Ah who am I kiddin'. I got nothing going on and its too early for bed.

Anyway... there is a sticky at the top of the turkey hunting page called the Guide to Pot Calls. I wrote that thing a year or two ago and it is a pretty complete and fairly broken down guide to pot style calls (which include slate, glass, crystal, aluminum and a host of other materials that are played with a peg or striker).

A pot style call is what I would recommend you start with. Everyone has their favorites... I'm a woodhaven and budnbetty's man. There are as many small makers of turkey calls as there are counties in the country... and your state probably has at least 20 or 25 active call makers and probably another 20-25 who make a few on the side when they take a notion too. These calls are quite often as good or better than anything you can buy in a store. I use woodhaven's and BnBs and recommend them simply because anyone can find and buy them pretty easily and they offer a custom sound (with a semi-custom price of course) with a hand made craftsmenship.

A box call is pretty easy as well. Box calls are a little bit more fragile and certainly more cumbersome to carry than a pot call, but they have a sound that is pure death in the right hands. They carry and cut the spring wind better than anything else. With 15 minutes of practice, just about anyone can use one with enough proficiency to get the job done.

Mouth calls are kinda like... well I don't know a good analogy (which is odd for a Virginian cause we love our descriptive comparisons). Mouth calls are pretty much grad school turkey calls. They are what I learned on, so it is really what I use most and probably what I use best. They are fairly cheap and to a neophyte fairly frustrating. You'll want to stick with simple, proven designs... no more than three reeds (and two is better). My all time favorite is the Quaker Boy Old Boss Hen. Simple and deadly. My personal favorite is Woodhaven's Sadler McGraw Signature Ghost Cut. It'll do anything but gobble well... and does the best Kee-Kee short of the genuine article. For gobble calls (which are really just a novelty... I use a Woodhaven Classic V3 or a Single V).

On to the noises they make;

The worst thing to ever happen to turkey hunting was forums like this and the onslaught of 'semi-experienced advice'. Now you might could contend that I'm contributing to the problem... but I've been around just long enough to know when to type and when to just move on and ramble about something else. Archerytalk.com is the worst thing ever to happen to new archers... take a kid with talent... put him under a good coach... you'll have a world champion by the time he is 25..... take that same kid... let him on AT... and he'll be chasing his tail the whole time. Soap box off.

There are a lot of things written, spoken and lied about when it comes to turkey calling. You are going to hear about putts and purrs and cutts and sequences and simulating fights and fly downs and cackles andall that other good for nothing but scaring turkeys crap.... and as a new turkey hunter I beg you to please IGNORE IT ALL!!!! Yes I mean it.... leave it JUST FOR NOW!!!! You need to learn to standup before you can dance.... and you need to learn the beat and the rhytm of spring.

The basic turkey noise is the cluck... I don't care what anyone else says. Its not the putt... its not the yelp.... its a cluck. All putts and yelps amount to are sharper and carried out variations of that single cluck. A cluckcan mean a lot of things.... I'm happy... I'm nervous.... Oh Chit.... Run Away.... I have food.... lots of stuff. What it means depends on where you are and the frequency you use.Just like George Carlin explained 'The F Word' and its many uses... its all about context. The sharper the cluck... the sharper the meaning.The amount of clucks let out in rapid succession can mean danger or excitement... depending on what its mixed with.

Yelps are used for a couple of things.... mostly to address other turkeys (usually multiple turkeys) over a broad area. They are used as locator calls... letting other birds know where they are and what they are doing or where they are going. Its a simple language really that is complex only because we over think it.

What you need in order to kill turkeys at this stage (from a calling standpoint)is a cluck and a yelp. Clucks also work well with purrs.

Yelps are what you'll hear most turkey hunters using.. which in my mind automatically is some what of a procede with caution sign, espeically if you hunt in a pressured area. Yelps, as I wrote above, are used often as locator calls. If you are in the right spot.. a yelp or two is all you'll ever need to get a birds attention. Just don't over do it.. because remember... we are being subtle.... yelps are like chili powder or bay leaves... you need some for sure, butyou can go from just right to WAYYYY too much in a big hurry. We are playing 'hard to get' here... DON'T FORGET IT!!!!!

When it comes to making yelps... cadence is important.... and really the only thing you can do wrong (other than making too many yelps) is to yelp too fast. Drag them out... make sure they come out sounding decent... cut them off cleanly....stick to four or five.... no more than six notes per yelp. Thats what the real birds do.... and thats what I do too. You can kill birds in other parts of the country with some pretty extreme calling... Rios will run under cattle, fly creeks, go through fences to get to you... but the easterns you'll be hunting in WI are the major leauges. You have to bring your A game every day.

I kill turkeys with what I like to call "Happy Turkey Noises." Imagine if you walked into a bar and everyone was yelling at each other, or if everyone stopped talking and looked at you, or if everyone was whispering.... you'd know something was up.... but if everyone was talking, laughing and just carrying on as normal... you'd think nothing of the situation at all. Thats the frame of mind you have to be in. Turkeys are always making noises of some sort. Little clucks and purrs and they never hold still.... to me, happy turkey noises are feeding clucks and soft purrs and raking the leaves.

Leaf raking is the single deadliest call in the woods. Coupled with wing beats to simulate fly downs right at first light... they just ought to be illegal.

Here is a tip (while I write plenty... I don't come off tips like this very often... I'm feeling generous)that I was told by a very experienced turkey hunter who I actually waterfowl hunt with. He has a couple yard birds (best teachers in the world), and two years agohis boss hen threw a clutch of about 12 real late (they hatched in like September) and 5 made it through. This was along about January and I think we'd shot a bunch of geese that morning. We'd take a handful of chicken feed and throw it out in the yard and watch the fray. The boss hen he has is extremely vocal... even for a turkey. I'd like to bottle her if I could.... I'd make ten million dollars. Anyway... as we were watching her beat up the chickens that were trying to dart in as her poults were feeding... Robbie made a point I'll never forget.... he, like I knows that raking leaves is a deadly call.... but what I didn't know is that there is a method to the madness. Frankly, in years past I have just raked the leaves at random.... thinking nothing of it. He told me to watch that hen scratch. Turkeys... for some reason... damn near ALWAYS scratch in patterns of three.... two with one foot... one with the other. Scratch, scratch, Scruff.... feed..... repeat. Since he told me that... I've noticed a ten fold 'pick up' in response from birds.... they can hear it quite a ways off on a cold spring morning... when you have a bird gobbling at leaf raking.... you'd better take the safety off.

Now, to totally un-do what I just told you... every situation is unique. And every turkey is unique. The only way to learn is to do it. It took me ten years to kill my first bird.... ten years. And now all I do when I am faced with a situation is revert back to a similar situation from my past and think about what I did and why it did or didn't work... I take into account where I am, where he is and where I think he wants to be... I think about a route to there that will not spook him.... or sometimes I hang it up so that I won't spook him and fight it another day... and i go from there. The good thing about turkey hunting is that it is sort of like black jack.... you know what your odds are with what you have... and you can hold or draw a card... and you get immediate feedback on your choice. Sometimes you can win by making what would typically be a bad choice... even a blind hog finds a few acorns... but the odds are always with the house... and you'll learn that soon enough.

The best thing you can possibly do is know where you are going to be hunting like its your own house. You need to know where the birds are, and more importantly where they are going to be. Turkeys are pretty reliable creatures, even in the spring time. At some point in the spring... everything will just seem to shut down... and just like the lull in the rut... the birds are henned up. Figure out how to consistantly kill henned up turkeys without bait or a rifle and you'd probably be the only man in the world that can do it. Key to succeeding is to treat him like a deer.... meet him at the water or at the feeding grounds.