Hung-up gobblers are incredibly frustrating. Here’s how one veteran hunter breaks them loose. Or not.
By Jim Spencer
You’re working a bird, he’s gobbling with gusto, and he seems interested in what you’re offering. He drifts steadily closer, sometimes covering a considerable distance, and the hunt has progressed to the point where your breathing is ragged and you can feel your heart in your throat. You’re expecting to see him pop into view at any second.
But then … but then … for whatever reason, all forward motion stops. You may have him in sight at this point, or maybe you don’t. He continues to gobble, but it’s as if he’s come up against an impenetrable force field, or somebody tied him to a tree, or something. You’ve experienced it numerous times, and so has every other turkey hunter on the planet.
WELCOME TO THE HANG-UP ZONE
Sometimes these hang-ups are temporary things, and after a while the gobbler gets impatient and comes on in. But not often. Sometimes the hang-up can stretch to ridiculous lengths. One long-ago opening day in the Ouachita Mountains of west Arkansas, I raised a mid-morning gobbler on the other side of a brushy clearcut. By the time that I fought my way across the thicket and got on him, it was 9:00. Something like eight hours later, he was still gobbling from the same spot he’d been in since I sat down to him. At 5 p.m., I got up from my tree, hollered a couple of words at the turkey you won’t hear in Sunday school, and he gobbled at the sound of my voice. I left him still gobbling.
That’s an extreme example of gobbler hang-uppedness, thank goodness. If every turkey hang-up played out that way, I’d be a golfer by now. And if I’d known more about turkey hunting back then, that particular marathon hang-up wouldn’t have lasted so long. First, I’d have switched calls, trying a slate or box or wingbone instead of the diaphragm I was using. Sometimes that’s all it takes to break one loose. Next, I’d have repositioned on him to see if I could get him to come to a different calling location. I’d have tried going silent, or getting very aggressive. That works sometimes, too.
If all of those tactics failed, I’d have said to hell with it long before eight hours had gone by and would have gone looking for another turkey. Sometimes the only smart thing to do with a hung-up gobbler is to concede the encounter and try him another day.
But, I didn’t know any of that stuff 35 years ago. I was a rank rookie with only a handful of gobblers to my credit. As a result, I wasted an entire day trying to kill a gobbler that had no intention of coming to me. At least, not as long as I stayed at that calling location — and we’ll revisit that in a minute.
Based on unscientific, but voluminous, observations accumulated throughout a lifetime of chasing turkeys, I believe this is the most common reason gobblers hang up — they don’t want to come to where you’re calling from.
Often this is because there’s some sort of obstacle between you and the bird. In this instance, there was some thick stuff, blackberries and smilax and such, between the gobbler and my position. He could have come through it, but turkeys don’t like to do that.
It doesn’t have to be something as substantial as a briar patch to stop a gobbler’s advance. I once watched a turkey hang up because of a 3-inch-thick tree limb was across the two-track forest road he was using as an approach. It could not have possibly been an obstacle. He could have easily stepped across it, and had probably done so numerous times. But nooooo. Not that day. He treated it like it was the Great Wall of China.
I’ve also seen turkeys refuse to cross something as insignificant as a foot-wide spring run or an old barbed-wire fence; again, obstacles that could not possibly have constituted a real barrier, things the turkeys in question had no doubt crossed numerous times before. On the other hand, I once called a gobbler 400 vertical feet down the face of a sheer Ozark bluff that would have stymied a mountain goat. And one dusty afternoon in Alabama, I watched Eddie Salter call a gobbler across not one, but two good-size creeks, plus a barbed-wire fence, a farm road, and a knee-deep orchardgrass pasture.
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION
The best way to deal with this quirk of turkey behavior, obviously, is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Do your best to make sure there’s no such “obstacle” between you and the gobbler when you sit down to work him. Of course, unless you’re intimately familiar with the patch of ground you’re hunting, you have no way of knowing what’s out there between you and the bird. Hence the reason for getting as close to that gobbler as possible before beginning to try to call him in. The less ground he has to cover to come to you, the less likely he is to encounter something that gives him an excuse to stop.
This tactic can be risky; if the gobblers sees you or hears your footsteps as you draw closer, it’s usually all over but the putting and the hat-stomping. But still, in most cases hunters can get closer to a gobbling turkey than they think.
During the initial approach, it’s important to keep your calls in your pocket. You don’t want that turkey thinking your way, not just yet. Take your time and be as quiet as possible on your approach. Keep as cool and collected as your temperament and the situation will permit, and think things through when choosing your set-up. Make sure that you have a clear field of fire, set up so that when the bird comes into view he’s already in gun range, put the sun in the gobbler’s eyes and not your own. All that stuff.
PLAN B
If he hangs up despite all of that prep work, there are still things you can do to break him loose. About four hours into the marathon hang-up session related at the start of this article, I tried a trick that nearly worked. The gobbler was 100 yards away and slightly downhill, and I’d been calling to him from the crest of a not-quite-hogback ridge above and east of him.
It was becoming obvious he wasn’t going to come to my current position, so I hatched a plan. I stood up, stretched my legs, gathered all my stuff, then made a series of excited calls, much louder than I’d been calling. When he gobbled at it, I crossed to the backside of the ridge, then hustled 50 yards west as fast as I could.
When I figured I was directly uphill from the gobbler I stuck my head over the ridge and yelped at him again. Before he had time to reply I ducked back and was in motion again. Another quick 50 yards west, another set of yelps over the lip of the ridge. I ran another 50 yards west and yelped at him one last time, then doubled back and ran as fast as I could back 50 yards east, to the place I’d called from last.
He was already coming my way, and fast. I fell down against the rootball of a windthrown pine, and had barely gotten seated when there he was, hotfooting anxiously through the woods, gobbling as he ran. He got past me so fast that I couldn’t get my gun on him, and he went almost out of hearing before giving it up. When he came back by me again, headed back to his gobbling spot, he was behind some brush and I didn’t have a clear shot. I couldn’t fool him a second time, though, and spent another four or five hours fooling with him before calling him that ugly name.
The point is, though, making him think his hen was leaving was an effective tactic. It worked, and I had a chance to kill him. I just failed to capitalize on it.
DEALING WITH THE HENNED-UP GOBBLER
I never did figure out why that long-ago gobbler hung up, but after getting a look at him halfway through that hunt I’m convinced it wasn’t because he had female company. That’s one of the most common reasons gobblers hang up; they’re already tending to one or more hens, and they’re not inclined to abandon them to go look for another. So they strut and drum and look pretty for the ladies in sight, and gobble for the out-of-sight one in hopes of coaxing her into the flock.
If there’s a more frustrating situation in turkey hunting than calling to a henned-up gobbler, I hope I never find out what it is. There’s the old suggestion about calling to the hens and not the gobbler, trying to call the hens to you and having the gobbler come dragging along in their wake, but that’s problematic on several levels. First, I have yet to figure out just how to let the hens know I’m talking to them and not to the gobbler.
Second, the hens already have company, too, so they’re generally no easier to call in than the gobbler. Sometimes using the kee-kee calls of young birds will bring in an old hen with lingering maternal feelings, but despite what I’ve read in magazine articles like this one, using fall calls in spring hunting has never given me an oversupply of turkey breasts.
I once heard the late Ben Rodgers Lee, a turkey-killing machine if there ever was one, answer a question at a seminar. A member of the audience asked Ben what to do with a gobbler surrounded by hens. “Go find yourself another turkey,” Ben said.
It’s good advice, if you can make yourself do it. Possibly the best way to deal with a henned-up gobbler is to leave him alone for a while. Go somewhere else and try to find another gobbler to play with. Even early in the mating cycle, even before the hens start to nest, they tend to drift away from the gobblers during midday and through the middle afternoon. If you can go back to the area and raise that gobbler after his hens have left, he can be the closest thing you’ll find to a pushover in the universe of turkey gobblers.
OPEN LAND HANG-UPS
A gobbler in the open is more prone to hang up than one in the woods. Most likely, this is because the lack of cover provides excellent visibility, and when he doesn’t see the “hen” that’s calling to him — or when he sees a motionless decoy or set of decoys and doesn’t see them moving around like ordinary turkeys — he gets suspicious.
Motion decoys are one way to overcome this problem, but I’m old-school and a minimalist to boot, so that option is pretty much absent from my playbook. It’s much too complicated and equipment-heavy for my style of hunting. However, I do have a silk-screened folding gobbler silhouette that I carry in open-country hunting, and I’ve brought in several reluctant gobblers by flashing it at them.
However, I flat draw the line at the new fad called “reaping” — the practice of holding a silhouette strutter in front and crawling across the open toward a gobbler or group of gobblers. Sure, I’ve seen the YouTube videos just like you have, and I know reaping can lead to some spectacular close-up encounters. But, combat-style turkey hunting doesn’t appeal to me, and on the public lands where I do most of my turkey hunting, holding a realistic turkey image in front of your face just isn’t a very smart thing to do.
So how to deal with open-country hang-ups? Patterning the gobbler’s movements is the best way, if you have time, but this usually takes at least a couple of days. Open-land turkeys are usually creatures of habit, and if you can determine where (and approximately when) the turkey you’re after is entering or leaving the open area, you can get there beforehand and wait for it to happen. Chances are, unless the bird is disturbed, he’ll repeat his behavior and you’ll be in position to point out his mistake.
KNOW WHEN TO FOLD ‘EM
Sometimes, though, no matter what precautions you take and no matter what trickery you employ, a turkey is going to hang up and refuse to break out of it. Although that long-ago 9-to-5 gobbler caused me to waste an opening day, over the long haul of my turkey hunting career it’s proven to have been time well spent. That bird taught me it’s counterproductive to spend that much time on a stubborn turkey.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t have any ironclad rules about how much time I’ll invest in a particular gobbler. I’ll admit that some of those birds get under my skin and I spend more of my season on them than I should.
But, nowadays I do have my limits. Whenever I start feeling antsy after working on a hung-up gobbler for a while (and this seems to occur somewhere during the second hour of the encounter), I cut my losses, leave the area as quietly as possible, and go look for another game. If there’s one gobbler in the area, there are others, and at some point things start sliding toward the life-is-too-short category.
After all, you’re not out there because turkey hunting is easy.
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