Bill once told our late handgun editor, Skeeter Skelton, that his favorite hunting was for wild turkey, and he definitely knew some tricks of the trade, so to speak. This article first appeared in the September 1985 issue of Shooting Times.
--The Editors

I find it hard to recall a spring that has not found me clad in raunchy camouflage clothing, enjoying the breaking day in some wooded area known to be the home of the eastern wild turkey. It's a place usually predetermined to be fruitful through reconnaissance made the afternoon before. My pleasure is usually shared by hordes of flying, crawling, creeping, biting, and stinging insects, with mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers among the most persistent. At this time of year, my stumbling advance through dark woods alerts all these insects to form an escort to the chosen spot. Although they do not await arrival to start sampling the repast I will furnish during the day, the real attack comes only after I have settled into ambush and must remain still--and thus helpless--if I'm hopeful of succeeding.

This is typical of a spring ritual followed annually by thousands of otherwise intelligent citizens. It is but an outward manifestation of a form of insanity known as spring turkey hunting.

While turkey, like chicken, is one of the more economical meats available at your neighborhood supermarket, the cost of wild turkey--in the event you are lucky enough to convert one to table fare--can be astronomical, particularly when the price of one successful hunt is multiplied by all those forays over several years from which the hunter brought back only a succession of lame alibis.

What kind of pastime is this that makes so many hunters go fumbling about in the dark, hooting like an owl and making other strange noises hopefully resembling turkey talk? Let's take a look.

With the hunter's intelligence--or lack thereof--firmly established, what about that attribute of this big bird? Don't ask a turkey hunter! He will probably tell you his quarry is the canniest wild creature in existence. No way. With the brain the size of a pea, turkeys have intelligence to match. Consider the turkey hen that goes striding into deep water. Her chicks have no better sense than to follow her and drown.

What turkeys have going for them are unmatched eyesight and hearing and a memory that immediately recognizes a discrepancy--like the addition of any strange object, animate or inanimate--in the area they customarily range. On top of that, they have no curiosity. By way of comparison, if a deer sees something unfamiliar, he will usually stand gawking at it and wondering what it is. In the same situation, a turkey will immediately put large chunks of real estate between himself and the unfamiliar something.

So much for the things a gobbler has going for him. His achilles' heel is a universal affliction of all males in the spring. Sex rears its lovely head! Bountifully endowed by nature with both the readiness and ability to take care of a whole harem of lissome young chicks, his libido so overflows as to make him a pushover for anything that sounds like an invitation to further dalliance. Like a turkey call, for example.

Listening to the perfect notes of the top contestants in a turkey-calling contest can be discouraging to a beginning caller. Lest he lose heart, a quote from an old Louisiana duck hunting guide at the national duck calling contest is worth remembering: "Those fellers," he said, "are calling judges. I just call ducks."