Turkey Hunting with Bo Pitman of White Oak Plantation
Understanding Turkey Time
 Editor’s
Note: Bo Pitman can’t remember when he hasn’t
hunted turkeys. For more than 20 years, he’s guided
and hunted turkeys at White Oak Plantation near Tuskegee,
Alabama, a 30,000-acre-plus hunting lodge that has some
of the best turkey hunting in the nation. From March
14th to the end of April, Pitman’s in the woods
of White Oak hunting turkeys every day. With stands
of hardwood timber, pine plantations and fields dispersed
throughout the property, White Oak’s ideal habitat
for the Eastern wild turkey. Each season, 30 to 50 hunters
bag from 35 to 55 turkeys off this property. I don’t
know any other place in the nation with more gobbling
Eastern turkeys than White Oak. This week, we’ll
ask Pittman what’s required to take a longbeard,
and what we need to know to increase our odds for taking
gobblers this spring.
To really learn how to hunt a turkey and have a great
hunt, you have to hunt on turkey  time,
not your time. Turkey time means when we leave the lodge,
my hunter and I aren’t concerned about anything
but finding and taking the turkey. We’re not worried
about getting back to the lodge to eat lunch or dinner,
make a phone call, meet up with buddies or do anything
else but hunt turkeys. Regardless of how long we have
to hunt and what we have to do, we intend to kill a
turkey that day, and we don’t let any outside
distractions interfere with the time we have to spend
hunting that turkey. When you’re hunting turkeys,
you never know what you’ll have to do, when you’ll
have to do it, or how long you’ll need to get
into a position to take a turkey. In the real world,
people like to compartmentalize their time. They have
day planners, schedulers and specific tasks they try
to perform in a certain time. But to be an effective
turkey hunter, you absolutely can’t have that
mindset. If you do, you’re doomed to fail. For
example, if you hear a turkey gobble, and you call to
that turkey, in your mind, you’ve made a decision
of about how long it should take for that turkey to
reach you. If that turkey doesn’t get to w here
you are in the time you think he should, you start thinking
you should move, or call more or perhaps the turkey
has left. When you start thinking like that, you’re
no longer operating on the turkey’s time, because
that turkey decides when he’ll reach where he’s
going, and what he’ll do when he gets there. You
have to be patient enough to let that turkey decide
what he’ll do and where he’ll go, and only
after he’s made his decision can you decide what
you need to do to try and take him.
Now, making a turkey do anything is hard. A turkey
will do what a turkey wants to do. A hunter has to take
his directions from what that turkey decides rather
than trying to make that turkey do what the hunter wants
him to do. You can call and scratch in the leaves to
entice him or give him a reason to come to you. But
the bottom line on turkey hunting is that a turkey will
do what he wants to do, and if you’re not in tune
with what  that
turkey wants to do, you won’t take him home for
supper. You can’t give a turkey an order as you
can your children, or the people you work with and expect
that turkey to do what you tell him to do. The best
turkey hunters I’ve ever been with are hunters
who say, “Okay, Bo. I don’t have anything
on my mind today but you, me and that turkey. I’ll
do whatever you ask me to do from daylight until dark
to get this turkey.” Now, that’s a real
turkey hunter, and that’s a turkey hunter who’s
hunting on turkey time. Turkey time also means making
the decision before you leave the lodge that you may
have to wade in a creek up to your armpits, crawl across
a cow pasture with fresh cow dung, snake your way through
a briar thicket, stay out in the rain until after dark
or walk further than you want to walk. Whatever’s
between you and the turkey, you have to be willing to
go to reach a place where you have a reasonable chance
to take that turkey. One of the most-critical elements
to my hunters’ abilities to take turkeys when
they hunt with me is that they make the deliberate decisions
that on this day, in this place, they’ll be on
turkey time.
For more information on hunting at White Oak Plantation,
call (334) 727-9258, or visit www.whiteoakplantation.com
or email hunt@whiteoakplantation.com.
Tomorrow: Stuff You’ve
Gotta Have
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