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Wade's World Hunting: Most turkey hunters are familiar with the role and use of locater calls to elicit reflex responses from gobblers within hearing range. However, many hunters don’t know how to use locater calls “to the max,” to increase their chances of getting a response that gives a gobbler’s location away.

Locater calls come in several “species”: owl, crow, coyote, woodpecker, etc. Carry several and try each one intermittently. Sometimes a gobbler may gobble back at a crow call but not an owl. It’s like trying different menu items. From one day to the next a gobbler’s “tastes” may differ. The only way to learn which call he’ll respond to is by trying several.

One of the best locater calls is a “hen squall”, which is a short series of excited cutts, then a cackle followed by a 4 or 5-note yelping series. I make this call with a loud mouth diaphragm call. I cut the squall off very sharply after the yelps. The loudness, excited nature and sharp cutoff are very effective for getting a gobbler to respond without thinking.

One more tip about using locater calls: don’t be timid. The purpose of using locater calls is to locate gobblers you didn’t know were around, or to get a better idea of a distant gobbler’s location. If he can’t hear you, he’s not going to respond. So “belt it out.” Perhaps you may scare a bird every now and then. But odds are good you’ll locate a lot more gobblers than you scare, so the benefits of being aggressive with locater calls far outweigh the negatives.