Feel free to post any tips and tricks for beginning turkey hunters.

1. Roost your birds the night before if possible, but dont scare them. You have a much better chance of killing the bird if you know exactly where he is so you can move and get on him before he flys down.
2. Call as little as possible. Just try and get him to come in to you and do not call when you see him comming, unless you use soft purrs and clucks.
3. If he hangs up out of view, back up and call again.
4. Decoys can hurt and help... it depends on gthe bird.
5. It sometimes helps to have 2 people when calling turkeys. a shooter and a caller, that way the shooter can focus on the bird and not so much on calling him in.

A lesson I learned last spring: Trust your decoys!

On this particular day all 2 of us could hear were a couple of gobblers going off 100-300 yds away. They were moving on wooded land we didn't have permission to hunt. Our calling did nothing to pull them out of their zone. So both of us stopped calling.

We had been silent for about 25 minutes and discussed the possiblity of picking up and going elsewhere. We were set up on the edge of a large hay field when my partner spotted 9 birds that had entered one edge of the hay field -about 200 yds away as the crow flies. The birds were dead silent. So we decided to be silent as well. They slowly pecked their way around the perimeter of the field and were headed in our direction. We could see that 2 hens were out front, followed by 5 jakes, followed by 2 long beards who seemed very cautious. The long beards' heads did not go down to feed. None of the birds made any sound we could detect.

It took 35 minutes for leading hens to cross in front of us, and when they got close to our 2 hen decoys they sped up a little toward them. The increased pace of the hens seemed to make the jakes speed up as well. While waiting for the long beards to come directly in front of us, one of the jakes detoured and walked within 3 yds of me. Suddenly he clucked softly. My partner then shot one of the long beards and I took one of the jakes. Both birds went down in their tracks. We arose and started toward our prize. We had forgotten about the 2 hens until they came running past us trying to catch up with the remainder of the flock, which had bolted in the direct which they came. That was a little surprising!

Lesson learned: Trust your decoys when birds are quiet (except for calling toms in their strutting zones. Those guys wouldn't shut up!). I think it was good that we stopped calling when we did and did not call when the birds first entered the hay field.

Side bar: When we opened the gizzards, the jake had a few kernels of corn and a good amount of alfalfa and weed seeds. The long beard was empty, except for a few kernels of corn. Interesting to note that the old guys were apparently keeping an eye on what was going on after entering the field and were content to let the jakes follow the hens. Again, all 9 birds were quiet as a mouse.