Spring Turkey Season 2024 - Turkey Hunting Gear, Turkey Hunting Tips, and Strategies for a Successful Hunt
Justin Hunold
12/29/2023
Well, as we sit here just finishing out the holiday season most of our minds go from thinking about the hustle and bustle to our next outdoor adventure. From being dressed in ugly sweaters and focusing on our friends and families who have probably gotten used to seeing us a lot less in the three months to thinking about Scouting, Waterfowl, Shed hunting, and the obsession that is Spring Turkey Season.
There is just something about a Do It Yourself Spring Turkey Hunt that just gets my blood boiling, and I’m sure it’s the same for you. So, let’s jump into some behaviors of the birds you’ll find on Infinite Outdoors Partner Properties, Turkey Hunting Gear that our Industry Partners offer, and Turkey Hunting Tips and Strategies from our team of passionate outdoors folks. We are here to help you be a more successful hunter on all levels.
Understanding Turkey Behavior in Spring
Merriam's Turkey
- Spring Behavior: Merriam's turkeys, typically found in mountainous and wooded areas, are known for their unique roosting habits. In the spring, they often roost in ponderosa pines and move to open areas for feeding. During mating season, gobblers become more vocal, making them easier to locate.
Rio Grande Turkey
- Spring Behavior: These turkeys are commonly found in more arid or semi-arid environments, like Texas and Oklahoma. They roost in trees near water sources and are known for their gregarious nature. In spring, they often gather in open fields for mating displays. Rio Grande gobblers are also quite vocal, especially at dawn.
Eastern Turkey
- Spring Behavior: Eastern turkeys, prevalent in wooded areas of the eastern United States, are known for their wariness. In spring, toms engage in gobbling and strutting to attract hens. They often use different areas for roosting, feeding, and mating, making them challenging to hunt.
General Considerations
- Adaptability: All turkey species are adaptable, but environmental changes can disrupt their traditional patterns. Hunters should be prepared for variations in turkey behavior due to altered food sources, weather patterns, and habitat changes.
Essential Turkey Hunting Gear for 2024
This topic draws more attention than any tactics, tips or strategies that ever get published. There are a couple reasons for that, hunters can’t touch those esoteric ideas but they can touch the Best Turkey Gun, be more efficient in a good Turkey Vest, or glass up a gobbler with better hunting binoculars. Another reason is these are prep items that can be purchased and prepared in the down time before Turkey Hunting. And new gear is just awesome. So here is some of the Best Turkey Hunting Gear offered from our friends in the hunting world.
Weatherby Element Turkey
The best turkey gun would be light, with a short barrel, fast cycling, reliable, camouflage and accurate. With all that in mind, the Weatherby Element fits the ticket. This inertia shotgun will cycle 2.75” and 3” loads equally well. Decked out in the Old School version of Mossy Oak Bottomland it won’t spook any birds from luster or shine.
The Element Turkey comes with a factory-fluted extra full turkey choke, fiber optic sites, and rubber grip panels. It is a purpose-built gun with a 22” barrel in both 12 and 20 gauge.
With a lot of our partner properties located in the western states, chasing Merriams with this compact gun is a blessing. Gone are the days of crossover do-it-all shotguns. We are a culture of job-specific tools and the Weatherby Element is a great tool for the job. When you’re looking for the best turkey gun, it’s tough to look past the Weatherby Element Turkey.
Alps Outdoorz Turkey Vest
Turkey Vests can be a contentious topic, light and minimal or heavier and comfortable with all the configurations between. Luckily on many accounts, Alps Outdoorz makes the best turkey vest available for any of those categories.
When looking for a turkey vest to organize all of your turkey hunting gear and sit comfortably while waiting for those Toms to come into gun range Alps delivers. In a major gear test hosted by Outdoor Life, Great Days Outdoors and Field and Stream Alps Outdoorz line of turkey vests took the top honors in multiple categories. Best Overall, Best in Production, and Best for Long Sits are just some of the top spots the line of vests inhabited.
When it comes to Turkey Vests the features and styles are as individual as trying to pick out boots, everyone has different needs. With that for general hunting it’s hard to beat the Alps Outdoorz Super Elite 4.0 vest is tough to beat, and that’s why it took hme Field and Stream's top honor for Best Overall Turkey Vest in 2023. Check the whole line out and decide what vest, blind, chair, or accessories fit your style.
Athlon Optics
When Spring Turkey Hunting first came into popularity there weren’t a lot of folks worried about optics for chasing strutters. Times have changed, whether it's a rangefinder for you bowhunters, a red dot for turkey guns, or the one optic all hunters should be carrying, a set of binoculars, Athlon Optics just fits the bill.
A few years ago I relied on fiber optic beads for my turkey guns, now each of them wears a red dot of some kind. With the line of open red dots like the Midas or Talos series, you can have pinpoint accuracy when delivering that magnum payload, without a huge compromise on weight or durability. In modern terms, there aren’t any downsides to running a red dot on your turkey gun.
One optic every hunter should own is a great set of binoculars. Athlon certainly has you covered there, but you should be focusing on a more compact set in the 8x42 range, leave the 15s at home. With that for most turkey hunting applications a pair of Athlon Argos G2 HDs are tough to beat on the bang-for-buck scale. 8 power is plenty for all turkey hunting needs and the price for what you get in glass on these Argos is pennies on the dollar for value.
Turkey Hunting Tips and Techniques
Strut Zones
Remember there are sub-species-specific behaviors for Merriams, Rios, and Easterns, but they all love a good strut zone. A lot of folks will focus on an opening or field but one of my favorite strut zones to set up on is overlooking a small topography change. Like a small hill or knob that might be 10-50 ft different in elevation. Sometimes it's a mound of dirt at the end of a tilled field, an island in a dry creek bed, or even a mound of construction debris. It’s tough to get a date on an app for guys under 6 feet tall, and apparently, that’s the same in the turkey world. Those proud toms like getting up above the competition to show off. Key in on that slight topo change and you might be surprised by the results.
Warmth and Food
When you’re out Spring Turkey Hunting, a good place to glass up birds or drop the hammer on one is a tilled section of an otherwise untouched field. That dark earth will heat up faster and hold heat better than the untilled field around it. When I’m scouting and trying to put something together on a DIY out-of-state trip, I will spend time looking for this particular feature. I might not kill a bird in that open dirt, but I know it's a great place for them to group up, warm up, and strut. Plus, that tilled earth uncovers a lot of bugs, worms, and grubs that are high-protein foods for those cold birds. This is an especially great tactic earlier in the turkey season.
Creek Bottoms
Speaking of food, where there is water there is food. Creek bottoms can be stellar. Turkeys have been known to eat worms, insects, grubs, tadpoles, and crayfish. All of which are in abundance in a creek bottom.
This terrain can be tricky due to the topography changes, ie hills, and ridges. Calling a Turkey uphill isn’t ideal, neither is them having to cross water. With that pioneers knew to find game they had to find water, and nothing has changed that. Keep the hills to your back and the water to the Tom’s and then get ready. Funnels are funnels for a reason, and that setup can be a fatal funnel for that Strutting dude.
At the end of the day, with the right gear and some sound tactics, you can kill a thundering tom on any piece of property any day in the spring. But your odds go down dramatically after the first week of the season. Turkeys are survivors and they know when to go silent and when to high tail it outta there. Persistence and planning kill birds, pressure saves them.
With Infinite Outdoors Properties, you can not only avoid that pressure, increasing your chances but you can pick a property that suits your hunting style. Do you want to run and gun ridges, or sit in a blind on a field? They both work, but what if you can choose private hunting property to fit your hunting style how much better off will you be than trying to sit on a field on the same public piece as everyone else, or calling on the ridge tops when those birds have gone silent after hearing twenty owls that morning when they normally hear one.
If your time is the most valuable asset you have, which it is, you may want to take control of your precious hunting time and check out our partner properties here.
This gear and these tactics will work anywhere you chase Toms, but only if the Toms are still there. So while you look at that awesome gear you got, and think about the Toms puffed up in that field, do yourself a favor and find a great place to make that daydream come true.