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There are two common ways hunters try and harvest a gobbler during the spring season.
The first is to quietly sneak into an area where turkeys are known to visit and wait for the birds to arrive. Many times hunters who use this strategy will have a blind set up overlooking where they expect the turkeys.
The other is to enter the woods and listen for gobbles. Once a hunter hears a gobble, no matter if the bird is still in the roost or on the ground, it is time to quickly and quietly sneak as close as they can to that location. After picking good cover, the hunter will call and try to draw the gobbler within shotgun range.
While these two methods are very different, both can be effective.
The hunters overlooking a field or open area typically will deploy one or more decoys to help bring the birds into the open for an easy shot. Run and gun hunters work on more of a case-by-case basis if they rely on decoys.
Over the years I have shot gobblers on various landscapes from hills near a field to the very stony side of a mountain. But I have never downed a bird with the aid of a decoy.
If you look under my bed at my cabin you would find an old, foam hen decoy I purchased as a young hunter. At the time, there were not many options in the decoy market. In fact, the one that permanently resides under my bed and others that look nearly as bad were the only ones stocked on local sporting goods store shelves.
My hunting consisted of trying to track down birds in the woods and get close to them. This meant a lot of movement and beating a turkey to a certain location. Needless to say, I usually did not have time to deploy a decoy or wanted to make the extra sounds it would require.
Eastern turkeys are one of the smartest animals that hunters pursue. Inexperienced hunters are always told that the slightest move will send an alert tom running the other way. Yet, they are constantly shocked when a turkey tears off in the opposite direction after seeing a hunter slightly rotate his totally covered face from 50 yards away.
If they are so smart, why do decoys work? That's a fair question.
Decoys are used while hunting turkeys for the same reasons they are used for other types of hunting such as predators and waterfowl. Hunters put the plastic animals where they can be seen by the live ones to draw them into a specific area where a shot can be taken.
When used in a field or open area, it also just makes sense to have something to represent the turkey that is doing the calling. Many hunters will tell you that a gobbler can come in hot and heavy looking for a hen, but when they get to a location where they believe that bird should be and it is not there, they do not stick around and ask questions.
As I previously stated, our local eastern turkeys have developed far better survival skills when it comes avoiding hunters than that of birds in the rest of the country. This can be easily seen when watching one of the countless turkey hunting shows airing each week on various outdoor channels.
These shows are basically all the same: The hunters pick a spot, put out a decoy or two and call. Soon they show some gobblers calmly walking into the decoy. Most of the time the gobbler stands around or slowly circles the plastic bird until the shot is finally taken.
That does not happen often in Penn's Woods. Our birds have evolved into survival experts that use their memory, the landscape and exception sight and hearing to quickly flee any situation they feel is threatening.
The main reason our birds have become tougher to hunt is the amount of hunting pressure they have received for decades. Each morning a gobbler could hear several different hunters calling and walking through the woods. This forced the gobblers to stop calling and become nearly unhuntable for periods of time.
The TV shows are filmed in locations where birds live in high numbers and experience little pressure. With little fears of hunters, capturing a good hunt on video takes a lot less work than it would in a mountainous setting.
These shows also are basically commercials for decoy companies. Today, there is such a wide variety of decoys on the market, these hunts can help try to persuade turkey enthusiast which way lean when spending their hard earned money.
The 21st-century decoys are very lifelike and a tremendous upgrade from the foam one I store with my boots under my bed. Those made by previously famed waterfowl decoy makers like Dave Smith and Fred Zink look so real they could easily fool an untrained eye.
In fact, I'm surprised there are not more incidents with careless hunters shooting decoys now that they have become so lifelike. Along with the perfect colors and contours, today's decoys can hold actual turkey fans taken from harvest birds as the makers keep pushing the envelope to be the best.
Some makers are taking the decoy making game to the extreme. I saw a video last year of a decoy that is made for hunters to hold in front of them as they try to walk to a turkey before dropping the decoy and shooting it.
Motorized decoys have also appeared on the scene. While not legal in Pennsylvania, other states allow the aid of battery powered decoys on hunts. Some hunters have set up decoys on a track that appears to be a strutting tom. Some hunters also actually use a decoy on top of a remote controlled car to drive the decoy around a field to give lifelike movement that a stationary decoy obviously cannot.
I am not sure what the next step is on the decoy revolution, but I know I likely will not using one. Instead, I will continue the time-honored Pennsylvania turkey hunting traditions of battling our local birds with nothing more than a call, a shotgun and some camouflage.
Be careful out in the woods this spring gobbler season. Make sure to always identify your target before you accidently shoot at a plastic decoy and the hunter sitting near it. It should never happen, but it unfortunately continues to do so.