KENN BRODY
Licensed Turkey Harvester
Not A Butterball
From the numbers
There are about 800,000 wild turkeys in Pennsylvania. PA issues turkey tags to about 250,000 hunters each year, and these hunters actually take about 60,000 birds. Half of these birds are taken in the spring, half in the fall. On a first analysis, the success rate for a hunter taking a spring gobbler is about 12%. Many hunters do not bother to hunt turkeys, even though they get a turkey tag, and some turkeys are “poached”, which means, according to PA, they were taken without turkey tags. The chances of taking a spring turkey in PA is more like 10%, where the success rate for deer is over 50%. Most hunters surveyed think the turkeys are too wary and claim they have tried for years and never taken a turkey at all.
Some areas support a higher turkey population or they may be more accessible.
Tioga County is on the Allegheny Plateau, which is at the cold winter limit of turkey survival. Snowfall is heavy and the nighttime winter temperatures are around 6 F. Summer time temperatures are in the 70’s and lower 80’s, with the usual variations due to altitude and terrain.
Tioga County is one of the least favorable habitats for turkeys because of the climate and the rugged terrain dominated by old-growth forests. Deer have eaten all the forbs and nibbled all the most productive hickory and oak shoots so that hickory nuts and acorns, a turkey’s favorite foods, are not as plentiful.
First Person account of Hunt in Tioga County
There are people who seem to think that the general landscape of the United Staes is somewhat like New York City or its extensive suburbs. Much of PA is pristine wilderness. You can travel ten miles in any direction from Stony Creek and see nothing more than a rare Amish farm or a hunting shack. There are few paved roads. The cell phones read “no signal”. You won’t find a restaurant, certainly not a McDonald’s. Many roads cross streams where there are no bridges — just put the truck in 4-wheel drive, ford the stream in your Ford, and climb up the bank on the other side.
The locals call them “hollers”. A hollow is a narrow cleft between nearly sheer 2000 foot high hogback ridges. The ridges look like the bony plates on a stegosaurus back, but with green fur. There may be a creek at the bottom and it will disgorge its clear waters into Pine Creek and eventually into the Susquehanna River. Dead Hollow, Ghost Hollow and Food Hollow are real names. The headless horseman came from somewhere near here.
The ridges are steep and generally unclimbable, but heavily forested in mature pine, hemlock, oak, birch and red maple. I followed a game trail from our primitive campsite. It started off as an ATV trail before it got too steep for ATV’s. About halfway up and just after dawn I entered a cloud forest. Everything dripped moisture and the ground cover was 100%, a mix of ferns, shoots and shrubs that make a dense layer under the tree canopy. That ground is rough, uneven, and there is deadfall and ditches everywhere. I could not go more than few steps into that forest without a serious climb over some obstacle. That is not a comfortable thing to do when you are carrying a loaded 12-gauge shotgun and other hunting paraphernalia. I climbed for miles looking for a certain grove of pines where the turkeys were supposed to roost. There were many groves that met the description that the land owner gave me, so I climbed all over that ridge all morning.
By 7 A.M. I was in some sort of position to make a stand. There was a grove of pine trees. There was a patch of fairly open ground splashed with light from the Easterly sun. I parked my ass behind a deadfall root and waited until the zone of silence that seemed to follow my blaze orange hunter’s hat began once more to be penetrated by bird call and forest sounds. It was penetrated by midges and mosquitos long before that happened.
I pulled out my patented slate turkey call and scraped out a few fingernail-on-blackboard yelps, cuts and clucks. They sounded just like the ones I heard on YouTube. I believe turkeys know more about how a turkey sounds on YouTube than I do about how a real turkey sounds. I never actually heard a real turkey. It may be that gobblers were screeching away trying desperately to communicate with my ersatz turkey. Besides not exactly knowing what to listen for, I’m a bit hard of hearing. Neither of those mattered much, because after the calling and the listening, I started sneezing, and that more of less cleared the wildlife for at least a mile. Even without YouTube, turkeys know that a human squatting on a dead tree root and sneezing is probably clutching a shotgun and should be avoided.
However, the sneezing did flush out a fine doe, who proceeded to thumb her nose at me and leap off to a quieter neighborhood. She knew it was not deer season.
I decided to move to another location and start all over again. Some of those trails had bear scat, but even bears refused to climb the semi-vertical wet and slippery ones that I followed. I thought that I heard a turkey up there.
Putting my back up against a huge old tree, I pulled out my turkey call again. The slate was a bit wet from sweaty exertions. The turkey call sounded more like the waitress at the York Diner ordering a breakfast special, “AhYeeggsUup!” I thought I heard something answer. Do turkeys have a sense of humor, and can they chortle? Anyway the answer was further along the steep, soggy trail. One thing about wet leaves- they don’t crackle. It’s easy to walk very quietly, and even the wet twigs don’t snap underfoot. So, if you look at it from the point of view of a turkey, the sneezing and the cursing come from unexpected directions.
I finally put my blaze orange hat under my shirt. I was sure turkeys could see in color because chickens can, and I figure they now associated blaze orange with cursing. It was one more handicap I did not need.
I’d been walking quietly, making waitress calls on my damp slate and listening and watching for hours. At this point every sound could be a turkey. A squeaking wren could be a very small turkey. I also scanned all around for turkeys. Turkeys are very hard to see in a forest, I figured. Their feathers are the same color as the fallen tree bark. A turkey head sticking out of the ground cover looks just like a broken tree stump. There are a lot more broken tree stumps than turkeys. I stalked several tree stumps, being very stealthy and trying not to sneeze, and none of them flew away.
The only animal I saw other than the deer was a red squirrel, sitting on a tree stump and looking just like a jake turkey. It looked at me and I waved my hands and shouted. I checked it out with binoculars and it was indeed a red squirrel, also out of season. It just stared me down, and did not move until I finally turned my back and slithered down the trail.
The Final Score
Hunter — 0. No turkeys taken. An average result, nothing to be embarrassed about unless you have any kind of human ego at all.
June 1, end of turkey season, all local turkeys met in the clearing and had a party with nutmeg beer.
