His Turkey Call Is All Natural
Dan Natt Reels Gobblers In With His Golden Pipes
By JOHN FULMER

Dan Natt is on the phone talking turkey. Quite literally, as in gobbling, purring, clucking, keeing, and kawing. He’s demonstrating his natural turkey call. He says he’s keeping it low; he doesn’t want to deafen anyone. But it comes in loud and clear, and it’s unintentionally funny, as if a huge, loud, slightly angry bird has suddenly commandeered Natt’s land line.

Natt, from Wysox in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, is one of a few turkey hunters who does natural calls, and this method has served him well. Though he’s been a longtime hunter, Natt came relatively late to turkeys. He began in 1990 and has killed forty birds, a pretty good record since bag limits are small. Natt started with a box call, a Lynch 101 inherited from his father, and got a couple jakes (immature male birds) right off the bat.

Natt is obsessive and highly analytical in his approach to hunting, so it’s no surprise that he read everything possible on turkeys before heading out in the woods. He did extensive scouting, and during his first reconnoiter, ran into his first tom.

“I had a gobbler gobbling in front of me,” he says. “I had on full camo and I ran that box call with my hands. I didn’t see him and he shut up. I went to give him another call, and said to myself, ‘Watch for the sneak, watch for the sneak”—and I was trying to work the box call—you have to move the paddle across the top—and he was over my left shoulder. I just happened to catch him run over top of the hill. He saw me and never made a sound.”

Though he’d read about the turkey’s extraordinary vision, which is eight times more acute than that of humans and can detect the slightest movement, he discovered it firsthand. It’s a bird that’s hyper-aware of its territory and takes note of everything around it. Natt dropped the box call in favor of a diaphragm-type mouth call, which the caller keeps inside the mouth. Trouble ensued.

“I almost swallowed one of those and that was the end of that,” Natt says with a laugh. He was turning blue, choking and had to self-perform a Heimlich maneuver in the woods. “I was by myself and ran into a tree limb just to get it out.”

When Natt decided to go natural, his natural determination helped. “The Indians didn’t have any of these calls,” he says, “and I said, if I can’t do it myself, I’m going to quit. But, I said, there’s no reason I can’t. So I took the box call and sat on the porch—because my wife would kick me out there because she’d get tired of hearing me—and luckily I have a warm porch—but I listened to that call over and over. With the friction call, which that was, you get the feel, you get the vibration in your hand.

‘So you start to get . . .’”

This is when Natt started to gobble. The resemblance to a wild bird, while funny in the context of a phone interview, was uncanny, pitch perfect. No wonder his skills as a hunter and woodsman have made him the subject of several newspaper articles and two spots on WNEP-TV’s Pennsylvania Outdoor Life. His first appearance came about because of a video he shot of a jake strutting his mating dance before a decoy hen. When he gets no love for his feather-fanning displays, the frustrated jake visciously slaps the decoy, bending it back at a forty-five-degree angle. The show’s hosts loved the video; they couldn’t keep straight faces on camera, says Natt. When they found out he was a natural caller, the hosts were intrigued and Natt went out in early spring to do a turkey segment with Don Jacobs; in the fall he did a hunt with Stan Sola.

He’s also been involved with the National Wild Turkey Federation’s  JAKES (Juniors Acquiring Knowledge, Ethics and Sportsmanship) program. A JAKES event in Wilkes-Barre he helped form with the Game Commission  was the biggest of its kind in Pennsylvania. The kids had a lot of fun, Natt says.

“There were 500-some JAKES who attended,” he says. “There were people all over the place. They all enjoyed it.”

Natt keeps it simple while hunting turkey; most hunters, he says, overequip.
“They have too much stuff,” he says.  “They confuse themselves. They don’t master one thing before they move on to the next. I have my gun, my seat, my water. A nice, comfortable seat’s the most important thing. That gives you the patience to stay and not move.”

“Woodsmanship and a good seat,” he says. “Calling’s not the most critical thing.”

2008 Spring Turkey Season

Pennsylvania
Season: April 26 to May 26
License: resident $20; nonresident $101; senior $13
Season bag limits: daily limit 1, season limit 2. (Second spring gobbler may only be taken by persons who possess a valid special wild turkey license.)
Also: special season for eligible hunters ages 12-16 on April 19. One spring gobbler may be taken during this hunt. Junior license: $6
Information: www.pgc.state.pa.us

New York
Season: May 1 to May 31
Hours: One half-hour before sunrise to noon
Area open: All of upstate New York north of the Bronx-Westchester County border
Season bag limits: Two bearded turkeys (one bird per day)
Also: hunters aged twelve to fifteen can bag one bearded turkey in a special April 26-27 season
Information: www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/hunting.html

The Wild Turkey Resurgence

Anyone driving through the Twin Tiers’ woods and fields might be excused for thinking the wild turkey was extinct here eighty years ago. They are everywhere now, but habitat loss and overhunting had almost wiped them out here by 1930. Their return is good news for turkey hunters such as Dan Natt. Roger Latham, in The Complete Book of the Wild Turkey, calls them North America’s “largest, the most intelligent, and the most prized upland game bird.” 

“It’s hard to believe how many turkeys there are but there are more turkeys now than there ever were,” says Natt.

Latham’s fine book is, at once, a jeremiad against carnage and poor sportsmanship, a bible of wild-turkey lore, a hunting primer, and a love letter to a wary adversary for thoughtful hunters. He says the bird’s repopulation symbolizes a new American philosophy: “Through ruthless slaughter and complete disregard for conservation principles, this bird was reduced to a point of near extermination. Then, with a feeling of shame and remorse at this near catastrophe, the people of the United States resolved to right this and other wrongs perpetrated against our wildlife, our forests, our soils.”

Would this were totally true. Latham’s passion is admirable, but was there a collective remorse for the turkey’s demise? Or did hardworking, dedicated individuals and organizations such as the National Wild Turkey Federation right our lazy, apathetic wrongs?

What a sight it is to see a flock of these wild creatures bobbing and weaving through the trees. Then, startled by our approach, they burst into a short, quick, powerful flight. The wild turkey, Latham notes, has been native to this continent since prehistoric times. Let’s hope it has a long life to come.

—John Fulmer