Foul Weather Turkey Hunting

Foul Weather Turkey Hunting by TR Michels
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Even though the first day of the spring turkey hunt was cloudy, and a cold wind was blowing, I headed for the soybean field where I had seen a flock of turkeys appear just after daylight for the last two weeks. I was fairly sure the birds wouldn’t show up because of the weather. Just to be on the safe side I drove to the field forty-five minutes before daylight. I parked on the road, got out of the suburban, and owl hooted loudly. When I didn’t get an answer I hooted again. Still no answer. I waited several minutes as the sky grew lighter and then blew a flydown cackle. No answer. The birds were either not there or not talking.

Luckily, I had been researching this particular flock for more than two years and I had a good idea of where I could find at least two of the fourteen jakes and toms in the area. I got back in the Suburban and drove to a small bean field that was protected from north and east winds by the surrounding woods. By the time I got there the sky was already turning gray, so I grabbed my bag of turkey decoys and quickly made my way to the edge of the woods on the west side of the small field. When I reached the gully that ran into the field from the north I put out two hen decoys and two tom decoys, one in a semi-strut the other in a full strut.

I chose a large tree at the edge of the woods, checked to make sure I had a clear line of sight, sat down, and yelped softly on my box call. With the wind blowing I wasn’t sure if I could hear the birds, or if they could hear me. I called intermittently for the next fifteen minutes without getting a response. Then I heard a double gobble. I called one more time and waited. I knew the birds were calling because they kept gobbling every two to three minutes, and each time the sound was closer. A half an hour after I set up two long bearded toms walked down the gully, into the field and approached the decoys. If I had been hunting the birds would have offered an easy shot at fifteen yards.

Research

As a guide, writer and seminar speaker it’s my job to know when and where to find game animals on a regular basis. After hunting for more than thirty years I have learned a bit about animals. Reading magazine articles and attending seminars helped me a lot at first. Then I began to talk to researchers and biologists throughout the United States. After reading several of their research papers I realized there was much more to learn. So, I decided to begin doing my own research.

Like most hunters I have had days when I felt I had chosen the right day, the right spot, and the right time to hunt, and still didn’t see anything. I was fairly sure the weather had a lot to do with game movement because of some of the research I had read. I knew that turkeys often roosted on the downwind side of a hill to get out of cold winds, and from my own experience I knew that they often flew down later than normal on cloudy days. But, I wasn’t sure when or where the birds moved when the conditions weren’t right.

That’s when I began watching the flock of thirty-four birds that were about a half-mile from my house. For two years I watched, listened and learned the movement of the birds. From the middle of March to late May I would go out in the evening to find out where the birds roosted. The next morning I would arrive an hour before daybreak. In a notebook I wrote down the date, temperature, wind speed, wind-chill, sky conditions and precipitation. Then I recorded the time and number of all the gobbles, any other calls the birds made, how many hens, toms and jakes I saw, what they did and when they did it, how long they did it and where they went from sunrise to as late as 1:30 PM. What I learned has allowed me to see more birds, find the birds on a regular basis, and get closer to them.

My studies show that several different meteorological conditions affect when and where turkeys move on a daily basis. These conditions include; the temperature or wind-chill, whichever is lower, the wind speed, amount and type of precipitation, and the cloud cover. The first thing I noticed during my study was that the birds generally started gobbling about forty-five minutes before sunrise, and that most gobbling occurred from forty-five minutes before to forty-five minutes after sunrise. They generally flew down from five to thirty minutes before sunrise. When the sky was cloudy the birds usually called ten to twenty minutes later than when the sky was clear, and flew down later than normal. When the temperature or wind-chill was below 34 degrees there was very little gobbling, and the birds often waited until the temperature warmed later in the day before actively gobbling.

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