Turkey Hunting with Bo Pitman of White Oak Plantation
Stingy Calling
 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.
I’ve been accused of being stingy with my turkey
calling, which isn’t really a fair accusation.
I’m not stingy with my calling, because if the
situation calls for it, I’ll call as much as needed
to get that turkey to come in to my hunter. Every morning
of turkey hunting is different, and that’s the
reason I love it so much. If the turkeys are really
vocal, you have to call a lot, if you’re going
to take a turkey. However, this far down South, turkeys
are generally not very vocal. So most of the time, I’m
not very vocal with my calling. Many turkey hunters
overcall turkeys. In our section of the country, generally,
turkeys don’t like to do a lot of talking. You
have to remember that the turkeys we’re hunting
in this part of the Southeast have been hunted for many
generations. These turkeys aren’t dumb. All the
good gobbling turkeys die at a very young age. Therefore,
the only birds often left to breed the hens are the
gobblers that don’t gobble much. I only want to
call enough to let the turkey know where I am, a nd
that I’m interested in him. Once he gobbles back
and starts closing the distance between me and him,
I won’t call. The purpose of calling is to get
the turkey to come to you. Once he starts moving toward
you, don’t really need to call to him again. I
don’t want to call any more than absolutely necessary
to get that turkey to come to me. Many times, if you
call to the turkey that’s already coming to you,
it will stop him. That old gobbler will stop and start
looking for that hen and say to himself, “I’m
close enough to her that I should be able to see her.
I’m also close enough that she should be strolling
over to see me. Now, since I don’t see her, and
she’s not coming to me, something’s wrong.
I may just need to go find me another date.”
The turkey also can hang up out of range until he sees
you and then leave. The only time I’ll call to
a turkey coming to me is when I believe he’s not
sure of where I am. Maybe he’s coming too far
to my left or to my right, and he hasn’t exactly
pinpointed from where the calling is coming. If you
don’t call enough to let a turkey get a dead bead
on where you are, he’ll walk past you, and you’ll
never see him. Now, turkeys are really good at pinpointing
from where a hen call’s coming. But they’re
not perfect. They don’t always get the exact spot
where the call’s coming from in their brain, so
they may not walk a straight line to the call. It doesn’t
take but a slight misdirection on the turkey’s
part for him to walk past you and out of range. When
you call, you have to make sure the turkey has a pretty
good bead on where you’re sitting. If he’s
drifting off course, you may have to call again so that
he can exactly pinpoint where he wants to come to see
the hen (you). 
A fiberglass call’s my favorite because you can
use it successfully, even if rain’s falling. I
call in the majority of turkeys using a simple two-
or three-note yelp, and if I see a gobbler straying
off course, I usually can get him turned around and
headed toward me and my hunter with nothing more than
one or two soft clucks. Sometimes, I’ve had to
give a cackle, a fighting purr or really-excited calls
to get a tom’s attention. Remember, every turkey’s
different, so you never know exactly how you’ll
have to call, or when you’ll have to call to the
individual turkey you’re working that day. The
majority of the time, really-soft yelping will pull
most gobblers within gun range. One of the questions
I’m asked most often is, “Bo, why do you
walk through the woods with your hands in your pockets?”
The simple answer is most of the time when I’m
hunting, my hands are cold, and if I put them in my
pockets, they stay warm. Too, if you walk with your
hands in your pockets instead of using them to reach,
grab, move or swing by your side, you look less like
a hunter and more like a tree. There is less motion
for a turkey to see when your hands aren’t flopping
out to the sides of your body. Also, if you come around
a curve in a road, over a ridge top or step out into
open woods, and a turkey spies you before you spy him,
you look more like a tree, a stump or some piece of
timber than you resemble a hunter. Many times you won’t
spook a turkey as much, if you spook him at all.
I’m also really conscious about where my feet
will be, and how much noise they’ll make as I
walk through the woods. I like to wear thin-soled boots
so I can feel everything under my feet. This way, I
don’t break limbs or make as much noise as the
people who walk on gravel or drag their feet through
the leaves .
Remember that turkeys have good hearing. As you’re
walking through the woods, they can identify a hunter
by the way he walks, especially if he’s making
too much noise. I don’t want to sound like a human
when I’m walking through the woods. Another question
I’m often asked is “Bo, what’s your
favorite call?” One of my favorite calls, especially
when a turkey’s in close, is scratching in the
leaves. I’ll scratch-up just about as many turkeys
as I call-up. If I can get away with scratching in the
leaves without a turkey seeing me, then I’ll scratch
in the leaves. Scratching in the leaves is the most-natural
sound a turkey will ever hear. Even when hens aren’t
vocal, they’ll scratch in the leaves. When a gobbler
hears scratching, he assumes there’s another turkey
nearby and will go looking for the bird. Scratching
in the leaves is another confidence builder that lets
the gobbler know there really is a hen where he heard
calling. Even though he may not be able to see the hen,
he has to believe she’s there because he hears
what he thinks is her scratching in the leaves. Scratching
in the leaves is especially effective late in the morning
when the turkeys have stopped talking to each other.
If you do a lot of calling later in the morning, many
times, you’ll spook more gobblers than you’ll
call in to you. But, if you’re close enough to
a gobbler that he can hear you scratching in the leaves,
then scratching in the leaves will be a much-more effective
way to get him to come in to within gun range than calling
will be. I’ve had toms hung up and gobbling their
brains out knowing that when they gobble, that hen’s
supposed to come to them. When she doesn’t come
to him, and she just keeps scratching in the leaves
just out of sight, those old gobblers will get really
mad and emotionally displaced. They finally get so mad
and so upset about this stupid hen that they’ll
won’t come to see her. Many times they’ll
just walk over to where they think she should be, and
that’s when my hunter squeezes the trigger.
For more information on hunting at White Oak Plantation,
call (334) 727-9258, or visit www.whiteoakplantation.com,
or email hunt@whiteoakplantation.com.
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