It’s unmistakable. The sounds of the wild turkey. Especially during the wild turkey breeding season.
You are listening to the Nature Photography Podcast sponsored by Image Light, I’m Terry VanderHeiden your host this week, as we take look and listen to the wild turkey.
These large birds are generally very plentiful across the US and at certain times of the year, the wild turkey can be very easy to find and photograph and other times it will be like trying to track down a ghost.
Like all wildlife photography, understanding the selected animal’s behaviors first will make a much more enjoyable experience when you try to go out and photograph them. With turkeys, you just have to find them when they are, shall we say…distracted.
In California, the turkey hunting season is usually from late March to early May and then again for about a month mid-November to mid-December.
While I know as photographers we are not out hunting these birds, but in a way, we are. We’re just not killing them and putting them on our tables to eat. But we are stalking them, out in the wild, so many of the techniques are transferable.
For many game animals, hunting season can be the worst time to be photographing a specific animal. Take for instance the wild moose in Maine. I went there once in early October specifically to photograph moose. We frequented ponds where they had been seen feeding, game trails, and many areas that were off the beating track.
The only moose I saw the whole trip, were the ones strapped to the hood of some hunter’s pick-up truck. Yes, I decided to go photograph Moose during the hunting season.
Lesson learned, don’t go stalking moose during hunting season… for two reasons. One, most of them will scatter toward the hills the first time they see their buddy get dropped standing next to them. Moose are smart animals that can move really fast. They can run at speeds up to 35 miles per hour, which means when they need to get lost, they can do it quite quickly. They also have great endurance in that they can swim up to 10 miles without stopping.
And two, who wants to be out in the woods, carrying just a camera, while your competition are carrying powerful rifles. If you do go out to photograph animals during hunting season, be sure at least wear vibrant orange outerwear to help keep yourself visible.
The exception to this rule of photographing in hunting season is stalking your wildlife in either state or national parks or look for them in populated cities where hunting is not allowed. In the case of turkeys, they can be found in many rural landscapes we found ours at a local golf course, but more about that later.
The hunting season for turkeys signals to us when the turkeys are easiest to find. Making this time the simplest time to photograph them.
In the southern parts of the United States, turkeys start their breeding season in February and as you find yourself farther north, the season can start up to as late as May. This has to do with increasing daylight hours that trigger sex hormones in the male birds, called the Toms. The weather conditions will dictate this as the colder weather will stave off their interest in the hens until it gets a bit warmer.
During this season, the Tom’s are trying to amass their own harems of hens. This is when the gobbling sounds are at their peak. And Tom’s are at their most vulnerable.
It’s their sex drive that makes male turkeys not think straight and in some cases, you can get them to come running right to you.
Some simple calls that you can get at Bass Pro Shops will do the trick, but there is a learning curve.
The idea here is that you are trying to make one of two calls. First, is a call that sounds like a female turkey that is looking for a big, strapping Tom. It’s kind of a purr that says to the male turkeys, that they are looking for a mate.
The second one is a gobbling sound that tells other Tom’s that somebody else is in their territory and trying to make time with one of the members of his harem. This sound makes them come running as well but this time with fury in their eyes.
There are hundreds of turkey calls available for as little as a couple of dollars up to $150 each. These sounds all do something just a bit different from the next and Turkey hunters will tell you that having a few different calls is the way to go. That way you can switch it up to get the reaction that you are looking for.
For starters, the most inexpensive calls are the mouth calls. If you remember us talking about mouth calls in an earlier episode on how to photograph coyotes, you can get mouth calls for lots of different species and there are several for turkeys. With the turkey mouth calls, these are again a half wafer type device that you place in the roof of your mouth, and depending on how you place your tongue or how the air gets expelled through it, it can make different sounds.
The upside to these are that you can easily carry these in your pocket. So, whenever you need to call a turkey you are ready to go. Also, if you have to hike a long way to get to your turkeys, it’s one less thing to carry. Another reason mouth calls are desirable is while you are using them you can keep your hands free to operate your camera.
The downside is that it takes some practice to get good at them, to make them sound correct.
Here is how a mouth call sounds.
Another version of a call is a friction plate apparatus. On this product, you use a supplied pencil-like device and scratch sounds out on this specially built resonating crystal plate that has a wood resonator on the bottom to amplify the sound.
These take some skill in the art of calling in Turkeys but once you learn how to do it, you’ll have them running right at you.
Here is what a slate call sounds like. Again, you are trying to imitate the sound of a hen that is on the market, looking for a Tom.
Lastly, there is a box type of calls. These are generally, handheld, wooden narrow boxes that have a lid attached. The sound is created by pivoting the lid across the box slowly or with a rhythm. The sound is magnified by the hollowed-out section of the box.
Here is a sample of a box call.
This is the easiest Turkey sound to make as it takes very little practice to learn to make these sounds using a box call. Just slowly move the lid across the resonating box and you are communicating with turkeys.
After you get a turkey call and start working with it, how do you know that you are making authentic sounds?
One of the best ways to know that you are making accurate sounds is to download a Turkey call app. There are a few iPhone apps on the app store for Apple iPhones, they are full of turkey sounds and most of them are free.
These apps will list the sounds along with samples of the sounds that you are striving to make so that when you practice, you will be making the sounds that get the turkeys to respond the way you want.
Before I forget, let me give you a few notes about using calls for calling in animals for photography.
First off, you can’t use calls to lure any ANY animal to you in a National park. It is also forbidden in many state parks. It’s considered “harassing” the animals. So, make sure you know where you are when you are using your calls.
Also, using electronic calls can be forbidden in some areas. It strictly outlawed for hunting but then again, we aren’t hunting the turkeys. Be smart about it, don’t be annoying to the people around you and you should be fine.
The basis of a turkey call is to make the Tom’s curious enough to come to you to check you out. And I got to tell you, this really works.
My brother happens to have quite a selection of turkey calls, so I had him come out with me one morning to be my caller while I made some photographs. After the break, you have a listen to my first turkey photography session using store-bought turkey calls.
The results were outstanding. I made plenty of photographs of turkeys that were really pretty easy to get.
Let me talk a little bit about lighting. Your best light will likely be early morning light that is low across the ground, illuminating their feathers and colored heads. This direct sunlight will also illuminate the copperish looking bodies that kind of look iridescent in the proper light. This is spectacular to see and is caused by the sun refracting off the feathers of the bird.
The wild turkey can also look great under soft overcast light. While the colors don’t explode as they would with low angle sunlight, they do look quite nice. One of the best parts is the colorful heads of the male birds.
The heads are made up of three specialized parts. The snood is that droopy bit of flesh that comes out just below their eyes and can be a few inches long as it hangs down across the male turkey’s face.
Chicks dig the snood. So, it’s a real attractant to the female birds.
The back of the head has some warty looking skin called the caruncles (car-uncles) that comes down and merges into the chin area. That flabby area in the chin area is called the wattle.
These parts of the turkey’s head can change color from bright blue to fiery red.
The blue – teal color is very saturated with color and this means that the bird is excited and looking for a mate. This is usually the head color you will see in the springtime when you are making sounds that mimic a female turkey.
When these areas are red, that means that the male turkey is angry. “In a fight’en mood.” As they say.
You will see these colors when there are other male birds trying to move into another bird’s territory. This is where another sound, the gobble, that you can also make with a store-bought call, comes into play. This gobble signifies that “hey, I’m here to take all your wives!”
Fighting words in just about any language. So, when this area of the bird turns red, you know you got its attention. This is a defense mode, he is defending his harem of hens that he has been gathering.
A month or two before the mating season the tom turkeys are gathering up their hens into a harem of female birds. That way when mating season begins, the male bird will have his pick and the convenience of everyone being right there, close by.
It’s during this time that rouge jakes (younger male birds) will try to lure hens away from a harem. These fights, while they normally don’t last too long, can be spectacular photo opportunities.
The birds will use the thorny spurs on their ankles to jab at the other bird, while many times twisting their necks around to peck the other bird. It looks like half fight half dance as two male turkeys will go around and around.
Eventually, one bird will come out on top, literally on top of the other bird, and the loser will slink away as the lesser turkey, for that day.
To photograph this display, you obviously need to be in the right place at the right time and be careful of having too long of a lens. Remember you will be having two large birds, moving violently around quickly so you want to be back far enough to capture the whole scene.
Since these birds are moving, you really need to have a very high shutter speed if you want to stop the action. So, keep that shutter speed in the 1 4000thof a second or higher for these battle scenes.
For the most part, wild turkey photography won’t require super-fast lenses or high ISOs. As the birds move rather slowly when they are strutting and showing off their feathers.
Shutter speeds a 250thor 500thof second should do the trick, but remember if you are using longer lenses, be sure to compensate for the magnification and increase that shutter speed.
Wild turkey photography is a lot of fun and can be a challenge to get them to come to you, but its worth it.
They really spectacular birds, that had it been up to Ben Franklin, the wild turkey would have been the national bird instead of the bald eagle.
For your sanity, start with photographing the wild turkey in the springtime during mating season as they will be much less wary and since they only have one thing on their minds, it should make photographing them way easier.
Until next time, this is Terry VanderHeiden thanks for listening to the Nature photography podcast brought to you by Imagelight.com