catman529":nonrwtu1 said:
They start putting and purring on the roost when they bust you.
Sometimes they just become or stay totally quite, not even flying off the roost at the typical time.
I well remember one afternoon roosting an old longbeard, coming back the next morning, setting up well before first light, and then never hearing anything, not even a nearby fly-down. I knew of no better spot, and knew I would be busted by any birds within a couple hundred yards if I moved, so I just stayed put until mid-morning. As I was leaving, he flew off the roost, and had been roosted in the very tree I had to my back.
This was one of those "great" ideal sunny weather mornings in early April. He couldn't have seen my coming in, but probably was watching me sit there all morning, curiously wondering why I was occasionally making hen sounds. But not once did he make any sounds whatsoever.
I've also experienced several times when I had birds roosted, took a novice hunter to get his first bird, then he would make some unnatural noise, like the metallic sound of chambering a shell in his pump gun, or the loud sound of Velcro tearing, only to have those nearby roosted birds remain totally silent, then eventually just glide off the roost going away from us.
Once I took a good friend to a location where I had roosted 2 longbeards the evening before. Our setup was about 75 yards from the roost tree, and we arrived before dawn, totally quite. Time to load the guns. Before I could emphasize the importance of doing this quietly, he quickly chambered a round in his pump, seemingly proud of how much noise he made, like he was trying to alert a home invader he had a shotgun! Needless to say, those gobblers never made a sound, and simply glided off the roost later away from us. Normally, they would have landed right in front of us at that location. For many years, one of the advantages I had was that I could load my side-by-side turkey shotgun with zero noise. You cannot chamber a pump or autoloader as quietly. Some have never even thought about how such a noise can be all it takes to totally sabotage the opportunity they otherwise had.
