After months of summer heat and humidity, cool, crisp autumn mornings beckon outdoorsmen, particularly hunters, to the woods. By mid-October, most Illinois hunters may be found perched in a deer stand or hunkering down in a duck blind, but a handful will be pursuing one of the wiliest game birds of all -- fall turkeys.

Fall turkeys are a different bird altogether -- forget everything you thought you knew -- this is a whole new show. Unlike spring hunting where sex is the common denominator and the language of love is spoken in clucks, yelps and gobbles, food is the primary motivator in the fall and hunters seldom hear vocal birds. This means the fall hunters must know intimately the areas they are hunting and the habits of local birds.

While turkeys are usually found in the same neck of the woods as they are in spring, calling doesn't often work. In order to increase the odds of success, fall hunters must devote pre-season time scouting for droppings, feathers, tracks or signs of scratching. Because preparing for winter is so important, turkeys spend late summer and early autumn gorging on insects -- poults depend heavily on them for the high protein count -- and open fields are one of the most reliable places to find grasshoppers, crickets and other bugs. After the first hard frost kills most insect life, the birds will head into the forests and search for its supply of mast.

Fall turkeys move in flocks numbering anywhere from several dozen to 100 or more, usually made up of hens and their yearling offspring or small flocks of gobblers, most commonly of the same age. Remember, hens and jakes are fair game in the fall.

Although a few fall birds may be taken by calling, most hunters prefer to use the scatter or the ambush methods. The scatter method is by far the most exciting, but it can be very physically demanding, so you should be in reasonably good shape and able to cover lots of ground.

After locating a flock, the hunter moves in close, then charges the flock shouting and screaming and making as much noise as possible to scare and confuse the birds and send them flying in all directions. The hunter then waits until the woods settle down and begins calling to lure individual birds back into range. Two very effective calls are the kee-kee run, which simulates a lost poult or jake looking to rejoin its flock -- jakes aren't used to being alone and when separated from the flock, they frantically begin calling for the others -- and the lost hen, a series of yelps mimicking the sounds of a hen looking for her brood.

The ambush method is exactly what it sounds like. Hunters scout to pinpoint movement patterns -- regular feeding patterns or a route between a roost and feeding locations -- then conceal themselves until a turkey comes within range.

After a decade of increasing bird numbers, Illinois hunters harvested only 1,613 birds in the fall of 2008, compared with a near-record 2,165 longbeards in 2004.

Ray Berens of Elgin is concerned about what he's seeing. He spent the last 10 autumns hunting wild turkeys on his Jo Daviess County property, and he says turkey numbers are declining.