CAMBRIDGE, Ohio - If wild turkeys had a sense of smell worth talking about, hunters probably would never bag the first one.

As it is, it is tricky enough to lure this premier gamebird - Ohio's largest at up to 27 pounds and three to four feet tall - into shotgun range.

Turkeys have excellent hearing. They can see color and flee at the first twitch of suspicious movement. Adults are big and strong and fear no wild predators.

The only time gobblers - toms, mature males - really are vulnerable is at breeding season - when they might be called into range.

Spring hunting seasons are set so that hens generally are bred beforehand. But that doesn't stop gobblers from responding to mimicked hen-calling. Sometimes.

Occasionally a gobbler will roar to a call like a runaway freight train - usually to his demise. Mostly they don't. It takes patience, careful calling, total camouflage concealment - head to toe, including the face and hands - plus sitting stone-still when on stand. Not to mention some luck.

If the ever-wary bird approaches a hunter's stand from the side or behind, the game is over: gobbler wins.

All of which made a recent hunt in Guernsey County with Alan Dieter twice as sweet. Dieter, an accomplished turkey hunter, called in a pair of jakes, young bearded gobblers, and we bagged both.

He is manager of the 19,000-acre Woodbury State Wildlife Area in Coschocton County, and had taken his first gobbler of Ohio's four-week season the previous week. It was a trophy - 22 pounds, 111/2–inch beard, 1-inch spurs on its feet. So he graciously gave yours truly first shot at the incoming jakes.

At first the birds shuffled in together, making a shot at one impossible without chancing a kill on both birds. Presently one of the jakes jumped up on a fallen log and stretched to see the phantom hen. It was his last look.

The second jake flapped off a short distance, halting on a deadfall 40 yards out and looking back to see what the commotion was about. “How far do you think that bird is?” Alan asked.

“About 40 yards.” Boom. Two jakes in the bag - this on a misty-drizzly, windy, chilly morning when intuition says the birds would not be active.

The evening prior, when Dieter and I had gone to a private farm to “put the birds to bed,'' it was too windy and nasty to locate them. Turkey hunters typically begin a hunt the evening before by scouting likely roosting areas and listening for toms to gobble. The birds usually sound off before flying up to their treetop roosts.

By so doing, hunters then have a general idea where to navigate in the oh-dark-thirty blackness of pre-dawn. The idea is to get close enough to call at dawn, without getting so close as to spook the birds on roost, Dieter said.

“They're the moodiest animals on earth. Rain and wind puts them in a major depression.”

Among other things, Dieter is an accomplished caller. He carries a full orchestra of calls - box, slate, mouth-diaphragm. He even carries a crow call to elicit a “shock gobble.”

When they wake up, gobblers typically will call. But when flying down they may go silent, especially if they already have attracted some hens with their treetop dawn serenade. A crow call or a great horned owl call - artificial, or the actual bird calling - often induces the shock gobbling. That helps a hunter determine where the bird is headed, and how to proceed.

Dieter uses a decoy hen about a quarter of the time, especially if he suspects a big gobbler, or dominant bird, is about. “When he comes in and doesn't see a hen, he gets nervous. It [the decoy] draws his attention away from you.”

Clever hunter that he is, Dieter also carries a good pair of pruning shears, to clear up shooting lanes, and a hunter-orange nylon bag to carry his game in and announce visibly that he is no turkey.

wThe foregoing hunt was part of what informally is known as “Turkey Ohio,” a play on the popular annual Governor's Lake Erie Fish Ohio Day held each summer.

The Ohio Division of Wildlife annually invites the National Wild Turkey Federation board of directors, dignitaries, legislative representatives, and others to a three-day hunt and business meetings.

“It's about networking. It's business,” said Mike Budzik, chief of the wildlife division. “In Ohio it [hunting] is a $2 billion business.”

NWTF has been instrumental as a partner in the purchase of thousands of acres of wildlife habitat for Ohio. This year during the NWTF get-together, the wildlife division dedicated a $1.3 million, 497-acre addition to the now-9,500-acre Mosquito Creek State Wildlife Area in Trumbull County. The addition was acquired with the help of NWTF, Ducks Unlimited, and Grand River Partners.

Steve Pollick is The Blade's outdoor writer. E-mail him at spollick@theblade.com.

First Published May 5, 2002, 10:04 a.m.