On a chilly April morning, before the sky has even started to lighten, Tim Otto gets ready at the edge of a field in Oneida County.
“This is hunting, and I'm not going to make any guarantees about what we may or may not see and experience,” Otto said when asked what I should know before we head out.
Otto goes through some of the basics of turkey hunting, like if we see a turkey, don’t move.
“Turkeys have eyes like a hawk, so they pick up on movement and color. That’s why they’re known for their plumage, their bright heads,” said Otto.
With the basics covered, we head out hiking to find a spot to set up a blind.
A couple times, Otto stops and scrapes a striker against a small disk in his hand imitating a turkey call to see if a tom will call back.
As we make our way towards the woods, some start to call back at a distance, but close enough that Otto decides it will be a good place to set up.
Dressed in head-to-toe camouflage and sitting behind a blind, Otto once again calls out to the toms and one nearby calls back.
Every once in a while, Otto will call out and the tom calls right back.
“He answers every call but refuses to come,” said Otto.
And in fact, he never did.
After roughly two hours of going back and forth, we begrudgingly call it quits.
“I feel like we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory,” Otto said with a laugh. “In terms of a morning turkey hunt, I have had far more boring hunts than that,”
Statistically speaking, that actually tracks for Wisconsin where turkey hunters have roughly 18 to 22% success rate based on harvest authorizations.
But that fact that there’s even enough turkeys for a hunt is a conservation success story.
“Early 1800s the wild turkey was almost completely gone and extinct from Wisconsin,” said Alissa Kakatsch, the assistant game bird specialist for the Wisconsin DNR.
By 1900, turkeys were almost nowhere to be found in much of the upper Midwest due to habitat loss, disease, and unregulated hunting.
It wouldn’t be until the1970s when Wisconsin would start to see success with restoration efforts.
In 1976, the state entered into an agreement with the Missouri Department of Conservation.
“We transplanted the turkeys from Missouri to Wisconsin. That was 1976 and once those populations started to establish and take off, we even started interstate translocation efforts, so just moving birds from those initial flocks just to different parts of the state to get a turkey population more widespread throughout the entire state of Wisconsin,” said Kakatsch.
Wisconsin is now home to a very healthy, reproducing turkey population.
It means the state has a strong hunting season as well and it’s been gaining interest.
“Compared to last year of 2024 for this year, for 2025 we saw an increase of over 12,000 applicants for that spring drawing,” said Kakatsch. “We believe that that increase is due to a really good and successful spring season last year, and ultimately, we're hoping for a great and similar season again this year.”
So far it is looking like a similar season, with roughly 100 more turkeys harvested as of last week compared to the same point in the hunt last year.
While Otto’s hunt did not yield a turkey, he says it’s those peaks of excitement followed by “utter and complete disappointment” are what keeps him coming back.
“If it was always success, that would probably get old too. You look at the grand scheme of things like, you know, we heard and saw woodcock on the way out, we heard some loons calling, we saw some deer, heard some deer snorting, a bunch of grouse drumming, and then there's even some turkeys mixed in there,” said Otto.
By Otto’s measure, that all makes it an early morning well spent.
