Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.

Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about becoming a better turkey caller. Look, it's still turkey Week here at met Eater, which is why you're getting all these bonus episodes. If you haven't heard, we are having another turkey calling contest and I think you guys know who should probably win. I mean, I don't think anyone on this staff has ever even bo killed a turkey besides me, let alone having I don't know, three quarters of a public land diy Jake slam with a bow. Anyway, head on over to the media and vote for me so we can at least prove to Mediator that some of the audience cares about actual hunting skills and not just how many social media posts we make a day. And while you're there, you might want to take a look at some of our gear, including the turkey calls that Phelps mikes. After all, this episode is probably gonna get you to want to try to level up your turkey calling game, so I'm gonna talk about that right now. I definitely wouldn't say that I'm a guitar geek because I'm not. I don't buy new guitars very often, and when I do, I tend to give away my old ones. It's not hard to find someone who has an interest in playing guitar, and I think it's the kind of gift that I don't know, you should just give to somebody because there's an off chance they might catch the bug and it'll change their life for the better.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about becoming a better turkey caller. Look, it's still turkey Week here at met Eater, which is why you're getting all these bonus episodes. If you haven't heard, we are having another turkey calling contest and I think you guys know who should probably win. I mean, I don't think anyone on this staff has ever even bo killed a turkey besides me, let alone having I don't know, three quarters of a public land diy Jake slam with a bow. Anyway, head on over to the media and vote for me so we can at least prove to Mediator that some of the audience cares about actual hunting skills and not just how many social media posts we make a day. And while you're there, you might want to take a look at some of our gear, including the turkey calls that Phelps mikes. After all, this episode is probably gonna get you to want to try to level up your turkey calling game, so I'm gonna talk about that right now. I definitely wouldn't say that I'm a guitar geek because I'm not. I don't buy new guitars very often, and when I do, I tend to give away my old ones. It's not hard to find someone who has an interest in playing guitar, and I think it's the kind of gift that I don't know, you should just give to somebody because there's an off chance they might catch the bug and it'll change their life for the better.

Now.

Now.

I do really like guitars, though, acoustics and electrics, and acoustics with an electric pickup, and I've even briefly had in my possession a few bass guitars. But playing bass guitar to me is like, I don't know, intentionally fishing for walleyes in a lake that is full of small mouth bass. I'm sure people can justify that, and they might have very good reasons, but for me, those reasons will never quite make sense I don't have enough money, interest, or, if I'm being brutally honest, skill to go really deep on owning a bunch of different guitars. At most I might have four or five total in my possession at any time, but that's about it now. I do follow a fair amount of guitar subs on some sites and sort of pay attention to the people who are really really obsessed with buying new instruments or seeking out the right model in the right color of guitar that hasn't been in production for a few decades because of one reason or another. A common theme that I see from some of those folks is that while they are all musicians to some capacity, there is a subset of that group that seems to think buying the right acts will make them a much much better player. Some instruments are a hell of a lot more forgiving, and depending on your personal style, definitely might offer up some advantages. But you won't be Jimmy Hendrix just because you play the same guitar heat played. It doesn't work that way. In fact, if you watch someone who is really good, they can do an awful lot with a really mediocre guitar because they have the skill. Then if you watch someone who has that skill and they end up with a high end instrument that gives them that tone and allows them to play to their full potential, it's literally a thing of beauty. It's art. Now, like so many things in life, you can buy something that might make you slightly better, but you have to use it correctly and really work on understanding how to use it to make it really matter. You can probably tell where I'm going with this. Every year, call makers, including Jason and the whole crew at Phelps there they come up with new turkey calls. No, maybe it's a mouth call with some kind of different cut on the read. Maybe it's a pot call with some kind of special surface or holes drilled in specific spots to really amplify the acoustics of the whole thing. All across the turkey hunting industry, this happens every year, and every year turkey hunters buy new calls and mostly don't become much better at turkey calling. The issue here is that you don't have to be very good to kill turkeys, but you do have to be pretty good to kill a lot of pressure turkeys. And how do you get better at turkey calling. I'll tell you, listen to real turkeys and then practice a lot. I know that's not revolutionary, but so many people get this wrong. Last year, I sat in a blind with my daughters while my buddy sat in a blind with his daughter across the field. Now, we were pretty far apart, but could hear each other call because there was nothing between us but a chisel plowed cornfield. Now, I managed to call in a couple of jakes that I first saw like five hundred yards away, which is something I've only watched happen a couple of times. The other time was a jake on a ridge in South Dakota that flew to my spread from so far away that the tommy was with would gobble and I could and hear it at all. I could just see him shake his head through my binos. Anyway, after the girls doubled up on their birds, we sat tight and watched as my friend tried to talk in another group of jakes. I could tell by his calling that it might not work out, though, and it didn't. He was yelping way too fast in a cadence that just wasn't quite natural. It took two minutes to talking to him after we got back to his place to get it all sorted out. But the lesson is important. You might be making turkey noises that you know a turkey might make, but you might be making them in a way that a turkey probably wouldn't. It would be like speaking I don't know, like Yoda in a natural conversation. I suppose while you could mix up the order of the words in a sentence and get your point across, the people with whom you're conversing might think you're a little bit off your rocker. Or it might be like Toddler speak, where you use some relative facsimile of normal words, but they are strung together in a way that just doesn't make much sense. I don't know. What I do know is that wild turkeys will tell you how they speak, and you should listen to them. This is one of the reasons I don't think you can be the most badass turkey hunter on the planet unless you've killed quite a few of them with a bow. There is nothing that requires you to talk turkey more than having to get them into your spread at ten yards. Now, you can talk turkey passively well and get them to come by for a little look where they might stand in shotgun range. But getting them right into the decoys and relaxed and convincing them to stay there just takes a little bit more, just takes a little bit more cohercion. It's also true that on turkey bowhunts you just spend more time around birds. You're far less mobile. So the bird that's gobbling his head off down the ridge has to make his own choices because you can't go after him. And the hens that get in close and talk a lot in their low chatter, they just seem to happen more on turkey bowhunts, or at least you have them stick around longer. Now, you don't have to chase gobblers with a bow to learn about actual turkey speak. But I'm telling you it's a lesson that can't be had really any other way. That's really kind of beside the point right now, because I know a lot of people won't do that no matter what. Plus, you can certainly get hens to mill around in your decoys when you have a shotgun across your knee. What people often do in this situation, though, whether they have a twelve gauge or a bow with them is totally shut up. After all, if you have living decoys in your fake decoys, why risk scaring them off to that? I say, why not try to get them to talk to you. They've already bought into the ruse, and hens often don't take a whole lot of persuasion to start chatting away. Now there's a sexist joke in there somewhere, but I'm going to ignore it. When I have a hen or a couple of them in my decoys, I talk to them a lot. Not only is it kind of fun to purr and put and cluck and softly yelp to see if I can get a response. But if I don't have a Tom around, for sure, the best thing I can do is try to piss off live hen in front of me. The moment I get a real hen to start cutting aggressively or yelping aggressively is the moment I believe I'll get a nearby bird to gobble and often commit I think that Tom's here. Hens make noise all day long, but when there is about to be a fight between two ladies and the rhetoric really heats up, they just come in. This is also why I almost always use a mouth call and a slate call to fire things up during dead times of the day. You know, with that slate I can cut hard and loud. In the mouth call, I can cut and yelp and try to drown out the slate. Now, it doesn't work every time, but it works often enough that I use it a lot during every season. The point is, if you have birds around, you talk to them. You hear all of the little sounds they make that we just don't think about, like those content little bubble clocks that can be magic for getting a tom to break from strut at fifty yards and march on in. When you intentionally try to get hens to talk, you also open up the possibility that they'll stick around for a long time. That's always a win, and it works really well. I see this with hens, I see it with Jake's, and I see it with Tom's. But sometimes you can just watch birds, you know, try to figure out why when they want to leave the rest of the turkey stay put. You can sometimes call them back over and over and over again. And the more you interact with live birds, the closer you are to having a long beard in range. Now, another thing I truly believe with this is that the more you learn to make a variety of calls and to try to cater your calls to the birds around you, the less likely you are to believe that overcalling is a thing. I don't think it is if you know how to call. I don't think there is a turkey out there that is like, hmm, that hen is talking too much, and I'm definitely not going over there if it sounds like calls a real hen would make. I think it's always either a net neutral or a net positive. Maybe if it's ninety five in the middle of the day and dead out, or maybe you know. There are other conditions where this is certainly not true, but generally I believe it. I believe that with private land birds that are sometimes dumber than rocks, and I believe it with the most pressured public land birds in the country, although with the latter proximity to them before you really start chattering away seems to be a big benefit. The key to all of this, though, is confidence in your calls and what you're saying. If you believe that when you pick up your slate or your mouth call or your box call or whatever, that you're going to make realistic turkey sounds and convey to the nearby birds that something interesting is happening. You can't go wrong. Does it always work? No, absolutely not, But that doesn't matter. If it's not a net negative. You can keep trying until a bird orbits into your world and is ready to see what all the fuss is about. I think a good way to get to this level is to forget about owning a variety of calls for now, because a lot of people think, well, I need a slate for soft calling sessions, I need a box call to really get those yelps to echo across the landscape when it's windy. Yet, someone who is good with any call can pretty much make every call with it. I think most good turkey hunters could fill their tags with just one mouth call all season long. Although it wouldn't be as much fun. Getting to a point where you are extremely confident with just one type of call is better than being marginally confident with a whole bunch of them. I really think the best way to do this is to find a mouth call that you can produce a super raspy, slow yelp with, and then try to learn how to cut and purr and cluck and gobble and just make every turkey sound possible. That's about as versatile as a call can get. And once you get confident with a mouth call, you've damn near won the game. But also, if you do, that's a call you can eventually use while you use a handheld call. Like I talked about earlier, I prefer slates or at least pot calls over box calls because I don't like carrying box calls quite as much, and I don't feel like box calls allow me to make vastly different sounds and a good mouth call will. But I've also hunted with people who run box calls in a way that I can't, so your mileage may vary. I guess the point stands, though, that mastering one call is better than not really mastering a whole bunch of them. Plus the more confidence you develop, the more likely you are to try to say different things while you're actually turkey hunting, and I think that matters a lot. You'll get to see this soon enough, but last year I failed to grun in a really big North Dakota public land buck, but I did eventually snort weeze him in I mean that buck came in on a string after ignoring my grunts, and it was pretty incredible. My shot wasn't, unfortunately, but after that buck ran off. My cameraman, who is a really good deer hunter, said he couldn't believe that that buck came in like that for snort wheezing well outside of the rut, but he doesn't snort wheeze to bucks in the first half of October because he thinks you're not supposed to, just like how you're not supposed to call the hens that are in your decoys seven yards away. But when you do, you learn that not only can you, but you probably should. Confidence with a call is the difference between defaulting to shut up and cross your fingers or trying to actively make something happen. The last point there is one I want you to take away from this. We often look at turkey hunting and really elk hunting too, since it's so call base, and we think there are a lot of situations we just can't overcome by our calling alone, so we don't and then we don't kill birds bulls, and we realize we were right all along. But if you get the chance to hunt either species, with someone who is really, really good at calling, you realize that there is no such thing as a time when you absolutely can't make something happen, or at least try to make something happen that will eventually work. That ain't the same thing with deer hunting. I think you could sit out there and blind call, you know, either grunting or rattling or snort wheezing, and no bucks will magically decide to come in or engage with you somehow. Most of the time. With turkeys, I don't believe that's true. I actually don't believe it's true with turkeys all year long, but especially in April and May, when they are truly prone to chatting away, and that chatter is a huge complimentary component to their evolutionary desire to pass on their genes. It's the best time to call them, but only if you understand what you're saying and you say it with confidence. So what do you do about that? Well, buy some new calls if you need to, or bust out the old ones. But then challenge yourself, are you timid with a mouth call because you don't really believe you can get loud and make something happen work? On that practice. Do you have no idea how to purr or cluck or cut or whatever with your call? Figure it out. The more you can mix in those sort of secondary sounds into a setup, the more realistic your setup will appear to real turkeys. Instead of just running through a five note series of yelps that really have no character and don't really mimic the way actual birds yelp. Head on over to YouTube and listen to some actual turkeys, then try to copy them. Try to figure out how to make a slow, two note yelp, and then try to figure out how to cut aggressively. Maybe you need a slay call to do this, but it doesn't matter. Whatever you're most comfortable with is what you should try to figure out first and what you should practice on. But don't just test it out for a few minutes and call it good enough. Figure out what sounds you can't produce but wild turkeys can, and then figure out how to make them. Then, when you're out there this spring, call to the birds lot, call to them and see how they react. If you get hens in the decoys, pick up your slate, make a bunch of soft purson clucks, watch them listen to them. Do they call back good, then yelp and cut. If not, keep the chatter quiet, but keep it going. If they don't run away, you're doing just fine. Develop some confidence in the garage or while driving to work, and then talk to the actual birds you see and hear while you're hunting. Figure out how to have better conversations out there, and that will help you figure out how to start better conversations out there when the birds seem to be tight lipped. Not only is this a great way to have more action in the woods during spring hunts, but it makes the whole thing a hell of a lot more fun. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you so much for showing up for our Turkey week, heading over to the medeater dot com, maybe watching some films, maybe listening to some other podcasts on here, just consuming this content that we drop every day. We truly appreciate it because without you, guys, we are nothing, So thank you for that. If you need to find some more Turkey content, head on over to the mediator dot com check it out. Tons of stuff there. Thank you,

I do really like guitars, though, acoustics and electrics, and acoustics with an electric pickup, and I've even briefly had in my possession a few bass guitars. But playing bass guitar to me is like, I don't know, intentionally fishing for walleyes in a lake that is full of small mouth bass. I'm sure people can justify that, and they might have very good reasons, but for me, those reasons will never quite make sense I don't have enough money, interest, or, if I'm being brutally honest, skill to go really deep on owning a bunch of different guitars. At most I might have four or five total in my possession at any time, but that's about it now. I do follow a fair amount of guitar subs on some sites and sort of pay attention to the people who are really really obsessed with buying new instruments or seeking out the right model in the right color of guitar that hasn't been in production for a few decades because of one reason or another. A common theme that I see from some of those folks is that while they are all musicians to some capacity, there is a subset of that group that seems to think buying the right acts will make them a much much better player. Some instruments are a hell of a lot more forgiving, and depending on your personal style, definitely might offer up some advantages. But you won't be Jimmy Hendrix just because you play the same guitar heat played. It doesn't work that way. In fact, if you watch someone who is really good, they can do an awful lot with a really mediocre guitar because they have the skill. Then if you watch someone who has that skill and they end up with a high end instrument that gives them that tone and allows them to play to their full potential, it's literally a thing of beauty. It's art. Now, like so many things in life, you can buy something that might make you slightly better, but you have to use it correctly and really work on understanding how to use it to make it really matter. You can probably tell where I'm going with this. Every year, call makers, including Jason and the whole crew at Phelps there they come up with new turkey calls. No, maybe it's a mouth call with some kind of different cut on the read. Maybe it's a pot call with some kind of special surface or holes drilled in specific spots to really amplify the acoustics of the whole thing. All across the turkey hunting industry, this happens every year, and every year turkey hunters buy new calls and mostly don't become much better at turkey calling. The issue here is that you don't have to be very good to kill turkeys, but you do have to be pretty good to kill a lot of pressure turkeys. And how do you get better at turkey calling. I'll tell you, listen to real turkeys and then practice a lot. I know that's not revolutionary, but so many people get this wrong. Last year, I sat in a blind with my daughters while my buddy sat in a blind with his daughter across the field. Now, we were pretty far apart, but could hear each other call because there was nothing between us but a chisel plowed cornfield. Now, I managed to call in a couple of jakes that I first saw like five hundred yards away, which is something I've only watched happen a couple of times. The other time was a jake on a ridge in South Dakota that flew to my spread from so far away that the tommy was with would gobble and I could and hear it at all. I could just see him shake his head through my binos. Anyway, after the girls doubled up on their birds, we sat tight and watched as my friend tried to talk in another group of jakes. I could tell by his calling that it might not work out, though, and it didn't. He was yelping way too fast in a cadence that just wasn't quite natural. It took two minutes to talking to him after we got back to his place to get it all sorted out. But the lesson is important. You might be making turkey noises that you know a turkey might make, but you might be making them in a way that a turkey probably wouldn't. It would be like speaking I don't know, like Yoda in a natural conversation. I suppose while you could mix up the order of the words in a sentence and get your point across, the people with whom you're conversing might think you're a little bit off your rocker. Or it might be like Toddler speak, where you use some relative facsimile of normal words, but they are strung together in a way that just doesn't make much sense. I don't know. What I do know is that wild turkeys will tell you how they speak, and you should listen to them. This is one of the reasons I don't think you can be the most badass turkey hunter on the planet unless you've killed quite a few of them with a bow. There is nothing that requires you to talk turkey more than having to get them into your spread at ten yards. Now, you can talk turkey passively well and get them to come by for a little look where they might stand in shotgun range. But getting them right into the decoys and relaxed and convincing them to stay there just takes a little bit more, just takes a little bit more cohercion. It's also true that on turkey bowhunts you just spend more time around birds. You're far less mobile. So the bird that's gobbling his head off down the ridge has to make his own choices because you can't go after him. And the hens that get in close and talk a lot in their low chatter, they just seem to happen more on turkey bowhunts, or at least you have them stick around longer. Now, you don't have to chase gobblers with a bow to learn about actual turkey speak. But I'm telling you it's a lesson that can't be had really any other way. That's really kind of beside the point right now, because I know a lot of people won't do that no matter what. Plus, you can certainly get hens to mill around in your decoys when you have a shotgun across your knee. What people often do in this situation, though, whether they have a twelve gauge or a bow with them is totally shut up. After all, if you have living decoys in your fake decoys, why risk scaring them off to that? I say, why not try to get them to talk to you. They've already bought into the ruse, and hens often don't take a whole lot of persuasion to start chatting away. Now there's a sexist joke in there somewhere, but I'm going to ignore it. When I have a hen or a couple of them in my decoys, I talk to them a lot. Not only is it kind of fun to purr and put and cluck and softly yelp to see if I can get a response. But if I don't have a Tom around, for sure, the best thing I can do is try to piss off live hen in front of me. The moment I get a real hen to start cutting aggressively or yelping aggressively is the moment I believe I'll get a nearby bird to gobble and often commit I think that Tom's here. Hens make noise all day long, but when there is about to be a fight between two ladies and the rhetoric really heats up, they just come in. This is also why I almost always use a mouth call and a slate call to fire things up during dead times of the day. You know, with that slate I can cut hard and loud. In the mouth call, I can cut and yelp and try to drown out the slate. Now, it doesn't work every time, but it works often enough that I use it a lot during every season. The point is, if you have birds around, you talk to them. You hear all of the little sounds they make that we just don't think about, like those content little bubble clocks that can be magic for getting a tom to break from strut at fifty yards and march on in. When you intentionally try to get hens to talk, you also open up the possibility that they'll stick around for a long time. That's always a win, and it works really well. I see this with hens, I see it with Jake's, and I see it with Tom's. But sometimes you can just watch birds, you know, try to figure out why when they want to leave the rest of the turkey stay put. You can sometimes call them back over and over and over again. And the more you interact with live birds, the closer you are to having a long beard in range. Now, another thing I truly believe with this is that the more you learn to make a variety of calls and to try to cater your calls to the birds around you, the less likely you are to believe that overcalling is a thing. I don't think it is if you know how to call. I don't think there is a turkey out there that is like, hmm, that hen is talking too much, and I'm definitely not going over there if it sounds like calls a real hen would make. I think it's always either a net neutral or a net positive. Maybe if it's ninety five in the middle of the day and dead out, or maybe you know. There are other conditions where this is certainly not true, but generally I believe it. I believe that with private land birds that are sometimes dumber than rocks, and I believe it with the most pressured public land birds in the country, although with the latter proximity to them before you really start chattering away seems to be a big benefit. The key to all of this, though, is confidence in your calls and what you're saying. If you believe that when you pick up your slate or your mouth call or your box call or whatever, that you're going to make realistic turkey sounds and convey to the nearby birds that something interesting is happening. You can't go wrong. Does it always work? No, absolutely not, But that doesn't matter. If it's not a net negative. You can keep trying until a bird orbits into your world and is ready to see what all the fuss is about. I think a good way to get to this level is to forget about owning a variety of calls for now, because a lot of people think, well, I need a slate for soft calling sessions, I need a box call to really get those yelps to echo across the landscape when it's windy. Yet, someone who is good with any call can pretty much make every call with it. I think most good turkey hunters could fill their tags with just one mouth call all season long. Although it wouldn't be as much fun. Getting to a point where you are extremely confident with just one type of call is better than being marginally confident with a whole bunch of them. I really think the best way to do this is to find a mouth call that you can produce a super raspy, slow yelp with, and then try to learn how to cut and purr and cluck and gobble and just make every turkey sound possible. That's about as versatile as a call can get. And once you get confident with a mouth call, you've damn near won the game. But also, if you do, that's a call you can eventually use while you use a handheld call. Like I talked about earlier, I prefer slates or at least pot calls over box calls because I don't like carrying box calls quite as much, and I don't feel like box calls allow me to make vastly different sounds and a good mouth call will. But I've also hunted with people who run box calls in a way that I can't, so your mileage may vary. I guess the point stands, though, that mastering one call is better than not really mastering a whole bunch of them. Plus the more confidence you develop, the more likely you are to try to say different things while you're actually turkey hunting, and I think that matters a lot. You'll get to see this soon enough, but last year I failed to grun in a really big North Dakota public land buck, but I did eventually snort weeze him in I mean that buck came in on a string after ignoring my grunts, and it was pretty incredible. My shot wasn't, unfortunately, but after that buck ran off. My cameraman, who is a really good deer hunter, said he couldn't believe that that buck came in like that for snort wheezing well outside of the rut, but he doesn't snort wheeze to bucks in the first half of October because he thinks you're not supposed to, just like how you're not supposed to call the hens that are in your decoys seven yards away. But when you do, you learn that not only can you, but you probably should. Confidence with a call is the difference between defaulting to shut up and cross your fingers or trying to actively make something happen. The last point there is one I want you to take away from this. We often look at turkey hunting and really elk hunting too, since it's so call base, and we think there are a lot of situations we just can't overcome by our calling alone, so we don't and then we don't kill birds bulls, and we realize we were right all along. But if you get the chance to hunt either species, with someone who is really, really good at calling, you realize that there is no such thing as a time when you absolutely can't make something happen, or at least try to make something happen that will eventually work. That ain't the same thing with deer hunting. I think you could sit out there and blind call, you know, either grunting or rattling or snort wheezing, and no bucks will magically decide to come in or engage with you somehow. Most of the time. With turkeys, I don't believe that's true. I actually don't believe it's true with turkeys all year long, but especially in April and May, when they are truly prone to chatting away, and that chatter is a huge complimentary component to their evolutionary desire to pass on their genes. It's the best time to call them, but only if you understand what you're saying and you say it with confidence. So what do you do about that? Well, buy some new calls if you need to, or bust out the old ones. But then challenge yourself, are you timid with a mouth call because you don't really believe you can get loud and make something happen work? On that practice. Do you have no idea how to purr or cluck or cut or whatever with your call? Figure it out. The more you can mix in those sort of secondary sounds into a setup, the more realistic your setup will appear to real turkeys. Instead of just running through a five note series of yelps that really have no character and don't really mimic the way actual birds yelp. Head on over to YouTube and listen to some actual turkeys, then try to copy them. Try to figure out how to make a slow, two note yelp, and then try to figure out how to cut aggressively. Maybe you need a slay call to do this, but it doesn't matter. Whatever you're most comfortable with is what you should try to figure out first and what you should practice on. But don't just test it out for a few minutes and call it good enough. Figure out what sounds you can't produce but wild turkeys can, and then figure out how to make them. Then, when you're out there this spring, call to the birds lot, call to them and see how they react. If you get hens in the decoys, pick up your slate, make a bunch of soft purson clucks, watch them listen to them. Do they call back good, then yelp and cut. If not, keep the chatter quiet, but keep it going. If they don't run away, you're doing just fine. Develop some confidence in the garage or while driving to work, and then talk to the actual birds you see and hear while you're hunting. Figure out how to have better conversations out there, and that will help you figure out how to start better conversations out there when the birds seem to be tight lipped. Not only is this a great way to have more action in the woods during spring hunts, but it makes the whole thing a hell of a lot more fun. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you so much for showing up for our Turkey week, heading over to the medeater dot com, maybe watching some films, maybe listening to some other podcasts on here, just consuming this content that we drop every day. We truly appreciate it because without you, guys, we are nothing, So thank you for that. If you need to find some more Turkey content, head on over to the mediator dot com check it out. Tons of stuff there. Thank you,