One of the most common mistakes turkey hunters make is to call too much. More important, they yelp too much and most hunters forget the most important aspect of yelping – timing or cadence. My followers already know I am not a fan of calling contests other than purely for entertainment. They are right there with hunting wild turkeys in meadows or fields rather than in the “Turkey Woods.”
Find and listen to wild turkeys every week of the year and you will gain a better understanding of what the turkeys, not the calling contest hunters, are trying to communicate. I can’t remember the number of times I sat and listened to real turkeys that sounded genuinely bad at yelping. The birds couldn’t even make the novice category. That said, the one common, unwavering denominator in real turkey yelping regardless of how bad the pitch and tone, the timing between yelps was exact.
If you want to improve your calling, especially to real turkeys, take out your telephone, sit in the woods and record the yelping of real turkeys. Then, play them back and try to duplicate, exactly the timing of those yelps using your favorite device. Record your practice in the wild, especially if you use a mouth diaphragm. Hunters can’t hear their diaphragm yelping any better than they can hear their own voice, unless they record it at a distance. We learned in our first ever seminars, “don’t move, don’t move, don’t move” Add to that chant, “timing, timing, timing.”
