I got 2 birds last year -- one with my bow & the other with an air rifle. Taken only a handful in my life so by no means an expert.
I pretty much hunt them the same as when I had a shotgun or air rifle. The only difference is that I use a leafy suit & take decoys when I'm bowhunting. With a shotgun, I'm less concerned with the camo or decoys. But with a bow or air gun, it's a very close-range deal.
Bow-wise, whatever you use for big game is probably best since you know that setup. A turkey's vitals are about the size of a fist so whatever setup you know best will work the best for you. I took a good-sized bird last year and my arrow cut a hole on the opposite side. I could see the broadhead in the hole but it didn't come out all the way. The feathers practically grabbed the shaft on the way in & stopped it pretty fast. That arrow was over 600 grains with a 2-blade Zwickey off a 50# bow (though I didn't come to full draw). One of my favorite hunting authors, David Petersen, wrote that he shoots the same gear as his elk setup, just with a 3-blade instead of the 2-blade single bevel.
I mostly hunt public land and have gotten used to finding large trees, brush, etc. to post up on the fly. I usually make a plan but game animals rarely care about my plans & I adapt. I prefer to know where they roost and then, as usual, setup about 100-200 yards away to call them over. It has worked a couple of times. But sometimes the real hens take them a totally different direction & I talk to them off and on for hours before they finally come in to where I am. I'll move around a little to get a better location but, as a public land hunter, I'm often hunting large areas where I don't know every detail of the land contours & such that somebody might have if they hunted the same 100 acres all season. Sometimes, I'm trying to call them from State Park land over to BLM where I can legally take a shot. Or I'm on NF land & trying to get them to come off of private parcel that borders. Twice, I've called them from somebody else's property onto the property I actually had permission to hunt that day. All that to say, I stay as mobile & open to changing my plans as I can be. Only my first 2 turkeys that I got as a teenager were textbook. The rest started with a textbook plan & then morphed into something that eventually put me & the birds close enough for a shot. Only those first two were taken in the early morning. The rest were mid-morning or afternoon -- after the hens were ready for a break & I was the only game in town.
Hope that helps a little.
Topic: Spring Turkey Help (Read 3839 times)
