The pushbutton box call is one of the simplest and easiest turkey calls for a hunter to use. Often it’s one of the most effective. Here’s why. There seems to be a pecking order in turkey hunters. If you use a diaphragm mouth caller to call turkeys, you often see yourself as a much-more effective and knowledgeable turkey hunter than those who use a pushbutton, a slate or a box call to call turkeys. However, that’s just not true. On any given day, with individual wild turkeys, one call most often will produce the most turkeys on that day in that area. That’s why, carrying different types of turkey calls you can use with you into the turkey woods often allows you to get a gobbler to answer you when all the various kinds of diaphragm turkeys calls won’t. I’ve been fortunate enough to hunt with some of the best turkey callers and hunters in the nation and learn from them. Almost always they’ll use a variety of calls and styles of calls – yes, including a pushbutton call – to try to make a turkey gobble.

You can hand a pushbutton call to a person who’s never hunted turkeys before but always wanted to try and hunt a turkey, give him or her 5-10 minutes of instruction on how to use the pushbutton call and then have a reasonably good chance of trying to bag a gobbler with a pushbutton call. With some more instruction, that beginner can learn how to cutt, cackle, purr, cluck and make most of the sounds of a hen turkey – and even some gobbler sounds.

One of the reasons I love using a pushbutton call is because when you’re hunting a region that’s had heavy hunter pressure – whether you’re on public or private lands – you can know just about for certain that the toms on that property never have heard pushbutton calls. Or, if they have heard pushbutton calls, that’s the call they’ve heard the least – often making the pushbutton the most-effective call you can use.

Most serious turkey hunters have their turkey calls out and are practicing with them on their way to work and/or at home and often driving their families crazy with a, “Cluck, cluck, cluck,” a “Yelp, yelp, yelp” and other calls they plan to use on opening day of turkey season. However, whether you feel you’re a master turkey caller or a beginner, I promise you’ll increase your odds for taking longbeards this season if you’ll spend some time practicing calling with a pushbutton call. That small box call has saved the day for me and many other longbeard chasers more than a few times. I’ve found the pushbutton call to be effective to call every race of wild turkey on the North American continent in just about every state I’ve hunted.

To learn more about hunting turkeys successfully, visit John E. Phillips’ Amazon book page at https://www.amazon.com/John-E.-Phillips/e/B001HP7K6O. For even more information from one of the top turkey hunters and callers, go to  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CFP9V2Q/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i2
to see the book, “How to Hunt Turkeys with World Champion Preston Pittman,” available in Kindle, print and Audible. You may have to copy and paste this link into your browser. (When you click on the book, notice on the left where Amazon says you can read and hear 10% of the book for free). On the right side of the page and below the offer for a free Audible trial, you can click on Buy the Audible book. You also can order “The 10 Sins of Turkey Hunting with Preston Pittman,” available in Kindle at  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D7NQFS8/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i10.

Tomorrow: The One Sided Box Turkey Call