GOBBLING PEAKS
Alabama is blessed with a long season that runs basically a month and a half -- March 15 to April 30, in most localities.

The first two or three weeks of the season are arguably the best time to be afield, providing that the weather cooperates.

"Turkeys come out of the winter and start gobbling," Eakes noted. "They gobble a little more each day, it seems. The gobbling intensity is something of a bell-shaped curve."

Those gobbling birds are perhaps at their most vulnerable to hunters right at the start of the season.

"Then you have a lot of people in the woods, calling to the birds and creating a general disturbance," Eakes continued. "The turkeys get educated in a hurry."

The gobbling activity tails off somewhat after a week or two of hunting. But as the season wears on, the hunting pressure drops off too.

"The gobbling picks back up," Eakes suggested. "You get a second peak of gobbling later in the season."

It pays, he added, to tailor your calling routine to the land and the birds you're hunting and the pressure they've been exposed to.

Eakes was the biologist for years on the Black Warrior WMA. The "running-and-gunning" techniques you see on outdoor television won't work for birds on the Warrior, so don't lay on the calling too heavy.

"Black Warrior has had turkeys for a very long time," he said. "There were still turkeys there when they weren't anywhere else. These turkeys are descendants of the survivors. I think that means the loud ones were probably killed out. If you overcall these birds, they'll go the other way."

On a farm that doesn't get hunted a lot, just the opposite may be true. You might call loudly and have to shoo off a gullible tom so you can shoot him.

TO KILL A PUBLIC TURKEY
If you live in Alabama, you can't complain that you have no places to turkey hunt. You might not have a private honeyhole all to yourself, but you can find a place to chase turkeys.

The state has 27 wildlife management areas encompassing roughly 750,000 acres that are open to turkey hunting. All you need to tap this resource is a regular hunting license, a $16 WMA license and a map-permit for the area.

"It's a blessing to have this much land available for turkey hunting," Eakes offered.

"The areas in the northern half of the state may actually be better than those in the south," he continued, while adding that scouting is critical to success on the WMAs. "Get yourself some good topographic maps or aerial photographs to start with. Pick out some likely spots on the topo map and then start looking.

"Leave your calls at home in the preseason. If you call, all you're doing is educating birds. If you call one up before the season starts, he's just going to be that much harder to call up next time. Just go and listen at a lot of different places."

Eakes also suggested that hunters cover a lot of ground looking for tracks, feathers and scratching.

"The WMAs get some hunting pressure, but it's still possible to have a quality hunt."