Late season can be a great season

It has been a strange spring, cold and wet and relatively turkey free. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are still plenty of turkeys out there -- maybe even more than if past three weeks had been more seasonable.

I've always been a fan of the late season, and here in Michigan that means Hunt 234. It's a long hunt period with a guaranteed tag that offers some flexibility and the option of hunting just about anywhere I might choose.

That's pretty appealing, but there comes a point every spring in which I find myself sitting under a tree with a sore back, sleep-deprived eyes and yet another gobbler hung up with hens just out of gun range. It's at that point when I think about my choice of season, almost always recalling a hunt earlier in the year in which the gobbler hammered at every call and practically ran into the stream of No. 6 shot from a buddy's gun.

"Guaranteed"? How cruel. The tag, maybe. Success? Hardly.

Late-season turkey hunting can be downright frustrating. But it can also produce some of the most exciting and rewarding turkey hunts you'll find. It's all a matter of weather, timing and the level of hunting pressure the turkeys you're calling have faced.

Turkeys are, by their nature, almost impossible to really figure out. Sure, they all share some common traits and patterns of behavior. But they are not a bird that can be truly deciphered. They do what they want, when they want to do it.

And if you think that just because you sat in a deer shack on the edge of a field for the last three seasons and shot a turkey as it walked past, that turkey hunting is easy, I suggest you stop reading.

That's not the type of turkey hunting I'm talking about. I'm talking about turkey hunting the way many turkey hunting fanatics insist is the only real way: Making a gobbler come to the call.

And that ain't easy.

Early in the spring season, gobblers are ready to rock but the hens are just starting to be receptive. That's a dynamite combination for calling gobblers in.

As the spring progresses, however, more and more hens will enter the breeding phase and competition for those hens will be minimal. There are plenty of hens to go around and when a gobbler has a hen willing and waiting, he's not going to look around much.

Generally, that peak breeding phase will hit right about the time Hunt 234 season begins. And that creates more than one problem.

Obviously, when gobblers have all the hens they need they're very tough to call in off the roost. Hens will be roosted very close by and the toms won't have to gobble much to attract them. Most of the time, those gobblers will fire off just a few times before hitting the ground and there will be hens right there with them. In that situation, you're done. Unless you've somehow put yourself in their path of travel, the game is over.

As the spring progresses, a subtle change happens. Hens will begin to nest and spend more of the day incubating eggs. That leaves lonely gobblers during midday. Early morning hunts will still be a challenge but midday opportunities increase.

Trouble is most guys simply refuse to hunt after 9 a.m. Everybody loves to hunt the roost in the morning; it's the quintessential turkey hunt.

But in doing so, hunters try to force a result. We call too much, too loud and too long. The frustration factor plays a major role. We can hear gobblers. We can often see gobblers. But they won't come in. Thus we call. And call.

All that does is serve to make those turkeys pressured and sensitive to calling. No matter how much you call, no matter how sweet you sound, the odds of calling in a gobbler with hens in tow are very slim.

"Later in the season when the foliage is on and the gobblers are with hens on the roost, you have to let your woodsmanship skills put you in a position to kill that turkey," said Michael Waddell, host of Realtree Roadtrips and one of turkey hunting's biggest names. "You can slip right in on them in the dark if you're careful and you know the land. And that's about the only chance you have when the turkeys are really henned up off the roost. You need to get close and call them in before the hens get to them."

Waddell said he doesn't think excessive calling will impact turkeys as much as you might think, but incorrect calling will.

"Turkeys call a lot. Listen to wild turkeys in the woods and you'll hear that they call more than you think they do. But they're not always calling real loud or aggressively. Sometimes, like during the peak breeding phase, they do get loud and aggressive," Waddell said. "But the thing that you have to do is have good turkey rhythm. The realism you put in the call is the difference. If you have the correct cadence and rhythm, that's the key thing. The way you sound isn't as important as the rhythm. And you need to know a little bit about how the turkeys call at the time of year you're hunting them."

Waddell, like most turkey hunters, admits that he loves to be set up on a gobbler first thing in the morning. But he also stresses that most roost hunts don't play out as planned.

"Midday hunting can be awesome later in the spring when those hens start to sit," he said. "That's when you'll find those lonely gobblers out looking for love."

It's important to remember that hens will likely play a factor in just about every outing, but it's possible to use that to your advantage.

For instance, if you know several gobblers are using a field during the midmorning hours to strut and court a group of hens, consider using a larger spread of decoys. Most turkey hunters will employ a single hen or perhaps a hen and a jake decoy.

Late in the spring, try using several hens and and jakes along with a strutting gobbler decoy. There will certainly be times when the decoys backfire and send a longbeard scurrying, particularly one that may have had a run-in with a hunter using decoys earlier in the spring.

But sometimes the social tendencies of turkeys will get the better of them. A gobbler with several hens will often follow the hens into the decoy spread as hens generally flock together in late spring. Other times, the large spread will entice a "satellite" gobbler away from a larger flock of turkeys in which he may not be the dominant longbeard.

Understanding the amount of hunting pressure that a property has seen is important. Late in the spring, I will call fairly aggressively. If I can get a gobbler to answer, I've found that I have more success in reeling the bird in if I continue to pour on the coals and keep that tom as hot as possible. However, if I'm in an area that I know had heavy hunting pressure -- public lands, for instance -- I'm more likely to scale back on my calling and try to subtly coax the gobbler in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's just the way it goes.

Late-season turkey hunting also poses another set of challenges when summerlike weather begins. As the final days of the spring season unfold, we're likely to see pretty steamy temperatures and plenty of rain. That's the perfect combination for unleashing the season's worst mosquito crop.

Don't even think about hitting the woods in late May without some sort of insect control. The ThermaCell unit is my first and last choice. I can't stand the smell of most sprays and when you're humping around chasing gobblers, you're going to sweat bug spray into your eyes.

Ouch.

The ThermaCell unit looks like an oversized TV remote. It uses a butane-powered cartridge to fuel a small burner that warms a special pad saturated with something mosquitoes can't stand. The thing works.

But the warm weather and rain aren't all bad news. It also makes the foliage pop, and you can use that to your advantage. You can not only sneak a whole lot closer to the roost tree before first light, you can use the green understory to maneuver on turkeys much more effectively.

The late season has its virtues and challenges. But, hey, this is turkey hunting. It's never easy.