Tri-State Outdoor News

When it comes to turkey hunting, I like a classic hunt as much as the next guy. One where I can call as much as I want with the tom answering every time – often with multiple gobbles to the point where it sounds as if he is about to choke and strutting around like he owns the place. The reality, however, is that these types of hunts are few and far between.

With turkey hunting growing in popularity each year, Gobblers run into more and more hunters trying to sound like seductive hens therefore becoming more educated and tougher to hunt. Like it or not, one of the best ways to consistently tote a bird out of the woods over your shoulder is to hunt them more like deer. By this, I mean that careful scouting and patience will pay big dividends on tough toms. This is especially important if you are hunting smaller tracts of land that do not afford you the opportunity to run and gun thus covering lots of ground. More »

As turkey hunters, being the stealthy types that we are, we generally like to move in as close to the roost as we can in the hopes of getting our intended quarry to pitch down our way. However, invariably we will at some point or another attempt to get too close and end up bumping the bird off the roost. Heck, on one occasion, I no doubt got close enough – too close – only to watch the bird soar out of the tree right over my head.

Last season, I found myself in a situation in which I felt like I needed to get as close as possible to a particular bird. I had nearly killed him the night before in a picked corn field. I called him in from about 250 yards away as he was making his way across the field towards his roost tree. His only saving grace that evening was an extremely low flying jet that spooked him at the last minute – just as I was beginning to put some tension on the trigger. More »

Indiana hunters killed 610 wild turkeys during the 2008 fall wild turkey hunting season. Wild turkeys were killed in 57 of the 74 counties open to turkey hunting during the season, which ran from Oct. 1 to 19.

The 2008 season was Indiana’s fourth modern-day fall turkey hunting season. Hunters experienced a 4 percent increase in success when compared to the 585 turkeys taken during the 2007 fall turkey season. The record is 716 turkeys in 2005.

During the 14-day archery-only season, Oct. 1 to 14, hunters killed 132 turkeys, accounting for 22 percent of the total. The majority of the fall harvest occurred during the combined shotgun and archery season, Oct. 15 to 19, when hunters killed 478 turkeys, accounting for 78 percent of the total fall harvest. More »

If you ask any serious deer hunter the most important aspect to killing a mature buck, “Paying attention to wind direction” is likely the response you will get. Most hunters know that a deer’s sense of smell is it best defense – and the one on which it relies the most.

Well, over the years, I have found that wind direction can also play an important role in turkey hunting – although for a much different reason.

Turkeys don’t have the sense of smell of a deer. If they did, we would be lucky to ever kill one. But they do sometimes use the wind in order to help dictate their travel routes, especially gobblers who are searching for hens. More »

Editor’s note: The following was written by Dru Hunsinger who is inflected with Multiple Sclerosis. Once an avid hunter, Dru has reached a point where he can no longer hunt. With the aid of a special computer, Hunsinger has taken to putting his memories down on paper.

It was a cloudy, gray, cold day with a temperature of about 35 degrees . The wind was blowing at 20 mph and coming from the northwest. It was the second to the last day of muzzleloader season for deer. I had taken a doe with the crossbow earlier in the season and another doe during the shotgun season. I was hoping to bag the big buck that was running with a herd of seven does where I live in Shelby County.

Here, the woods are few and far between. The local farmers have cleared most of the woodlots except for some small ones here and there. When I talk to the old timers they tell me even before their time and as far back as the 1800’s a lot of the forests were gone. What would I give for the old days? More »

It’s cold now and your local deer herd has no doubt seen tremendous hunting pressure during the regular firearm, but that doesn’t mean you can’t put a notch in your deer tag yet this season. If you have the fortitude to tough it out during the late muzzle loader and/or archery seasons, success can still be yours if you concentrate on food sources.

In the first few days after the rut, bucks tend to hunker down and rest for a few days, moving very little. But once they get their legs back under them, they know that if they are going to survive the winter, they have to strap the feedbag on in order to gain back as much of the weight as they can that they lost during the rigors of the rut.

But late season food sources are not only good places to hunt for bucks but does visit them routinely too. The deer become more predictable during the late season, regularly visiting food sources each evening. More »