Each day after my hunt is over, I sit at home and reflect on what went right and what went wrong and how I can do it better next time. I also jot my thoughts down in a turkey hunting journal that I have been keeping for the last three years. By doing this after each hunt, I'm able to record many details that I would probably forget had I waited until the season was over to think about and try to remember. When the season does end, I take my journal and read over each entry and try to come up with the most important items that I learned during my hunts. Here is an example of what I learned this year. Think back over your season and share with us the most important things you learned.

1. Weather can affect nesting times and later nesting means real hens for the gobblers to follow making it tougher to call them in. Another related point is a high hen to gobbler ratio makes for tough going.

2. The odds of calling in a bird go up if you have the patience to pick a good spot, call periodically, sit still, and listen. I now understand what I had read some time ago that patience and sitting perfectly still will kill more birds than fancy calling. On 5 separate occasions, I had gobblers come into me because I stayed in one spot, where I knew their were birds, and had heard no gobbling on the roost in the morning.

3. I personally need to practice my close in calls (cluck, purr, soft yelp). I did good with the fairly loud calls in getting toms to commit, but think I could have done better when they got to about 50 yards or so. I was taught this lesson by a real hen on the last day of the Pa. season. She came in behind me and began clucking to my soft yelps. I started immitating her and we held a conversation of clucks for about 10 to 15 minutes. I was very surprised at how her answers were really only loud enough for me to hear. She didn't cluck any louder than necessary. When she headed down over the ridge from me, she yelped, but again only loud enough for the turkeys in her immediate area to hear. I also immitated her yelp and about 5 minutes after she left, a silent tom came sneaking into my cousin who was set up about 20 yards from me. He downed it with one shot.

4. As stated on another post somewhere that I read and I agree with, a tough turkey season will make a better turkey hunter out of you in the long run. You get to try more things and hopefully find some new things that will help you in the future.