Run and Gun has some bad connotations for me, but it has to do with where I am and how I’m set up. I don’t mean to throw shade on the R&Gers. I’ve got 200 acres in SW Bracken County, KY. A number of years ago, I had a couple of “big time” turkey hunters come out to the farm for an afternoon hunt. Where they came from, afternoon hunting was banned, so this was like some sort of guilty pleasure.

They left after lunch and were back before 5, all tuckered out. They’d set up on the edge of one of the fields and gotten some action, and when a gobbler came in on them, they’d spooked it. From there, they decided to run and gun. They had spent several hours chasing a flock around one of my creek bottoms trying to get a shot. It never occurred to them that they were just being impatient. If they were only waiting an extra 10-15 minutes for birds to show up, they were never going to get them in all the way. They left frustrated. This was their first Northern KY hunt and they were convinced KY birds were impossible.

I gave up on R&G as a tactic a few years after I settled in at my farm. The reason was simple: If I set off from the house in any direction, I’d be out to the property line within 20 minutes. Furthermore, the more experience I got at the place showed me several important points.

1) The turkeys roosted in the same places and moved to the same feeding areas and loaded in the same spots season after season.
2) There are only so many good setups. I found myself putting my back to the same trees year after year.


There’s a similarity in the neighboring hunters as well. The 200 acres I’ve got adjoins half a dozen other properties, and over the years I’ve found there’s a type of hunter that goes all the way out to the limit of his property, walks the perimeter calling as loud and as often as he can. He never shoots anything, but his calls are incessant.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting at the center of the property, about 100 yards from a roost. I know that, if something doesn’t plop down and run my direction at sunrise, there’ll be a bunch of them coming out into one of the pastures around me sometime in the mid-morning. All I have to do is sit and wait. No, I’m not an ambusher. I just know my turkeys.

My sons spent several years hunting with me, and when they got off on their own, their first idea was to run and gun. That lasted just a few years. They’d come back with desperate stories of surprise encounters with gobblers and hasty setups and such. Eventually, the pieces fell into place and turkey hunting became more like a chess game and they each found a good spot to sit their butt down and do a little bit of calling. They learned a gobbler might honor your call at 0700, but not show up until 1100.

After 40 some seasons, 25 of them at the farm, I can say that R&G is a valid means of hunting birds, and it especially makes sense when you’re faced with an endless tract of strange land. It just loses efficacy once you start hunting a static patch of ground over successive seasons.

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