some of the birds as they shock gobbled across the big expanse. That’s the kind of locator call that can’t be carried in your vest pocket. The coyote howler I pulled out after that confirmed a gobbler well below us, but in striking distance.
To get to the nearest one, we’d have to navigate down the mountain, pussyfooting over elk tracks in the snow, and sliding on mud that caked to our boot bottoms. Forget that it had taken us a chunk of time to scale to the top. Truck. ATV. Hiking with a pump gun slung over my shoulder.
Now we were going back down.
Guides, if anything, usually know the land you hunt way better than you do. Trust them. The long and winding trip under more rumbling, bright flashes and strangely falling snowflakes put us on a game trail.
We both plunked down the way kids do just before they’re caught doing something wrong, and took a breath or two. My guide called. I followed. The gobbler around the next knob on the hillside hammered back.
I’ll never forget the sight of the drop-down Merriam’s longbeard mincing steps around the corner to the front of my gun barrel.
Rise Up
It was a different year in a different Wyoming location. There had to be fifty turkeys all around us if there was one. A third of them were gobbling. I had my gobbler tagged before I even started calling.
That was my first mistake. Sometimes you nail that roost, and then the turkeys leave you waiting. If there’s limited cover and open areas for them to safely cover, they tend to have the upper hand and you have to let them walk.
We let them walk.
We’d found them roosting at the bottom of a mountain, above a chattering creek. According to the map, a meadow sat at the top, framed by steep sided cliffs. Well you can guess where this is going. That’s where they wanted to be.
Maybe an hour had passed, I don’t know. What I do remember is that the skinny game trails climbing up to the meadow seemed at once the ticket to tagging a Merriam’s and the sure effort to come.
Like a lot of you, earning it the hard way is a lot of fun at times. If you hike, mountain bike and enjoy that sort of thing, chances are, at times like these, you think: Bring it on.
That’s what I thought too.
Cresting the top, it got real interesting real fast. We busted turkeys, which ran in all directions. We called a longbeard back, but he wouldn’t come out of the woods. We eased along, saw more turkeys running. We set up, and let things settle down, and a gobbler hammered over the side. We shut up. I repositioned on the bird, easing my head up to see him strutting on a bench like a golf course putting green jutting out from the steep cliff.
When he turned his fan my way, I got the gun up. When he faced me again, it was lights out.
That was when, dead or not, he had the last laugh: tumbling, rolling and bouncing all the way down the mountain. I earned that one brother.
Going Sideways
South Dakota. Open expanses all around and precious little prairie cover. You knew where they were roosted, but when they hit the ground, they kept on going and going: ants milling around on the horizon.
I wasn’t sure if some gobblers were coming our way or if we were catching up to the ones that had roosted nearby, but it was pretty clear we’d be going sideways for much of this hunt. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, moving through cover, calling to locate, setting up, waiting, and moving some more.
On an all-day hunt, anything can happen in that big prairie country. Sometimes you can go for hours then wrap it up in a few minutes.
I saw the hen leading him in before the full fan behind her appeared. She had come, I suspected, to the recent calling clinic my buddy and I had offered the valley. We clucked, cutt and yelped—half of it out of desperation and half of it because we both liked to call.
At least one hen couldn’t resist, and the longbeard with her acted like a lot of you guys do at the local mall while your girl checks things out. He shadowed her.
Minutes later, walking out with my bird shouldered, I caught a glimpse of red on the rise ahead of us. I dropped my gobbler, my vest, grabbed a call, and yelped, my buddy mounting his gun while standing. In ran a bunch of jakes, then a trailing gobbler, long of beard and shorter on lifespan given the shot that followed.
Staying Put
Sometimes with these open-terrain turkeys it just pays to sit tight, stay put and call. They move so much sometimes it’s only a matter of waiting for them to pull within earshot of your calling.
Texas Rios on big ranches can be like that. They fly down, and clearly have destinations in mind. Maybe it’s a feeding station (legal in the Lone Star State). Maybe it’s a watering hole. Maybe they just like to put on foot miles.
I’ve pinned down Texas turkey roosts and gotten so tight sometimes that the satisfying plop of turkey droppings nearby told me I’d found the location right in the dark. But that’s when you have to make a decision. Which way will they go?
Sometimes it’s your way, as they will occasionally stay in the available cover as they move within big open expanses. Move, and they see you coming. Sit tight and they might come your way.
Even if they drift you might luck out.
Once on a west Texas ranch my buddy and I listened as hens yelped and gobblers sounded off in an oak mott across from us. In big country, these roosts are easily recognizable. The racket from them is unmistakable. When the birds fly down and drift off, the silence is deafening.
Unlike the rise-up Wyoming situation I mentioned, Texas can be pretty flat. Sitting tight and moving inside cover is sometimes the way to go, even if the stuff at your feet and under your backside can prick, stick or bite you.
Though the big wad of turkeys was clearly moving off, I just had a hunch some others would linger and lurk. Subordinate gobblers are like that sometimes, and there are surely plenty of them in Texas.
When I touched the slate again after a little silence from our position, two of them ripped back from the far treeline. Then they ran to our position, looking, gobbling, either thinking they were late for the parade or that they’d found some new action in town.
We greeted them the way any of you would: with a two-gun salute.
Lost Yelping in Open Terrain |
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Lost yelps are louder and longer in duration than plain yelps. They can prove to be a killer call on spring turkey hunts in open terrain.
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