mauser06

if it was hit as hard as you described, and if i was a bettin' man, id bet the stack that JW is right on....hide they will...and hide well.

took me about an hour to find the bird i killed last season. jerked the trigger and he took a full load of hevishot to the wing butt [:'(] to top it off i short pumped the gun...empty came out but fresh one didnt make it in...he popped up..CLICK...shot him again in the head and neck...must not hit anything vital...blood and clear pattern on the log his head was laying on..i didnt know he left...got down there and he was gone...nothing but blood and feathers...took me an hour to find him from there...not even 100yds away...straight down the hill BURRIED in a brush pile. if he didnt lift his red head out to look at me i would never noticed him....he was very much alive...but would been coyote food for sure...

tky1187

Don't take all the critisism your getting to heart. I shot the lower portion of the wing off a big gobbler the other year and never found him either. Sometimes in the heat of the moment crazy things can happen. And for the guys telling you to NEVER shoot a flying turkey, thats bologne! If I worked on a bird all morning and had him in range and he flys I can tell you that I am most definitley not just going to watch him fly away and not shoot! Call me what you want but I've shot quite a few birds flying directly away from me. You have very good chances of hitting the backbone or the head/neck when they are flying away and I can assure you if you hit them in either the turkey will fold up.

kingvjack

I dub thee Sir full of it
This is also somewhat crap.... If you can peg that head on a bird thats flying away from you with a full choke without taking the chance of just wounding the bird.... Like whats been done here... I'd give you some credit, but since everyone thats every taught me a stitch of turkey hunting and most folk with common sense frown on such things.
Ever try head shootin a goose flying away from ya, with a modified choke on a 3.5"..... still pretty friggin hard..
Don't shoot turkeys on the wing, Just wait till you know you can kill em next time.
Another point, Our boy here didn't do it, His friend did....

Jasonlester

Wow, I just hope noone was around while the 10 gauge was barking out pellets... not only is it a poor time to shoot but dangerous too.

SwampCollie

Only way to get to a goose's head when he is flying away from you is slam through him. Difference is a goose will usually put his head up and climb which offers you a chance at not only his head, but his back too. A turkey is usually just flapping and trying to scoot off fast. You stand a better chance at breaking a wing when they are flying off I'd suspect. From my point of view I look at shooting a turkey on the wing about like shooting a quail on the ground. Different strokes I suppose.

mouthcaller

tky1187 -

So, according to your reasoning, the longer one works a bird the greater the justification for taking a high-risk, low-reward flying shot??? Respectfully, I don't agree with that at all.

Frankly, I can't find any justification for shooting at a flying turkey, but that's just me. If the turkey flies before I get a chance to kill him than he won that battle and we will play the game again another day. That is just the way I see it.

The way I was taught to hunt turkeys you didn't shoot at one until you knew you could kill him. In range, in the clear, standing still with his neck extended. I still stand by that. It is the ethical and responsible way to hunt in my opinion.

We didn't have many turkeys around when I began turkey hunting in 1981 in West Tennessee. You were doing well to hunt the whole season and have a single chance to actually pull the trigger. You sure didn't want to wound and lose one of the few turkeysyou had. We passed on marginal shots because, rather than risk wounding the bird, we could hunt him again another day. Just because our turkey population is 1,000 times better now than back in 1981 doesn't give me the justification to deviate from what I feel is responsible and ethical.

Have I wounded birds? - of course I have. If you hunt long enough you will lose some,and I still regret each and every one of them. I learned valuable lessons with each screw-up andhopefullyI can pass along those lessons to others and they won't have to repeat them. Most of my mistakes were made shooting at turkeys beyond the proper range, while they were moving, or when there was too much brush between me and the turkey.

And "bologne" is spelled bologna. Remembr the old TV commercial? "Cause Oscar Meyers has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A"

tky1187

[blockquote]quote:

ORIGINAL: tky1187

Call me what you want but I've shot quite a few birds flying directly away from me.[/blockquote]

I dub thee Sir full of it

Dub thee what you want sir but any animal you shoot will it die faster if shot in the back, in this instance flying away from the shooter, or in the guts or breast in a turkeys case? Even though not ideal by any means, any animal whether it's a deer or what have you will die faster with a back shot than one in the guts.

ducksmoker

Sounds like your friend got a littleturkey fever and it was out of range to begain with or poor shots.The odds of recovering a wounded turkeyare silm at best if you do retrive the bird you are one of the lucky ones! Nothing replaces a well placed neck/head shot for myself i would not even wing shot it unless it is allmost right on top of me better to let it go an get busted then end up with what happend. You can allways come back to hunt the
bird at a later time but that is just my opinion.

Dont take to to hard its lessons/learned

tky1187

Sorry guys I'm really not trying to get into any of these disputes which we see on here all the time, I'm just stating things that have been affective for me over the years. Maybe I have just been very fortunate to have only lost one bird over the years but I just think w/ the success I've had that not everything I stated in my original response to this post is out of line or terrible advice.

Mouthcaller sorry I wasn't a Oscar Meyer weiner as a youngster. haha

ducksmoker

All in All it just comes down to what youwant. you are ether out to get that bird or you are in it for the hart pounding thrill of working that tom.

tky1187 their is nothing wrong with how you do it. its just your way it works for you an puts meat on the table
mouthcaller is right also its all about youvs oldlong beard its oldschool

Myself i am 52yrs old and have turkey hunted 40 plus years as a kidand young man it was all about bring home that gobbler no matter how much work i put into it and i killed a lot of them but for the past 15 years or so its all about the hunt and working that tom i would at my stage in life pass on a deer hunt for a morning in the turkey woods withmy 15yr old son along beard an my box call it just does not get any better thanthat

this year we took sofar two 9" ers nothing special in size but we worked those birds for thee hours an pulled them off seven hens with the last 45 mins of nothing but hart pounding action of hanging up struting and gobbling all the way up to 15yards is that cool or what?