One of the most difficult scenarios a turkey hunter faces is dealing with a vocal, henned-up tom. You know the type. He gobbles at your every call from his roost or on the ground, but he doesn’t close the gap, because the hens are leading him around like he’s on a leash. Understandably, he excites you with his gobbles, but he’s telling your bogus hen to come to him. You can’t do that, so you keep trying to change his mind, even though you know down deep he has no intention of coming to you any time soon.
My advice is to back off and let him have his fun — for the time being at least.
A few hours sometimes makes all the difference. For instance, if breeding season is well under way, chances are that any hen, or hens, the tom was with early in the morning will be visiting their nests by midday, and he may be quite lonely by then. I’ve had success many times in the afternoon for that very reason.
Or, while you were elsewhere, the flock may have been scattered in some other way. Perhaps the turkeys encountered a predator like a bobcat or coyote. Maybe something else upset their routine. It doesn’t matter how they got separated. What’s important is that you’re back to take advantage of the situation when it counts.
Here’s how
Here are a couple of examples of what can happen on back-off-and-come-back-later hunts.
One year, in early spring, my son, Mark, and I watched four toms follow several hens away from their roost site in a small stand of pine trees. The gobblers were plenty vocal, but they weren’t about to turn around and join us. Smartly, we decided to back off for a while and look for some other turkeys that were willing to play.
Failing in that endeavor, we returned to the roost site two hours later and relocated the gang with a shock call. They were on the hillside below us, a couple hundred yards away. Moving closer, we set up just in time to hear a brief gobbler fight. When the scuffle subsided, we produced some tentative box call yelps, and one of the longbeards — loser or winner, we didn’t know — came to us at a beard-swinging trot. Mark was only too happy to carry the big fellow back to our pickup. I realize luck had a lot to do with our timing that day, but with turkeys, I’ll take all the help I can get. Read on…..