How to find turkeys: listening, roosting and covering ground before your first hunt

Learn the ground first

A first season goes badly when you drive to a big block of woods on opening morning and start walking. Turkeys are easy to bump and hard to catch up with, and the hunter who knows one ridge well beats the hunter who half-knows five. Two turkey hunters quoted by the NWTF say the same thing in almost the same words: “Knowing the woods is foremost,” and “You must know the land.” Their advice is to “plan your approach before heading out.” If you are still working out the order of a spring hunt, start with the first-season path and come back here.

Practically, that means picking a piece of ground small enough to learn. Walk it before the season with a map, and mark the things you will need in the dark: where you can park, which logging roads and trails let you move quietly, where the ridges and open fields are, and where the property lines run. The NWTF's public-land rule is blunt about that last one: “Abide by property lines, regardless of whether it's private or public.”

Mark a second and a third spot while you are at it. On shared ground you will need them, because the NWTF's advice when someone is already there is simply to go elsewhere: “If you see a truck parked where you wanted to hunt, drive to the next spot.” More of that in public land turkey hunting.

You find turkeys with your ears

In spring, a gobbler advertises. Missouri's conservation department puts it plainly: “In spring, male turkeys (toms) begin gobbling to announce themselves to males and to attract females.” Pennsylvania's wildlife agency adds when: “Toms gobble loudly in early morning and sometimes in late evening.” Those two sentences are the whole scouting plan for a beginner. Be somewhere you can hear a long way, at dawn or at dusk, and keep quiet.

A locator call is the tool that makes a quiet bird answer. The NWTF's locator calls: how to make turkeys gobble describes them as “nothing more than a loud sound that forces a tom to shock gobble,” and its writer's routine is an owl call “first thing in the morning or as the sun is setting,” with crow calls “in the middle of the afternoon.” Coyote, duck and goose calls are on his list too. The point of a locator is that it makes a gobbler give up his position without teaching him that a hen is standing on that ridge.

Do not scout with hen calls. The same NWTF article draws the line clearly: “I only like to use a hen turkey call when I think a tom is close and I am in position to shoot if he is in range.” Yelping at a bird you have no intention of hunting today teaches him something, and on public land it can pull a person toward you instead. Our ranked owl and crow calls are in the best locator calls, and how much calling is too much is in how often to call turkeys.

Roosting a bird the evening before

Turkeys sleep in trees. The NWTF puts it simply: “Wild turkeys fly into trees or tall bushes at night to evade predators,” and Maine's wildlife agency describes them as active by day and roosting in trees at night. Because a roosted bird is still in that tree at daylight, a gobbler you locate at dusk is a gobbler you can be sitting under in the morning. That is the single highest-value thing a new hunter can do the evening before a hunt.

The roosting routine in the NWTF's great roost hunts, step by step:

1. Get in early and settle. “Move in several hours before dusk, set up and chill.”
2. Pick a listening spot and wait. “Find a good listening spot, and wait until the sun is low before trying to elicit gobbles.”
3. Do not rush it. “Many hunters err by trying to roost turkeys that haven't flown up yet.”
4. Then hoot. “When you're sure birds have roosted, start with owl hoots to provoke a shock gobble.”
5. If the owl gets nothing, try a cackle. “If that nets nothing, wait a minute, and then make some fly-up cackles on a friction call.”
6. Pin him down. “Get as close as possible so you can nail down his exact location,” then back out the way you came.

One caution that saves a hunt: knowing where he sleeps is not the same as sitting in his bedroom. The NWTF's roosting article says to “avoid hunting the bird's exact location” and to have a plan B, “to observe activity in the roost area later” if the morning falls apart. Where you actually put your back against a tree is covered in turkey hunting setup.

Listening at dawn

The morning after you roost a bird is about timing and quiet. The NWTF lists arriving late as one of the mistakes new hunters make: “Arriving late to your hunting spot gives turkeys a distinct advantage, as they can see and hear you approaching,” and the fix is to “arrive well before dawn to give yourself enough time to set up.” For a roosted bird the NWTF is more specific still: “Do it well before dawn. Be under the bird a half-hour or more before light.”

Getting in without blowing him out of the tree:

• No flashlights. The NWTF's instruction is to “use darkness to slip into the area. No flashlights.”
• Walk the easy ground. “Traverse logging roads or deer trails if possible” — birds are “accustomed to hearing deer and other critters underneath them at night.”
• Then use your eyes and ears. “As light begins to break, scan treetops for dark forms, and listen for drumming.”
• Read the first gobble. “At the first gobble, determine where the longbeard is and where he might pitch down.”

What to look for in scouting gear

Scouting gear is short. You are walking, listening, and occasionally confirming what you are looking at from a long way off.

• A locator you can actually run. An owl call covers the two windows that matter, dusk and first light. Look for one that is small enough to live in a pocket and that the maker says is easy to blow — a locator you are shy about using is a locator you will not use.
• Glass, for the bird you can see but cannot identify. An 8x42 binocular is the easy first pair: enough magnification to pick out a beard across a field, steady enough to hold against a tree. It matters more than beginners expect, because a beard is not proof of a gobbler — the NWTF says “do not assume a bird is a male if it has a beard – about 10 percent of hens also can have beards.” Telling them apart is in jake vs tom vs hen.
• Boots you can cover ground in. Scouting is miles, often before daylight and through wet grass. A lighter, waterproof boot beats a heavy one unless you hunt snake country, in which case the trade goes the other way.

We have not hunted with any of the gear below. Every detail here is what the maker publishes, and each one is linked in the sources at the end.

More owl and crow calls sit in the turkey calls hub, the full binocular field is in best turkey hunting binoculars, and snake boots and knee boots are compared in best turkey hunting boots.

Covering ground after fly-down

If the roosted bird walks off with hens, the morning is not over. The NWTF's all-day plan describes where birds go as the day runs: early, “this is when birds are flying down from the roost and milling around their land zones”; later, “turkeys tend to shift toward feeding areas that are further from their roost sites”; at midday, “it's time to think temperature. On hot days, focus on cooler areas.” A second NWTF writer says afternoon birds “will likely loaf or mill about in shady areas until grabbing a bite to eat during late afternoon or early evening.”

So the mid-morning move is not random walking. It is walking from the roost area toward feed, then toward shade, stopping to listen. One NWTF hunter gives a clock for it: “Unless I hear a gobbler, I usually stay put until about 9:30 a.m., at which time I start moving.” He also rates a midday bird highly: “There's not as much gobbling then, but if you find one that will talk to you, you have a much better chance of doing something with him.”

Evening can work too, where the law allows it: one NWTF writer notes that “sometimes, it's easy to sit by a hot roost site and clobber a gobbler as he prepares to fly up.” Which end of the day suits a beginner is weighed in morning vs evening turkey hunting.

When you find nothing

Silent mornings happen to everyone, and they are not proof that the woods are empty. Some of it is weather. A study the NWTF reported found that “gobbling activity was highest when winds were about 3 mph” and that “almost no gobbles were recorded when winds exceeded 12 mph.” The same research found birds vocalized most “when the average daily temperature was between 60 and 69 degrees,” and that “lower pressure, often associated with rain, meant less gobbling.” A windy, wet, cold morning is a bad listening morning, not a bad spot.

Some of it is the calendar. Research using recording units, again reported by the NWTF, found that gobbling “follows a more complicated pattern with multiple peaks” rather than the two peaks hunters once assumed, and on the non-hunted properties studied, “25%, 60% and 15% of gobbling activity occurred before, during and after the time when the state's spring turkey hunting season is open.” Quiet days are inside the normal range.

What to do about it, in order:

1. Stay until mid-morning before you move, and listen more than you call.
2. Move toward feed, then toward shade, stopping on every high spot to listen.
3. Use a crow call through the middle of the day rather than an owl, per the NWTF's locator routine.
4. Go to the second spot you marked. Ground you have not disturbed today is worth more than ground you have.
5. Come back at dusk and roost a bird for tomorrow, which is where this page started.

About turkey sign

You will read a lot about tracks, scratching in the leaves, dust bowls, droppings and dropped feathers. Sign is real and experienced hunters use it, but we are not going to print a field guide to it that we cannot source, and none of the wildlife agency or NWTF pages we used for this guide describes how to read it.

The honest summary of a first season is that your ears will find more turkeys than your eyes will. Learn one piece of ground, be on it before light, keep the hen calls in your vest until you are sitting down, and let a gobbler tell you where he lives.