Harold Knight On Gobbler Decoys

Harold Knight On Gobbler Decoys

By Lawrence Taylor  & Knight & Hale

Just four years ago no one even considered using a mature gobbler decoy. Prevailing opinion was that a big, strutting decoy would spook the birds, and truthfully, the few examples that were on the market probably did scare the bajesus out of all but the most ignorant tom turkeys. The decoys were huge, plastic creatures that only remotely resembled an actual turkey. Then, turkey hunting legends Harold Knight and David Hale had an idea.

The pair of hunters who created Knight & Hale Game Calls probably combine to have more turkey hunting experience of any two people in the business. They’ve spent decades studying the wild turkey both in hunting situations and with penned birds. They’ve hunted across the country for every subspecies. Knight and Hale flat out know turkeys and turkey behavior.

Part of their success relies on questioning conventional wisdom and developing new and innovative ways of harvesting turkeys. They created the Fight-n Purr system which mimics the sound of a turkey fight, and it was wildly successful and created a new way to call in birds. They aimed to do the same with the mature gobbler decoy.

Knight and Hale contacted Carry-Lite Decoys and told company managers of their desire. Carry-Lite officials were excited and sent them a dozen or so of the company’s old mature gobbler decoys, and the Knight and Hale team took it from there. They created the Pretty Boy decoy – the decoy that spawned an entire niche in turkey hunting.

“We’d always been told that a mature gobbler decoy will scare gobblers off,” Knight said, “but we found out that that’s just not right. The first thing David (Hale) did was cut off the tail and put in one of his dried fans. Then I started working on the colors, putting bars on the wings and changing the head color. It’s the head color that makes the difference.”

Knight and Hale completely redesigned the color scheme on the entire bird, adding realistic colors to the wings, body and head. On the head, they didn’t just look at calm gobblers in a pen and replicate that. Everyone knows that a gobbler’s head changes colors depending on mood and level of excitement. Knight and Hale studied gobblers getting ready to breed and matched that. Some customers have looked at all of the white on the decoy’s head and turned up their noses at it, but that white is one of the features that sets the Pretty Boy apart from many of the other decoys on the market. 

“In all my 50 years of turkey hunting, I’ve never seen anything that makes a turkey want to fight any more than the Pretty Boy,” Knight said. “They just run to it. They run in and just as they get close they stop and start strutting and purring, and that often brings in even more gobblers.”

As the company’s television commercials and hunting program often show, gobblers do become enraged and attack the decoy, usually going right for the head, or pecking at its eyes or crown. They circle around it and jump on it, knocking it off the stake and often standing on the shell, spurring the plastic and pecking at the head.

“The decoy looks so real,” Knight said. “Anytime you put out a decoy, the more real it looks, the better.”

Another part of the realism is the ability to mount a real turkey fan on the decoy via a slot in the back. With a real fan mounted in it and a slight breeze moving it slowly back-and-forth on the stake, the Pretty Boy is the spitting image of a strutting gobbler. Add the Pretty Girl, a realistic hen decoy squatting in a submissive position, in front of the gobbler decoy and it seems to enrage the local gobbler population.

While testing the decoy system during the 2005 season, Knight and Hale were a part of 16 kills with the decoys. The pair hunted more than 50 days during that season.

“The Pretty Boy made that year the most memorable season I’d ever had,” Knight said. “Nothing works 100 percent of the time, but I’ve never seen anything that works like the Pretty Boy and Pretty Girl.”

Default Administrator :

email@here.com
Other Articles »

Related Articles :
No Related Content Found