When the spring woods green up, turkey hunters who adjust their approach to mesh with the changing vegetation are the ones who go home successful. Photo by Michael Skinner

Spring turkey season is a time of change -- which in part explains the difficulty of the game that is turkey hunting. If things would stay the same from beginning to end, maybe more hunters could get a better handle on it.

But things don’t stay the same. Typically, turkey seasons open when the woods -- and often the temperatures -- seem more wintry than springlike; just as typically, conditions by the end of the season often resemble those of summer, with foliage dense and green and the days sultry and humid.

The turkeys themselves go through shifts every bit as dramatic. Emerging from winter segregated into uniform flocks of hens, jakes or longbeards --groupings often still intact when the season opens -- the birds quickly pass through several predictable phases: spring break-up, complete with fighting and resetting of the pecking order; the first peak of gobbling, when gobblers are ready but hens aren’t; the prime mating period, when hens and gobblers see eye to eye and gobbling almost ceases; the lingering lull after most of the mating is accomplished, when the gobblers still follow the hens around and will gobble at you but will rarely leave the hens; the nesting period, when the hens start slipping away to their nests and the gobblers become more vulnerable in the middle reaches of the day; the second peak of gobbling, when the hens are incubating and the lonely gobblers are trying to locate some more female companionship; and finally, the wind-down period, when a combination of increasing day length, increasing temperatures and discouragement results in a gradual cessation of gobbling as the toms begin to reestablish bachelor groups.

That long, very complicated sentence describes a long, very complicated vernal ritual. Unfortunately, the ritual’s predictability doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. Hunters must continually revise their thinking and their game plans -- even, in some instances, their camo patterns -- just to stay in this game.

EARLY-SEASON STRATEGIES
Some states begin their turkey seasons too early. As a result (unless spring comes ahead of schedule), opening-day hunters find themselves taking to the woods before the birds are ready. If you’re a turkey hunter, you want to be there on opening day whether the turkeys are ready or not, because at least some gobbling will be heard, and sometimes a lot. But the gobblers will still be still hanging out together, and won’t be very receptive to hen calling.

Dealing with these early birds is more a matter of being where they want to be, and getting there before they do. It’s basically a deer hunter’s game plan: scout, anticipate, ambush. Calling is often useful for locating gobblers, because they’ll gobble at hen calls even when they’re still in bachelor groups. But only rarely will one come to hen calling in the way that we’d like for him to do.

Imitating gobblers by means of more-subtle clucks and coarse, short yelps is usually better for closing the deal on one of these late-winter/early-spring turkeys (assuming, of course, that you’ve followed the advice in the preceding paragraph and are calling from a likely place). “There are only two places you can call a turkey to,” an old turkey hunter told me one time when I was a struggling newcomer. “You can call him to where he’s already going, or you can call him to a place he doesn’t mind being.”