When it gets light enough to see, I'll let out a few hen calls that immediately elicit thunderous gobbles. We've all been in this situation. The textbook says the gobbler should fly off the roost and run right to me, right? What normally happens, however, is the bird gobbles its head off until it flies down and then I never hear another peep.

A few years ago, one of my turkey-hunting buddies told me how he makes this situation end with a turkey in his game bag. The night before he intends to hunt, he goes out to a likely roosting area. When he hears a gobbler sound off from the roost, he goes directly to the spot where he plans to hunt the next morning and lets out a few hen calls to let the gobbler know he's there.

The next morning, my buddy will go to that same spot before daylight, put out his decoy and sit down. When daylight arrives, he doesn't make a sound. More often than not, my buddy says, the gobbler he talked to the night before will fly off the roost and walk over to him to see if the "hen" he heard the night before is still there.

SAFETY IN NUMBERS
For decades, goose hunters have known that when the birds get wary, one of the best tactics waterfowlers can employ to draw birds into shotgun range is to put out more decoys.

Tom Neumann, co-owner of Penn's Woods Game Calls, sometimes applies that theory to spring gobbler hunting.

"I've been on turkey hunts where nothing that I tried seem to work," Neumann said. "After all, by the second week, they have heard all the calling they care to hear from obnoxious cackling to fighting purrs. By then they have also seen the typical hen and jake combination or even the old jake mounting the hen setup."

That's when Neumann believes there's safety in numbers. Frustrated one year by a series of difficult gobblers, Neumann decided to put out every turkey decoy he owned. The first gobbler that spotted the fake flock walked right in front of his gun barrel.

"Plain and simple, the sight of other turkeys -- or decoys when used by hunters -- reinforce what the turkeys expect to find when they approach your calling location," Neumann said. "When they don't see anything, they often hang up. How many times do they approach a hunter's calling location to find five or more turkey decoys? I know it sounds crazy, but it has worked for me on numerous occasions when done with good, effective calling."

THE BUDDY SYSTEM
The hunt I described at the beginning of this article is a demonstration of the Buddy System. Essentially, the buddy system is a two-man ambush tactic. When you locate a gobbler, post the shooter in a spot that's likely to yield a shot. That person does no calling.

The other hunter will act as the caller. He starts out calling 10 yards or so behind the shooter and then moves farther back if the gobbler doesn't move closer to the shooter.

The idea is that you want to fool the gobbler into thinking the hen he's calling to is moving away from him. This tactic is lethal when you encounter a gobbler that hangs up either out of sight or out of gun range.