"Go ahead Sam, show them your silent caller," one of the hunters would say and Sam would pull out his reedless diaphragm, put it into his mouth, and start calling. The observers, hearing nothing, would ask how it worked.
Sam would respond, "I don't know how it works - but it works so good I'm almost afraid to use it. The last time I used the silent caller, it drove an old tom so crazy he tried to romance a bobcat."
Sam always did blow things a bit out of proportion, but I do have a silent turkey call and so do you. You must not use it too often, but there are times when its silence is not only golden-it's successful.
Enter the turkey woods, break out your regular caller, and make a soft yelp. You've announced to any tom who listens that you are a hen on the make. If he hears you, he'll know within twenty to thirty yards of where you are. You've given him an advantage. He returns your call with a gobble. He has given you his location and sex. The romance begins.
Now the real test: convincing him to go against his natural instinct. Instead of the hen going to him, he will have to find the hen and go to her. If you're lucky, he'll hit the ground, gobbling his way to you, or maybe he'll come-a-runnin'. A well placed shot and he's yours. If you are not so lucky, you may run into a gobbler that seems to pay no attention to you (even though you're within a couple hundred yards of him), or a tom that gobbles a few times, then heads in the other direction. With these two examples, if your calling is right, then you are in the wrong location. What's a right location? Any place where the hens hang out.
A gobbler wants hens. All the hens he can get. Even a gobbler with a harem of hens will check out a seductive little lady if she's close by and where a hen should be. He is the greedy gobbler, yet his greed gives him the added protection of his harem. His harem is constantly n the watch for danger, any sudden movements and they will alert him and he's gone.
And there are the macho gobblers. They are not about to be caught running after a hen.
For example: one morning I had a limited time to hunt. I drove to familiar grounds, walked into the woods, took a temporary location, and let go with an owl hoot. A tom answered. I made a little adjustment in my location and waited for calling time. The gobbler gave another gobble. I could tell he was on the ground. We had a brief conversation instead of coming to me, he started up the steep hill side.
Frustration and panic set in. What was this? My calling was good and I was in the normal travel route of the turkeys. He hadn't been spooked, and yes, I felt like getting up and chasing him, but I didn't dare. Instead, I tried calling him back. But no, he wouldn't come. I heard him gobble several more times from the hill top.
I sat there in rejection. I'd been jilted. Like a kid in high school who'd lost his first love, I pouted for a few minutes.
I was familiar with the hill top the tom had gone to. It was flat, the old fields were mostly overgrown with brush, and it had a line of woods on the other side of the old fields just before it began to drop back off. There was plenty of cover and food on top, but why did he head up the steep hill instead of coming to me. I had to investigate.
I didn't chase the turkey, and I didn't get up immediately to follow him. I waited about fifteen minutes and set out on a course parallel to the route he had taken. I stopped half way up the hill to catch my breath and was surprised to hear him gobble again. He was still on top. My path would take me approximately a hundred brushy yards from him. I reached the top and took time to again find where my breath had gone.
Rested and relaxed, I made a hen yelp and received a strange gobble, kind of like the "row your boat" song, one gobble on top of another. Ah! There were two gobblers! We started talking and gobble as they did, they wouldn't make a move. Finally, I resorted to my silent call. They couldn't resist it. They both came sneaking. I shot the first one and watched as the second took to the air and flew down the hill.
Those toms were fickle, but they were still gobblers and cautious as they may have been, they couldn't resist looking for the uppity hen.
Like the above example, a gobbler may be wary and gobble a lot but hang up in a brushy location not far from you. This situation seems to be where the silent caller works best. Not all hung up gobblers are behind some unseen barrier or on the edge of their territorial line, some of them are just plain stubborn. Wise toms will hang up when and where they feel safe. They'll strut, gobble, beat their wings, and drum to bring the hen in to them. As long as the hen is flirting and making sweet talk by answering back, the tom knows he's got a chance to lur her into his quarters. You can call him out, but you'll have to use good calling, practice the art of camouflage, and use the silent turkey call.
Let's see what the turkey is saying.
He gobbles once, he's saying, "Here I am baby, come on to me."
A double gobble says, "I'm tired of waiting, get on in here, I'm a hunk."
And, he expects results. He believes. He believes all the young ladies are calling just for him. As long as she keeps calling and looking, he'll keep bragging and gobbling.
Then, when the hen shuts up, he starts wondering just what kind of lady she is: shy, timid, good looking, but doesn't understand the rules yet. Maybe she's just playing hard to get. Maybe some young gobbler has slipped in! He decides he'll come out of hiding and see what's going on. He just can't seem to stand the silence.
He makes the same mistake many a hunter makes. When a gobbler quits gobbling, the inexperienced hunter has just got to move to see if he can figure out what's going on. Then, with movement, it's the tom who's going on-to safer ground.
I had to utilize the silent call when I ran into old silver tip.
My Dad (retired and an avid turkey hunter), and I decided we would hunt a ridge where friends had reported gobbles. We started the walk up the ridge using an old road and stopped occasionally to make owl calls. We got a response. A single gobble, but that was enough. Dad told me to work the tom. He went to the top of the ridge to locate another gobbler. I settled in to wait until calling time. As daylight crept in and the woods came alive, I made a tree yelp. The tom answered, not more than a hundred yards away. He gobbled a couple more times and left the roost. He flew to the bottoms, about two hundred yards below me. we had quite a time calling to each other. I'm sure the tom enjoyed it as he gobbled his head off, but I was in the wrong location.
An old time turkey hunter once told me, "You can call a tom down a hill or anywhere else, if that's where the hens are."
The hens were across a small creek and in the brushy areas of the next small ridge. The tom finally gave up on me and gobbled his way to the other ridge. "I'll be back, Mr. Turkey," I said as Dad and I got in the truck to leave.
The following Saturday I was back. I parked in a different location, opting to walk an extra quarter of a mile so the tom wouldn't hear me. When I got into the woods, I didn't hoot, call, or get close to where I expected him to be. I went right to the brush bottom near the creek. Daylight gradually crept in and I had to hold back the urge to call. Finally, he let the world know he was awake. He had roosted in about the same location. He made a couple more gobbles, then the thud as he landed on the ground and another gobble, about sixty yards in front of me. I made a hen yelp, soft and low. In a few seconds, he gobbled back. He had traveled to my right and was right on the creek bank. He then started sounding off. I'd wait a little while, give a yelp or cluck, and he'd gobble. This went on about thirty minutes. I was going to outsmart him. This was my day. It was time to use my super call. The silent call.
I shut up and sat still.
He gobbled his head off for about five minutes, trying to get that hen to talk back to him. Then he shut up. I knew he was coming. I was smart enough to figure out he would circle around the creek back to my right. I placed my shotgun toward the right and would make a left handed shot. I'm right handed. The few minutes of waiting seemed like hours, then movement, but not where I was expecting him to be. He was directly in front of me, easing through the brush. I slowly moved my gun up to get into a right handed shooting position. He stopped. I stopped. He stood for a full minute looking at me. The white on his wing tips was as pure as silver with a little more white than usual. It made him look wise, like a man with graying temples. His beard was a good ten or eleven inches long. He flipped his feathers and started drumming as he stepped off into the brush. I readied the gun for the next opening, but he never stepped into it. He drummed in that little brushy spot for twenty minutes. He was within twenty-five yards of me, yet out-of-sight. I got another good look at the old turkey as he slowly walked off, heading back up the hill as though to say, "I'm going to start this day over again." Maybe he thought he had lost his touch, he couldn't seduce the hen.
His backside toward me at about fifty yards, I took aim, then lowered my gun. He'd outsmarted me twice, I was not about to take a bad shot.
"I'll be back again-with the silent call-next year, Mr. Turkey."