Turkey Hunting Tips from a Legend: How Eddie Salter Calls Gobblers
This post is based on our podcast episode with turkey hunting legend Eddie Salter. Watch the full conversation below, or read on for the key takeaways.
Eddie Salter grew up on a gravel road in Conecuh County, Alabama, listening to turkeys gobble while he waited on the school bus. His grandfather taught him to build mouth calls out of roofing lead and latex — a design the old man helped pioneer back in 1929 after watching a street vendor in Mobile sell bird whistles.
Salter went on to win the Alabama state calling championship in 1983 and his first World Championship in 1985, spent 16 years with Hunter's Specialties, and has hunted turkeys in 33 states. At 71, he just watched his six-year-old grandson kill his fourth bird — a double-bearded gobbler in Florida.
We sat down with him in Evergreen, Alabama, and the thread running through two hours of stories was simple: most turkey hunters call too much and listen too little. Salter kills turkeys by reading them first.
Read His Temperature Before Anything Else
Salter calls it checking a turkey's temperature. If you call to a gobbler and he goes quiet, then gobbles a while later on his own, he's telling you he's available but probably not coming — he's heard it all before. But if he cuts you off before you finish calling, that changes everything.
"If that turkey, you start calling to him and he gobbles at you before you get through calling, that turkey is ready right there. He's telling you he's very killable. He's really telling you, hey, I want to ride in your truck."
When a bird cuts him off, Salter flips the script: he won't call again until the turkey gobbles first — then he answers immediately. Now you're in the gobbler's head, because you're responding to him instead of begging.
Stop Hammering Him While He's Still in the Tree
The biggest beginner mistake Salter sees is aggressive calling at a roosted bird. Get a gobbler fired up in the tree and he'll sit on that limb until 9 or 10 o'clock waiting on a hen he's sure is coming. Salter tree calls softly — he likes a light friction call palmed in his hand to muffle the sound — and he may make that quiet call 20 to 40 times with no cackles and no cutting. Once the bird pitches down, he hits a short fly-down cackle: just a few quick notes. A long, drawn-out cackle tells that gobbler the hen flew half a mile away. Then comes his most repeated advice: put the call back in the case. "Long as that turkey is coming to you, don't never call no more." He's killed piles of birds with just those two calls.
Set Up in the Open, Left Shoulder to the Bird
Salter's grandfather taught him to quit hiding in thick cover and instead sit in front of a big tree that breaks up his outline. Keep the gun on your knee at all times, and if a bird is gobbling straight away from you, point your left shoulder at him — that way you can swing the gun left or right with a small move of your knee instead of shifting your whole body. His grandfather also built quick natural blinds, cutting dogwood limbs and pine branches with a pocket knife and sticking them in the ground, specifically to hide gun movement when a bird slipped in from the wrong side.
The 10 O'Clock Blind Strategy
When a gobbler hens up at daylight and drifts off, Salter doesn't go home. He finds fresh scratching, builds four or five small natural blinds across the area, and slips into one around 10:00 to run a series of calls. Here's the number worth remembering: three out of five times, the turkey that shows up never gobbles at all. The first thing you hear is drumming, close enough to shoot. That's exactly why the blind and the gun-on-knee setup matter — you have to be able to move. If nothing happens in 45 to 50 minutes, he moves to the next blind and stays aggressive.
When He Hangs Up: Scratch the Leaves, Then Start a Fight
On hung-up birds, Salter starts with a soft cluck and purr, then rakes his hand through the leaves. If a gobbler ever answers the scratching itself, he lays the call down and scratches him the rest of the way in. When that fails, he goes to the fighting purr — running purrs on a pot call and mouth call at once while beating his leg with his hat. On an 18-degree opening morning near Pontotoc, Mississippi, he'd called up seven gobblers that wouldn't close the distance, with 25 to 30 birds gobbling in the area. He went to the fighting purr, had his buddy slap his leg with his hat, and the gobblers ran into the decoys — both hunters killed turkeys. His rule: in the first two weeks of season, that call will put birds in your truck.
Throw Your Sound to Steer Him
Salter learned as a young man that he could direct where a turkey walks. By turning his mouth and cupping his hand — or repositioning a box or pot call — he throws the sound left, right, or straight down the middle, and nine times out of ten the bird comes in on the side the sound favors. He also preaches carrying multiple calls like a bass fisherman carries a tackle box: if a bird ignores the mouth call but answers the box, stay with the box. And before you ever drive away from a quiet spot, hit a call one more time — "if he don't gobble, you can't kill him."
Go Deeper
This is only a slice of a nearly two-hour conversation. In the full episode, Salter tells the story of how his grandfather built one of the first diaphragm calls in 1929, how a straight razor and a barber chair earned him hunting permission all over Conecuh County, his memories of Ben Rogers Lee, the "squealing hen" call that broke birds in Nebraska, and the 82-year-old man whose first gobbler brought him to tears. Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on your favorite audio platform.
What's your go-to move when a gobbler hangs up out of range? Swap tactics, stories, and scouting help with hundreds of other hunters in The Southern Outdoorsmen community. Join the community here.
And if you want to look the part next time a longbeard wants to ride in your truck, grab some Southern Outdoorsmen gear before you hit the turkey woods. Y'all Stay Southern.
