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 Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and in honor of Turkey Week, I'm going to drop another bonus episode right now. But why you should try to think more like a gobbler. Before I get into this, I have to say that because it's Turkey Week, you gotta head over to the medeater dot com and check out what we have going on. You know, of course, you can buy some sweet gear from First Light or Dave Smith, Decoy's or Phelps, you know, maybe pick up a couple of calls, maybe a buy no harness from FAHF. But you can also check out a whole bunch of turkey content as well if you just kind of want to be entertained and maybe learn a thing or two. Also, you can see that we are hunting a turkey calling contest. Now, you guys, know, that I don't get super hyped up about stuff like this, but I do want to beat Mark Kenyon, so I would really appreciate it if you would go over there and give me some boats throughout this whole thing, to make sure that not only do I knock you onis out right away, but if I do meet up with Mark, that I can kick his ass to thank you for that in advance. All right, enough of that, I think this is actually a fun one, you know, at least for me, and I hope it is for you. You know. When it comes to deer hunting, I try really hard to think about what a deer would think about and then use that knowledge. Now. I know that might sound like a little bit bananas, but it works, especially when you're hunting pressure deer. But with turkeys might not really be necessary. But then again, you might need a little boost, and one way to get it is to not just blindly set out with a box call in a sandwich, hoping you strike up a bird before it's time to go home. Instead, try to think about what gobblers, now all turkeys might be interested in, and at what times and where. The more you do this, the more turkey fans you'll have to put on your wall. I know I've talked about dogs on here a lot, and if you pay attention at all, you know that I have another podcast over on Cal's feed called Houndations, which is all about our four legged buddies. On most of those episodes, I talk about professional dog trainers at some point. Sometimes they are the main focus. Sometimes they are just mentioned in passing. But the folks who make their living molding dogs into something you don't want to give up for adoption out of absolute frustration and embarrassment are folks with a lot of knowledge to drop. I think one of the things that has always just blown my mind about pro dog trainers is how they can get inside the head of a dog and predict what a dog will do. Now, this can be broken down into two different lines of thought, both of which can probably apply to most dogs. So for starters, you kind of have general dog traits. A lot of German shorthair pointers or lot of setters, or a lot of labs or springers or whatever will do the same kind of things as other members of their breed. But then you have the individual traits and the quirkiness which pro trainers tend to figure out pretty quickly and use to shape the behaviors through the training process. When you spend time with a really talented trainer and watch what they can do with dogs, you also witness somebody who understands what is going to happen before it does. It's pretty cool and it shows you that there's no replacement for tons of experience. The ability to predict behaviors before they happen gives you an edge on two levels. The first is that you can head off undesirable behaviors or encourage desirable ones in a more efficient way, and it will inform you on future training sessions because you know some of the pieces of the puzzle before you toss that first bumper. That's hugely beneficial. Now, unfortunately, not too many of us are going to get the chance to professionally train a bunch of gobblers to do something like I don't know, strutter gobble, I guess. But you can still get inside the head of a turkey and use that to your advantage. You can even do this kind of like with dogs, where you can focus on general turkey behavior, or if you scout like I told you to do a couple days ago, you can learn about the habits of individual birds. That's actually crazy fun and some of my most exciting hunts have involved going out with a specific gobbler in mind because I've been keeping tabs on him and I believe I have a chance at that specific bird. But for most folks, the generalities will do the trick. Here. The key is to actually think about what gobblers or hens or jakes for that matter, actually do throughout their day. So let's start with early season birds here. While this might be more relevant to a South Dakota hunter versus someone down in Mississippi, the early birds have different needs versus the mid and late season birds. Now, while the toms are always ready to go, the hens often only have food on their minds. This is especially true early in the day when they fly off the roost. While you always have the chance to call in a rando, if you're hunting birds that are mostly flocked up, you have your work cutout for you. At sunrise, those birds are generally going to follow the hens and they're going to you know, gobble their asses off without coming in a whole lot. Look. This can be fun, but can also be frustrating unless you're waiting on the food with some decoys out. Now, even then, you might watch a flock for hours while they don't get anywhere near you, because the hens want food and maybe a little morning sun on their backs, and the toms are mostly going to stay with them. But what about noon when the temperatures rise, or three in the afternoon or six, Now you have a different game. You know, the bugs might be out, which means the morning food source is going to take a back seat to the high protein, freshly available food source. Now you might have roamers or birds that spend their midday criss crossing through a different type of cover, or you might have birds that mostly hang on a destination food source all day long until evening when there's some type of march back to the roost. In this situation, imagine being a tom or one of the couple of jakes, and all day long you've been fighting other birds and strutting and watching the hens, you know, just ignore you all day long. You've tried your best and it hasn't worked. Then you hear a hen yelping like crazy off of the food, and maybe you head over her way and you lift your head up and when you hit the fence, you realize not only there are a couple hens over there, but there's a lone jake about to accomplish what you've failed all day long. The same bird at sunrise as a heart full of hope, but as evening progresses he might be downright pissed about his lack of luck. After a lot of effort, that time is cullible, although he might not be as vocal as he was at seven in the morning. Now let's take that example a step further. Imagine that field just catching the first rays of sunlight, and you watch a whole bunch of birds sail out there and pose up like famingos, waiting to get warm. I see this a lot up here where I hunt in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and it's like you can almost take a little nap then when they do that, because until they hit their desired temperature, they just aren't going anywhere. So you think, well, turkey's like being in the sun, So I'm going to sit here all day. But by noon the temperature is eighty degrees and the sun is directly overhead, and you haven't seen a bird in the field in three hours. What do you think is going on there? They needed the sun when it was cold, and now they need the shade when it's warm. Maybe you hunt the field edge for a few hours, but then it's time to get into the timber for your midday. It's not exactly rocket science. It's kind of like, I don't know why I love hunting white tails over water. I know deer get thirsty every day, So that's about as simple as I can make it. I don't need to overthink it and try to go really deep on tactics when it can be distilled down to something so easy to understand and execute. Turkeys are no different. In fact, turkeys also drink water. And I'll tell you what, Bobby. Sometimes, when you're hunting in a state like Kansas or Texas or some other dry cactus filled location, setting up close to water is a really good idea. Turkeys love ponds and cattle tanks, not only for the water, but the fresh greenery and often the bugs around wet areas. You know who knows that secret, actual Toms. That's who. This hit me one time while I was hunting in Texas for rios, and I realized that even though the feeders on the place weren't in operation, the turkeys were in the habit of checking each spot every day. Anyway, they all have road access because there isn't anyone filling up corn feeders by rucking in fifty pound bags of seed. Each feeder spot was in some type of opening, too, and the gobblers seemed to cruise the routes between them looking for hens in places they expected hens to be. It was so much more methodical than I expected. And I've seen that with limited water in certain places too. So let's think about getting inside the head of a turkey in another way. We think of gobblers as being generally kind of dumb orm rebirds that will fight at the drop of a hat. But the truth is birds tend to establish their pecking order early, and everyone in the flock knows who is above and below them. The two year old strutter in the field that won't come into the strutting decoy you have out knows that if he does, he might have to fight, and if he has to fight, he might lose. It's safer to stay out of harm's way and advertise the good stuff from afar. Hung up gobblers, the kind we think we have no real explanation for, are often just that bird. They might look the same size as all turkeys, but they might be three or four pounds lighter than the bigger birds in the neighborhood, and that difference is a lot when you're pushing each other around and trying to knife each other with your spurs. I look at this like I look at deer decoys. Everyone wants to use a buck decoy because that's all you see on the sportsman's channel, But a lot of bucks don't want to fight, and that means a lot of bucks are not going to come into a buck decoy. A lot of toms don't want to fight either, and that means they're not coming into a full strutter. Pay attention to the turkeys and think about what you could do to ensure the highest odds of a positive response out of all legal birds. In fact, sometimes you see roving bands of jakes that will run off toms two. I had this happen to me in Minnesota last year, and the nine jakes that kept the toms at bay eventually pissed me off enough to where there were eight of them after one of them caught an arrow to the chest. If I had kept hunting there, I probably would have left the jake decoy at home to see if one of the toms that stayed away from the Jakes would just eventually venture into a spread of hens. After all, if every time you walk by the middle school the whole herd of seventh grade boys ran out and chucked rocks at you, you'd probably alter your routes a little bit. Let's look at this another way. Imagine you're at the stage of the season where the toms are really cruising. You can get them to gobble, but they all seem to be on a mission somewhere and you can't quite pull them into your deeks. Why would they do that? Well, for whatever reason, sometimes they just seem like they have a destination in mind, and that is that cruising bucks do this too, And it's maddening when you try to call a deer and it's just not interested. But it happens a lot. So you have a bunch of birds that seem to be randomly crossing the countryside looking for a hen, but when you show them a hen is around and they ignore you. It doesn't make sense. I believe animals, and yes, even turkeys, have the ability to reason more than we probably think. So that cruiser that comes out to the field corner and he looks at your decoys and just keeps going, even though you know he's all alone. He must have a reason for it, and the reason, I think is because they decided in their little long beard brains that the next spot in their route is where the hens will be, and that's where they're going. Some of them do change their plans when you call them and you show them some decoys, but some just don't. How do you solve for the ones that don't. Well, you better get closer to where they are likely to cruise again, not really rocket science. If the birds are on the move but not acting all that callable, you better set up right where the logging road meets the field, or right on the ridge between the two pastures that they like to strut in. While they try to draw in some hens, you're going to want to think about why they might walk from point A to B and whether it's the right time to set up between them. The problem here is that when turkey hunting gets frustrating, we often default to the idea that if we run and gun and call enough, we will strike up a hot bird. 00:12:19 Speaker 1: Look. 00:12:19 Speaker 2: Sometimes that works, but a lot of times it doesn't, and when it doesn't, it often doesn't do you any favors for future hunts. Another way to think like a turkey is to pay attention to the hens that you see and the hens that you hear, and think about what their behavior means to the local gobblers. If you've ever watched a tom follow ahead to the point where she lays down on a nest, you can almost see them get frustrated. After a little while, they know the game is over, and while they'll push the issue a little bit, they often just seem to give up and go what do you think that bird is thinking? I think he's probably thinking, well, shit, I guess I have to put in some work somewhere else. When you hit the point of the season where the hens are definitely nesting, which is often earlier than a lot of folks believe, you have an opportunity to work gobblers in the late morning or midday. That went from being totally hand up to being totally hand free and looking hard. Can you imagine a more callable bird than that? So what if you're running and gunning from sunrise to nine o'clock and you just can't get a bird to come in and then things go quiet, which is something that happens a lot with all subspecies, but it's like an eastern turkey's biggest trick. Now, you have a daily window where a few birds in your neighborhood might go from almost uncallable to highly callable, but not if they find a better option than you when they start cruising. So what does that mean? Well, if your birds start to go quiet in the midday, it's time to post up on a known travel route and call throughout those dead hours. Make something happen. Think about what the birds are probably thinking about, because what they are thinking about is everything you need to know to kill them. Now, I feel like I have to say this again. Turkeys are pretty dumb and often not that challenging to kill. But sometimes they're really smart and are very challenging to kill. When you encounter the latter, ask yourself when you're out there or when you're planning the next day's hunt, what exactly they might be doing throughout the day. Is it early season and they're flocked up. That's a great jumping off point for a strategy and might even convince you to sleep in and work the birds later. Or is it right in the heart of the season, with big temperature swings throughout the day that might bring out the bugs or make some water worth considering? What might have frustrated Tom do when his hen beds down for a few hours, Or what might a few frustrated jakes do when it's getting close to the time to roost and they haven't even had so much as a sideways glance from a hen all day? How is it Tom going to accomplish his goal of always being around hens that might be ready for some action? And what is he going to do when he can't immediately find that? What are the actual bird reactions to your calling and your spread? And what do you think that means? What are they thinking that keeps them from committing All of these thought exercises to take yourself into the mind of an actual turkey might seem dumb, but I can't think of a hunting opportunity that we put less thought into the animals themselves than a spring turkey on it. We take it for granted that they can be called in without an ounce of brain power going into the why and the where and the how of any given day in the field. But the more you think about birds and what they might be thinking about. The easier it is to stay in the action and be where they actually want to be. Takes a lot of the randomness out of the equation and alleviates at least some of the need to be lucky. Look, it's not necessary, but again, if you want to get better at this stuff, a lot of what we all need to work on is just between our ears. I believe this to be absolutely true with big game deer and hell even ducks and pheasants. But I also believe it to be true when it comes to turkeys. So think about what that big old long beard is thinking about. Try to get inside his mind, try to predict his movements. Have some fun with it. Because spring turkey sees and is an absolute short lived gift. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support. Like I said in the beginning, if you want to check out our Turkey Week content, go to the meadeater dot com. Articles, videos, podcasts, you name it. If you want to just get hyped up, maybe learn something about turkey hunting, check that out. You can also check out our Turkey Calling contest there where I'll be competing against Yanni and some of the other guys here for the crown, and I would kind of like to win it, if for no other reason than to remind Mark that I'm an amazing hunter and he's not. That should be good enough reason for all of you guys to go over there check it out anyway, Thank you so much for your support. Truly appreciate it. Hope you guys have a great Turkey season. Thank you.

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