What to Wear Turkey Hunting, Head to Toe

Deer see poorly in the reds and see movement extremely well. Turkeys see everything extremely well — full color vision, excellent resolution, and a field of view approaching 270 degrees without moving their head. A deer might tolerate you at 40 yards in a hoodie. A gobbler will not tolerate the pale flash of a wrist at 40 yards for one second.

The second difference is posture. Deer hunting is largely done from an elevated stand where you are above the animal’s eye line. Turkey hunting is done sitting on the ground at the bird’s eye level, often with the bird approaching from an unknown direction. There is no height advantage to hide behind; the clothing does all of the work.

Three more safety habits that belong in the same paragraph as clothing:

• Wrap a decoy in blaze orange when carrying it. A decoy in your hand looks exactly like the thing everyone is hunting.
• Sit against a tree wider than your shoulders. It breaks your outline for the birds and protects your back from anyone approaching from behind.
• Carry a blaze orange band or vest panel. Wear it on the walk in and out, and tie it around your tree when you set up on public ground.

If you take one thing from this guide: cover your face and hands. Hunters who buy an expensive camo suit and then sit bare-handed with a bare face have spent their money on the least important surfaces.

Your face is pale, round, and moves whenever you look at anything. Your hands move constantly — running a call, adjusting a gun or crossbow, shifting position. Those are the two areas a turkey will pick out, and covering them costs less than a box call.

Two practical notes. A head net with a mouth opening makes it far easier to run a diaphragm call and to get a cheek weld on the stock. And gloves need to be thin enough to feel a trigger or a crossbow safety — thick insulated gloves are the wrong tool in April.

A spring turkey morning routinely starts at 35 degrees in the dark and reaches the mid-sixties by eleven. You will walk in loaded, sit still while cold, then walk and sit repeatedly as the day warms. This is a layering problem, and the same principles apply as in our hunting layering guide— with one turkey specific twist.

The turkey-specific twist: your vest is your pack. Buy one with enough capacity to swallow a fleece, because a shed layer tied around your waist is a shed layer that catches on brush and flaps at the wrong moment. Our turkey vest guide covers capacity and seat comfort.

Turkey hunting covers ground. You may walk several miles between setups, on soft spring soil, through creek bottoms and wet field edges, often before daylight.

• Waterproof matters more than insulated. Spring ground is wet and the air is mild. A heavily insulated late-season boot will cook your feet by ten in the morning.
• Fit for walking, not for standing. Break them in before the season. Blisters end turkey hunts more often than birds do.
• Consider snake protection in the south. In much of the southern turkey range, snake boots or gaiters are a legitimate consideration during spring season.

Our hunting boot guide covers the waterproofing and fit criteria in more depth.

Treat the vest as part of your clothing rather than as gear, because it determines two things clothing normally determines: how long you can sit still, and how much you can shed.

The built-in seat cushion is the important part. Sitting on cold, damp ground for two hours without one produces fidgeting, and fidgeting is what a turkey sees. A vest with a decent kickstand or seat frame lets you stay put through the long silent stretch that so often precedes a gobbler appearing.

Storage matters for the same reason as the layering plan: everything you take off has to go somewhere that is not your waist. See best turkey vests for the options, and our spring turkey gear guide for the full kit list.

Less than complete coverage does, but more than for deer. A turkey’s color vision means a pattern whose colors are wrong for the spring woods stands out in a way it would not to a whitetail.

The practical rule is to match the season, not the brand. Spring turkey woods are green with heavy leaf-out in the south and brown-and-gray with bare branches in the north during early season. A green-dominant pattern in bare April timber in Wisconsin is as wrong as a bare-branch pattern in fully leafed-out Alabama.

Our best camo for turkey hunting guide covers pattern selection by region and timing, and camo patterns explained covers the underlying science of why patterns work at all.

1. Nothing red, white or blue on your body, pack or gear. No exceptions.
2. Camo head net or face paint, and camo gloves. These are not optional.
3. Base layer plus a shedable mid layer plus a quiet packable rain shell.
4. Camo pants with reinforced knees and seat.
5. Waterproof, broken-in boots and wool socks. Insulation is secondary in spring.
6. A vest with a real seat cushion and enough room to swallow a shed fleece.
7. Blaze orange band for the walk in and out, and to wrap a decoy in transit.
8. A pattern that matches the actual foliage where you hunt, not the one on the packaging.