The Turkey Hunter Podcast with Andy Gagliano & Cameron Weddington | Turkey Hunting Tips, Strategies, and Stories

Joe Hutto is a naturalist, artist, and author who imprinted two clutches of wild turkey eggs. Joe wasn't prepared for how this experiment of gaining acceptance into the inside world of wild turkeys would change his life.

For two years, Joe spent nearly every daylight hour with this flock of birds, witnessing and documenting their transformation from young hatching poults to full grown adult wild turkeys. Joe's notes of this transformation were put into book form in Illumination in the Flatwoods.

Several years later, Joe's book was made into a documentary and aired on PBS. The documentary entitled, "My Life as a Turkey" won 3 Emmy's.

In this episode of The Turkey Hunter Pocast, Joe shares with us more about his experience raising the turkeys as well as provides us some behind the scenes information about the book and the documentary.

If you want to learn more about the behavior of wild turkeys (and if you are a turkey hunter, then you definitely should be a student of the bird), then you'll want to listen in to this week's episode, buy the book, and watch the documentary.

Here's my affiliate link to the book on Amazon:

Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season With The Wild Turkey

Here's a link to the documentary on PBS:

My Life as a Turkey

Corey New with Combat in the Wild and The Turkeyologists is on this episode of The Turkey Hunter Podcast sharing tips on how to take better video footage of our turkey hunts. 

With the popularity of video on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, more and more hunters are sharing their hunts with friends and loved ones via social media so that they can enjoy the success as well.  Videoing hunts is also a great way to extend your season if you live in a state with a short season or low bag limit.  If you are going to take the time and put forth the effort to video a hunt and share it with your friends and family, then you should also put forth the effort to take good video.

Listen in as Corey shares with us the 3 Cardinal Sins to avoid while videoing our turkey hunts, and set up tips as well.

In this episode of The Turkey Hunter Podcast, Bob Eriksen, Regional Wildlife Biologist with the National Wild Turkey Federation, shares with us some tips that we can put to use on our hunting properties to improve the habitat for our turkeys.

We discuss prescribed fire, planting crops, improving brood and nesting habitat, wildlife habitat management plans, and cost sharing programs available for landowners who would like a plan for their properties.

If you want to hear, see, and kill more wild turkeys, then you need to improve the habitat on your hunting property so that you'll increase the population and your opportunities for harvesting a trophy bird.  Bob teaches us a great deal of what we need to know to make those improvements.

JT Byrne's passion for Fall turkey hunting with dogs is apparent in this interview. JT shares with us the history behind the famous Byrne line of Appalachian Turkey Dogs, the benefits of using dogs to turkey hunt in the Fall, and some exciting Fall turkey hunting stories as well - my favorite of which is the story of his dad's last turkey hunt. 

Listen in to this week's very entertaining episode about Fall Turkey Hunting with Dogs with JT Byrne.  I hope you learn as much as I did and that the interview sparks an interest in trying out the sport if you get the opportunity.

As promised during the interview, the links mentioned towards the end of the show are below:

American Wild Turkey Hunting Dog Association

Byrne Turkey Dogs Facebook Group - This is a closed group, and you'll need to apply to join.

Turkey Trot Acres - Provides guided turkey dog hunts in New York.

In this week's episode of The Turkey Hunter Podcast, Sally Morgan with Morgan's Americana shares her excitement about her husband, Kenny's, new book entitled America, Wild Turkeys, and Mongrel Dogs.

Kenny Morgan passed away in 2011 after finishing the manuscript of his second book.  Kenny's vision for this book was for it to be a coffee table book that people would be proud to display in their homes.  After Kenny's passing, Sally took up the project of completing the book in Kenny's honor, and she certainly made Kenny's vision come to life.  The book is a coffee table book full of Kenny's turkey hunting stories, amazing photography of nature, wild turkeys, and photos from Kenny's childhood.

Listen in to the interview, and then I'm sure you will want to pick up your copy of the book while there are still some available.

The number of women hunting and fishing is growing each year for great reasons. The same reasons why men have been hunting and fishing for years. The outdoors is an awesome place to spend the morning or afternoon, and enjoying the outdoors with a gun or rod and reel in hand makes that morning or afternoon even more awesome. More and more women are picking up on that fact each year, and they are also enjoying being part of the "Farm to Table" movement that has swept the country over the past several years. 

Brenda Valentine, The First Lady of Hunting, shares information with us to help us introduce women, and new hunters, to the sport of turkey hunting. If we take care to introduce others to turkey hunting the right way, we will create turkey hunters for life, and Brenda goes over some of those tips that we can use to introduce others, especially women to the sport that we love so much.

In this episode of The Turkey Hunter Podcast, Tes Randle Jolly, who is a very well known wildlife and nature photographer, shares information about photographing wild turkeys.  Tes' work has been in numerous magazines, books, websites, and advertisements.

Tes shares with us how photographing turkeys can teach us patience and make us better turkey hunters. She also shares with us the one thing that she has learned while turkey hunting that has made her a better turkey hunter, and she shares with us the story of her most recent successful turkey hunt.

If you want to reach out to Tes to purchase her work or to ask her some additional questions, you can find her contact info on www.jollysoutdoorvisions.com. Listen in to Tes and me while we talk turkey, and I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did putting it together.

Traveling out of state to hunt turkeys can be very exciting and a ton of fun. These out of state trips can be a way to extend your hunting season or increase your bag limit opportunities.  They are also a necessity for completing a Grand Slam. They can, however, also be a lot of stress and be very expensive if the trip is not planned out properly.  

In this episode of The Turkey Hunter Podcast, I share 6.5 steps that you will want to follow to plan a turkey hunting trip out of state so you can be sure that you are getting the best experience possible for your investment of money and time.

Click here for the blog post where I share 45 questions to ask a turkey hunting outfitter.

Even the best turkey hunters odds of success are greatly diminished when hunting in an area that has a low turkey population. In this episode I share some tips that we all can use to increase the nesting success, as well as the brood rearing success, on our hunting properties.

Preston Pittman with Pittman Game Calls shares his knowledge of how to best care for your turkey calls so you can get years of use out of them.

Preston tells us how to condition our calls during the season so that they are ready to play while we are hunting, and he also tells us how to store our calls so that they are ready to be put into service next year as well.

We also get to hear the story of Preston's most recent successful turkey hunt and the one or two keys that made that hunt successful.