Thanks for the comments guys. My turkey hunt was very successful, even though I didnt bring home a bird. In the course of a 5 day hunt, I saw literally hundreds of turkeys. The place we were hunting was in southwestern Nebraska, and was a combination of riverbottom and prairie.
The evening we got there, we sat up on a bluff above the riverbottom to roost some birds, and it didnt take long before they were gobbling all up and down the bottom. we honed in on a spot that appeared to be the toughest spot on the bottom to get to, LOL. That first moring, I got set up before daylight, and after all the gobbling and yelping stopped, here comes a line of 5 big gobblers, with a handful of hens. They came by me at about 35 yards, and didnt seem to pay any attention to my calls or decoys. The gobblers would shock gobble to my calls, but would not come in or change there direction of travel. We spent the days spot and stalking on the prairie, and I had multiple close calls, but just couldnt get an arrow off.
Each morning I moved closer to the roost tree the 5 gobblers seemed to be using, and on the final morning, we snuck in at 4:30 in ninja-stealth mode to the blind that was set only 50-75 yards from the roost tree, the day before. I had spent some time the previous day walking around the roost tree looking back up at it to find an obvious flightpath the turkeys might take. My blind was 20 yards from where I thought they would fly down.
That morning, as the it got light, we could see 2 gobblers and 5 or 6 hens in the roost right above us. The big gobbler was at full strut while in the tree. Finally, they start to fly down, and lo and behold, the two gobblers land right in front of me at 20yards. they are right in the spot that we predicted they would land.
I took the shot and the arrow zipped through the bird just above the leg body junction. the tom hobbled a few steps and collapsed face first. I thought I had hit him too low, and already had an arrow nocked. He got back up, hopping as he tried to get out of there. I shot a second time, and the arrow appeared to hit him center mass, with a loud thump. However, the tom didnt seem to react to the second hit very much. He hobbled over to the hill that went up out of the river bottom and out to the prairie. He stopped on the hill as he couldnt make it any further. I sat back in my chair thinking, "theres no way he's going anywhere, I got two arrows through him". We waited there for about 40 minutes, and the bird appeared to be dead. As we started talking, moving and making noise, there were still some hens nearby, and they spooked. AS they ran up the hill, I watched in amazement as my "thought to be dead" gobbler made a mad dash hobble the rest of the way uphill. I got out of the blind as fast as I could and ran up the hill where the tom was last seen. There were no birds in sight. We searched for 3 hours looking under every cedar and deadfall we could see, but nothing. I think theres a good possibility the bird got airborne. After some final analysis, I discovered the second arrow did not actually hit the birds body, but passed harmlessy through his feathers. The first hit must have entered through the lower pelvis region, but only disabled one leg. Man, those are tough animals!!
Anyways, I learned more about turkey hunting in 5 days, than you could learn reading every book and article in publication. I also got a nice mulberry log from the same riverbottom that we were hunting in. I plan on returning next year with a bow made from this log.
