EP292 How To Hunt Turkeys In The Rain

How do you hunt turkeys in the rain? Is it even worth your time to try? On this episode I talk about how rain impacts turkey behavior and I work to help you determine if and how hunting turkeys in the rain could work for you.

Rain significantly impacts turkey behavior, however, that does not mean you cannot hunt them. In fact, you can use their change in behavior to your advantage if you plan well and have the right kinds of hunting habitat available to you.

While neither turkeys nor much else moves in heavy rain, they will move in light to moderate rain, and of course all heavy rain eventually ends. If the weather is very bad, birds may not leave the roost, or if they have already flown down, they may hunker down in thick cover if the storm is bad enough. But once the weather breaks, they will begin to move again, looking for food and company.

The rain creates a lot of noise and reduces the effectiveness of a turkey’s hearing to keep it safe. So, the birds often move to larger open areas where they can see for long distances in order to detect predators by sight. And after the rain ends, the trees still drip so turkeys will move into open areas to begin drying out faster. These could be fields, clearings, burned areas, gas line roads, food plots, etc.

So, you want to try and identify these areas that the birds will move to and get their first if possible or arrive just before the rain lets up. The good news is that if the weather is very bad, you can arrive in the woods hours later and be present when the birds begin moving mid-day. 

People often assume hunting blinds are the answer for poor weather. These have pros and cons. Yes, a pop-up blind can keep you dry and comfortable and keep your calls and gear dry and effective. That is great. But blinds are most often placed in areas that are good turkey hunting spots for fair weather. Often these are not very productive foul weather spots. So, while the blind is a great resource, if the rain turns a good location into a bad location, then you may be better off just staying home or moving out on foot.

Personally, I do not like to hunt rainy days because of the extra gear challenges that rain causes for turkey hunting. But if it’s a Saturday I will still likely go out because those days are fixed, I only have so many weekends in any given turkey season. However, if I am taking time off work and it’s raining, I may reschedule my day off for better weather. If I can shift the day easily, it can be more enjoyable to hunt a nice weather day.

Ultimately you need to decide for yourself if going out on a rainy day is a good idea for you and your hunting style. Listen to the full episode to hear all the details!

 

EP291 How To Scout Turkeys With Maps & Apps

Maps and apps are all the rage but how you can effectively use them to scout for turkey hunting? The unavoidable truth is you must put boots on the ground to scout for turkeys effectively. But these tools can help you focus your time on the most promising areas. On this episode I talk about how to read maps and find the ideal landmarks that signify good spots to go and check out.

The single most important part of turkey hunting is picking an area that holds turkeys. If there are no turkeys nearby then it doesn’t matter how good your gear is, how expensive your TSS ammo may be, or how skilled of a caller you are, you will not be taking any turkeys. They must be there. And using maps and apps can help you save time. In truth nothing about this is new, it’s just done digitally vs. on paper. Old time turkey hunters used these same tactics to find good hunting spots. 

Using maps and apps for scouting turkeys is all about knowing what to look for, or rather what can be seen from a satellite photo or topography lines. Understanding how to read a map is critical to doing this but this podcast episode is not on the subject of map reading but rather using the knowledge gleaned from the map.

In order to locate ideal turkey hunting habitat, you must look for numerous features that intersect in close proximity. The first thing I look for is clearings. Turkeys like open spaces in the spring, natural or man-made. They want to be able to see each other and see predators at a distance and often they will spend a portion of the day in these open spaces. They prefer full clearings but will settle for open spaces in the woods, such as under mature oak trees.

Once I find open spaces, I begin looking for water. Turkeys do need to drink periodically but the bigger reason I want to find water is because soft wet ground holds turkey tracks and makes their presence easier to detect. Streams and possibly even better, muddy puddles, make it easy to see turkey tracks, which can give you a very important indicator that they are in the area. And if they are in the area, you can hunt them. You can also setup trail cameras around tracks to get more information about how often and when they are in the area. This intel can help you pick and prioritize spots. 

Streams and clearings are easy to see from satellite images, and often map apps will overlay stream info onto these images to make it easier to see them. To hear about the other things you want to look for, listen to the full podcast episode.

 

EP290 Good Bye Self-Righteous Turkey Hunting Culture!

Turkey hunting today is plagued with opinionated self-righteous snobbery about what is right, what is ethical, and what is fun. But there is nothing objective to it. It is just a cauldron of bubbling highbrow tradition, group think, and mythology stirred together. On this episode I cut through the junk that is destroying our sport to help people break away from the judgmental constrictions of our culture. 

There are legal boundaries that frame the sport of turkey hunting, established by experts who have the birds’ best interests in mind. That gives us a strong framework to guide our hunting. Furthermore, we have some ethics established to help minimize animal suffering, maximize hunter safety, and ensure fair chase. But many of things people claim to be ethics are not, they are just simple opinions based on what they like, how they prefer to hunt, and how they want other people to follow their own protocols to make things better for them. 

Sometimes people are just plain selfish and try to pressure others to abide by regulations that limit them so the selfish hunter doesn’t have to work as hard, or they can hunt in ways that would normally not be effective.  Sometimes people have just been doing something a certain way for so long, they don’t want to see change. Other times new innovations come along, like TSS ammunition and people resist the innovation and the new capabilities that come with it and try to malign early adopters. They don’t want to hunt with tungsten ammo so no one should. And all of this gets pass off as “what makes a real turkey hunter”, or what is ethical, or perhaps unfounded rumors are started to dissuade people from experimenting with other strategies. 

No matter how it happens, many people are ostracized, especially on the internet, when they don’t conform to the snobbish cultural turkey hunting norms.  This podcast episode tackles this nonsense head on. I cover topics like how far is it ethical to shoot a turkey? Is TSS ammo wounding birds? Is it wrong to get pellets in the breast meat of a turkey? Is long range shooting really not fun? And why people think 101 things should be outlawed when it comes to turkey hunting.

Some of these things are simply senseless fabrications, others have data we point to in order to find clarity, and some are just garden variety opinions that have no merit and not of importance to anyone else. We need to stop shaming turkey hunters for having fun and hunting in the way they find most fun. 

 

EP289 How To Set A Realistic Annual Hunting Budget

If there is one sure thing about hunting, is it that you are going to spend money. It is best to acknowledge that from the beginning, to count the cost, and to plan for the expense, and then stick to that budget. On this episode I talk about how to set a realistic yearly hunting budget no matter what your income. This is for new hunters, lifelong hunters, and everyone in between.

When I first started hunting, I had no idea what I was getting into financially. It took me years to begin to even think about the annual costs, let alone start to budget for them. But of course, there is more to the cost of hunting than just that. There are two primary types of expenses when it comes to hunting, the fixed costs needed just to go into the woods and take game every year, and then the discretionary costs of everything else we buy.

Lots of things contribute to the cost of hunting, depending on the game we are after. If you are hunting deer, you will likely use a tree stand or a hunting blind of some sort, those have costs and don’t last forever. Maybe you need to replace them every 3-5 years, maybe every 5-10 years, but you will need new ones at some point. When it comes to waterfowl hunting, waders and decoys are the same way, when it comes to turkey hunting you have calls and vest that wear out.

No matter what you hunt, you will have clothing and other standard gear that will wear out and need replaced eventually. Many of these things you can plan for, accrue for, so you are not caught off guard. And there all the new shiny things that you must have, this is where costs can quickly multiply. So how do you budget for the necessities and the nice to haves in a way that makes sense for your level of hunting devotion and your income?

In this podcast episode I get into the nitty gritty details of how to take all of these things into account and build a smart sustainable annual hunting budget that will enable you to pay for the things needed to hunt, set aside funds for things that need replaced, and put some money away so you can buy upgrades and new fun things from time to time. The biggest trick to all of it is counting the costs, being realistic, and sticking to your budget without steeling from other areas of your life to buy more and more stuff.

It took me a few years to even begin to realize how much money I was pouring into hunting. I did not understand all of the costs or all of the things I chose to add on because I was not paying attention to the expenses, or where the funds came from that I used for hunting equipment. 

If you’ve never had a hunting budget, you may be surprised to learn that you can end up spending a lot less money by setting aside money for hunting. How can this be? Listen to the whole podcast episode to find out!

Let me also say, I am not an accountant or a financial planner. I am just a regular guy who has learned some simple financial principles over the years that anyone can put into practice to help set and keep to a reasonable budget that can cover all of your hunting costs and expenses from the must haves to the nice to haves. All it takes is a little bit of focus and discipline and you can both save money and be relieved to never need to think about where you’ll pull the money for your general hunting expenses again. 

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