00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast. I'm your host Tony Peterson, and it's Turkey Week here at mediater so I'm talking long beards today, but more specifically, just how to hunt this spring, whether you're dealing with beach weather or conditions. It'll make you want to stay home. All right. It's the first day of Turkey Week here at meat Eater, and if you're on social media at all, you're going to hear about it a whole bunch. You'll probably also see that First Light has a new Turkey kid out in a pattern called dark Water that is pretty dang sweet. If you're the kind of person who likes to put his back to a tree and yelp your heart out. You'll also probably hear that we are running a Turkey Week sweepstakes where you can win a Texas turkey hunt in the spring of twenty twenty seven. For three people. Now, if you've never hunted rios, trust me, this is going to be a fun one. They are beautiful birds. They gobble their heads off all day. You can be a hell of a lot more fun than Easterns. If you win, you'll get a prize pack worth over thirteen grand, which includes a hell of a lot of killer hunting gear. Well how do you win? Head on over to the medieater dot com and just buy something. The more you spend, the more entries get dumped into the bucket, and someone is going to win, So why not you? All Right, Now that that's out of the way, it's time to talk turkeys. This is a show I've been thinking about for a while because I realized how much you know the different conditions and weather shape my approach to turkey hunting, kind of like how different conditions and weather shape my approach to all hunting and fishing. And just like all hunting and fishing, instead of using weather as an excuse to not go, learning how to use it to your advantage is a better option because then you get to go turkey hunting, which is better. And whatever you do when you're not turkey hunting, So listen, up, because here we go. Let's kick this one off by doing a little thought experiment. When I say, think about deer hunting this fall, what is the first thought that comes into your mind? Is it something that involves being in a stand or a blind during the peak of the rut? Did your mind sort of instantly go to the best scenario with deer hunting, you know, the time you just love the best. How's the weather in that scenario? Probably nice and cold and crispy, and just the kind of thing to get the bucks really moving. Now, let's try the same thought experiment with spring turkey hunting. Just think about it for a second. Think about your hunt this upcoming spring. My guess is you pretty quickly put yourself in a blind in a spot you love, or maybe you're back to a tree somewhere and the birds are gobbling, it's greening up, and let me guess, the sun is shining and the wind isn't blowing too hard, and it's as good of a day to hunt turkeys as it would be to go sightfish some bedding large mouth. But what happens when we actually go hunting. I'm convinced that at least half of the time I head to the field or out on the water, the most challenging thing I'll face is the weather. This would be a good time to insert some saying about how the weather here in Minnesota is unpredictable as it gets, but that's just pure silliness. Everywhere you go, the locals say the same thing about their weather, except for maybe anyone living close to the equator. The rest of us Vitamin D deficient pale hairless monkeys deal with unpredictable weather all the time, which means we are very likely to deal with that during turkey season. And just like with deer, the turkeys just do their thing no matter what the weather is doing. And if we understand how to work with that, we can kill long beards no matter what Mother Nature gives us. Now, I know we all want those bluebird skies and those calm winds and all the beautiful sunlight waking up the world and getting the food chain in motion, both by feeding tiny, weightless packets of energy to plants but also raising the air temperature enough to get the insect life really going. But we often don't get that. If you have a long turkey season and enough time to get out there, you probably don't worry about this much. You can pick and choose your dates and use the forecast to tell you when to hunt. But a lot of us have schedules that just don't allow for that. And if you have, you know, kids that are in a stupid amount of activities, you might only have a weekend or two to put them on a bird let alone yourself. Plus, it's hard to argue against the benefit of sitting in the woods trying to call in a tom versus not sitting in the woods and not trying to call in a tom. So what can you do when the forecast calls for something less stellar than you'd like? Well, adapt use it to your advantage. Let's start with a for sure weather condition you will get if you have a turkey hunt enough wind wind sucks for almost every outdoor pursuit. I probably mind it the least while deer hunting because it does give me some real advantages there, and I probably hate it the most while fishing for obvious reasons. In between those two is high winds wild turkey hunting. Way back when I was in high school, a buddy and I pulled into a parking area on a chunk of public land in northern Missouri, well before first light. Now, as soon as I got out of his truck, I heard the hissing sound of air going from where you wanted in a tire to where you don't, which is no longer in the tire. We had a quick conversation and realized that since you could only hunt till one PM, we'd changed the tire when we got back, so we split up and we headed out with the wind absolutely whipping across the land. I didn't do this on purpose, but I ended up dropping into a valley and sneaking along in a low spot where the wind wasn't quite as obnoxious, and as gray light started to permeate the world around me, I stopped next to a hillside that sort of banked off the valley I was in, and then I looked up into the trees and realized two things. The first was that I was very close to a hell of a lot of roosted turkeys, and the second was that it was damn near dead still where I was, despite being able to hear the wind roaring over the hill above me. I'm sure I've put my ass on the ground faster while hunting, but I don't remember, when I do remember a tense ten sit there waiting for those birds to start hitting the ground, and the absolute rush of walking up on a public land bird with a big old rope beard and the longest spurs I had ever seen on a tom Those birds weren't roosted there by accident, And it would take quite a few fall turkey hunts back in Minnesota to get me to realize just how much wind plays a role in where they roost. To figure this out, where you hunt, take into account the wind direction, and then imagine what you'd have to do in order to sleep in a tree but not constantly be hammered by the blowing air. Turkeys are masters of knowing where these spots are, and if the wind is set to blow all night, they will roost in a place that's advantageous for them. But you might not have that spot on your hunting ground, and what if it's supposed to be windy all day. Let me put it this way, turkeys are not curious. They are cagey, and this is because a hell of a lot of stuff tries to eat them all throughout their lives. In addition to the fact that for several weeks each spring, we try to shoot them in their faces. They don't seem to handle a lot of unpredictable movement in the woods well, which is what the wind causes. They also don't seem to like not being able to hear a whole lot either. Duh. Now, you might think, well, that's the same as deer, but it's not. An animal that uses its nose as its primary defense against predators is an animal that is far more comfortable in the wind than one that doesn't, and turkeys don't. The hard part about this is that turkeys in windy weather aren't super likely to call much. You know they're gonna sound off on the roosts, but often when they hit the ground, they'll go where it's calm and they won't say much. This makes running and gunning really tough, because if you're not in the red zone, the odds of getting a response are low, and you're very likely to have to work with several birds, even during the mid or late season when they should be more scattered than not. Turkey hunting in the wind is a game of patience, and it requires you to identify the spots that would allow them to have some respite from it and then get in there and hope your instincts are correct. Now, you certainly will see birds out in fields that are just doing their thing, but generally they'll be tucked in on a field edge or somewhere that offers some protection if they can get it. No matter what, if you hunt when it's really blowing, pay attention to where you see birds because their response to those conditions today is very likely to mirror their response to those conditions in the future. High winds aren't much fun to hunt it until you figure out how to work with them, which is pretty much the same thing as hunting in the rain. I have a complex relationship with turkey hunting in the rain. Then I'm almost ashamed to admit, but I will anyway. It's almost like cheating to turkey hunting the rain. But there's nothing that looks worse in photos and videos than a wet gobbler. I know, I know, I literally have influencer in my job title. This doesn't make me feel great, but the truth is, if you don't turn everything you love into a job like a total moron, you can just go turkey hunt in the rain and live with the consequences and on this front, I view turkey behavior and dear behavior almost exactly the same. It's missing out. Oh good, get out there and fill your tag. Raining lightly, Oh good, get out there and fill your tag downpouring so hard you can hear them building an arc somewhere in the distance. Oh good. Stay home and have a cup of coffee and chill out, and plan to get out there before the rain lets up, so you can be there when the animals feel that same relief. Most people who have turkey hunted a little bit have probably noticed that a light rain brings the birds out into the open. I don't know if this is because the woods just get a little too claustrophobic to them, considering they just can't hear or probably see quite as well in the rain. It could be as simple as they expect worms to come out in the rain and they want to eat them. The reasons for the behavior might never be truly known to us, but knowing that the behavior exists and it's very reliable is really all that matters here. If you have the chance to hunt a light rain, do it. They are often visible and often very callable. Just don't be surprised when your trophy photos look like you killed a soggy black chicken instead of a twenty five pound former dinosaur with knife blades on his legs now Ken, you killed birds in a downpour, you sure can. Quite A few years ago, I slipped into a chunk of timber in southern Minnesota to hunt a ridgetop with a logging road on it, mostly because I was avoiding going where I really wanted to because somebody else was already parked there. It was pouring, and by that I mean the kind of rain where you were just soaked within like five minutes of being out, and if you don't go home and dry off and oil your gun up, you'll regret it very soon. On my very first setup of that morning, with my gun over my knees pointed down that logging road, I about couldn't believe it when I saw two redheads bobbing my way. It was the first day of my hunt, and when I saw that they were jakes, I did something I almost never do, which is I let them walk right up to me without taking the safety off. Now, in their dumb, juvenile brains, they finally formed a thought that something didn't quite seem right because I hadn't even put out a decoy, given I didn't think i'd call in any birds and was mostly killing time. So they turned around, and that was when the thought of who I really am as a hunter hit me across the side of my head like a sock filled with nickels, and I buried the bead of my old mossburg on one of their necks. And that was that much later, while bow hunting turkeys up here in the Twin Cities, I had a flash storm roll through that took me from nearly perfect turkey weather to sitting in a blind in a total downpour. I had a bird just gobbling his head off below me the whole time, and I knew where he was. I knew he was strutting on a little two track, and I knew that I could probably sneak up there and get a lot closer to him. So I grabbed my bow and popped in a mouth call and did just that. They not only did I see him, but while I was glassing him and trying to figure out if I could call him up the road and draw without getting busted, I noticed a little whack a mole situation directly in front of me. A whole flock of hens was bedded in the grass along the little logging road, and occasionally one of them would pop its head up, look around, and then it would just disappear. I got to watch those birds do what birds often do during a heavy rain, which is just sit tight and ride it out. That Tom couldn't help himself and was strutting for some of the birds that were farther down the road, but the ladies weren't having it. The instant, and I mean the instant that I felt the rain downshift in gears, all of those birds stood up, and I had a few brief moments of chaos before that Tom came right in and I not only shot some feathers off his back, but absolutely barrowed my arrow into a tree right behind him, which sent the whole flock in a direction that did me absolutely no good. Heavy rain is a bitch, but it often comes with lightning and thunder. And while I'm I'm not telling you to stay out there and get fried, I'll tell you this. Every time I've been out turkey hunting and a thunderstorm has rolled in, that toms have gobbled their heads off. Not never did me much good. For calling them in, but it's always pretty cool to witness. It's also true that if you know where they are going to roost, and you are dealing with some level of rain and maybe thunderstorms, you can bet your ass that they'll get back and stage up to roost earlier than they would if it was beautiful out. In a lot of states, you can hunt until sunset, But if you do that enough, or you glass enough birds in the preseason, you'll see that they often don't fly up until way way after sunset, which means they don't get that last good period of movement in before shooting light ends. That's not the case in nasty weather, though, and it's something you can use to your advantage. Hell that's how I arrowed my bird in Minnesota last year. It was supposed to rain on and off all day and be cloudy and gloomy, and I figured that the birds that had given me the slip so far would show up early enough and be callable enough. I ended up arrowing did just that, and he gobbled while coming in from a long ways off. He was just getting to the roost early because of the conditions, And it was a fun sit and at least I believe made possible by less than ideal turkey weather. Of course, I can't really talk about hunting turkeys in the weather without just talking about temperature. Real cold sucks, and we get it up here in Canada South a lot when it's supposed to be super cold. One thing I notice is that the bird's default back to their winter mode for at least the first part of the day. They'll gobble like mad, But the ladies tend to lead them all to the same food sources that they hit all winter long, and they'll do their best to fill up their crops before doing anything else. If I'm facing stupid cold weather and just hunting for myself, I won't go out a lot, you know, until like noon or later. I'll hit that afternoon window of higher temperatures and hunt off the hopes that the birds will spread out and do their thing after their morning routine. It often works. But if I have kids to take or someone else or whatever, sometimes you just go do your thing and the cold and hope for that bird that will cover ground and work no matter what. Now, with turkeys, that bird is often out there at some point of the day. They're out there when it gets really hot too, but that's a different thing. My least favorite turkey hunting condition just might be blazing heat. Now, just like with cold, how hot is too hot is relative. My version of that would be dream weather for someone down in Texas or Florida. But it's safe to say that if you have temps that you'd consider oppressive, the birds will react to it. The heat often leads to loafing in the shade, but again you can use that. I killed a bird on some public land last year in Nebraska while hunting in really hot weather by sitting close to a windmill over a stock tank. The flock of jakes that came in all had their mouths open because it was stupid hot. And I don't really know how to make this sound any smarter than it is. Hunting around water allows you to be where the birds are, expect birds to go because they want to go there, And if it's one of those early April heat waves like I was in, you have the added benefit of a little micro habitat around that water that has lots of fresh greenery and bug life, and maybe even some frogs or snails to convince them to come in and chop down. Essentially, if it's going to be super hot, hunt where you'd want to be if you were covered in black feathers and had to be out there all day. You might hit the field, you know, for an hour or two in the morning, but mostly you'll be in the timber, maybe low in the timber where the coolest temps are, and you'd almost always build in a visit to water at some point throughout your day, and no matter what, just try to be out there in the afternoon or evening when temperatures start to drop a little, Just like with deer, you'll often witness a flurry of turkey activity. And that's when the birds get real callable because they feel it too, and they know their chances of meeting a girlfriend for the day are the best they are going to be before it's time to sleep away another night in a tree. Don't fear the weather. This bring my friends, learn how to use it, and then come back throughout this week because I'm gonna keep dropping a few more turkey episodes. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I said, in the intro, it's Turkey week here. Lots of cool stuff going on and you can find out all about it if you head to the mediater dot com. Go check that out. And while you're there you'll probably see some turkey hunting films get dropped. You'll probably see some more podcasts on turkeys. I know, you'll see some articles, maybe some recipes. Whatever. We're celebrating America's greatest game bird today and all through this week, and you can check that stuff out at the mediator dot com. And as always, thank you so much for your support. We truly appreciate it.

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