I’m so thankful to have experienced a time of pure turkey hunting before the sport became infiltrated with politics, anti hunters, hollywood wannabes and morons.



AMEN Brother , AMEN!!!!!!!

I see two ways of looking at it. For biological study, you'd want to classify only jake and gobbler, then qualify within those groups as you look for trends to figure out what goes on within a population. My area is air pollution. There are things I know about that would require years of study to characterize and which nobody is really interested even though there are issues which should be addressed. That, I think, is the technical side.

I'm a hunter who can't see detail past thirty yards and that's only directly in front of the lens. What makes a trophy to me is behavior. All the beard and spur length stuff is inconsequential because I don't see it before I kill it. Say a jake that was born early slips in when you're expecting the older you've been working and moving around on for hours. You shoot it for your last bird of the year thinking you had the old boy when that white head popped over the rise. I know I'd be disgusted. That's why I let them walk.

This wasn't an issue in my area until about six or seven years ago. Since then I've called up three male groups that had redhead jakes, short fan gobblers and a single fully fledged gobbler mixed together in them. That's not counting doublets or triplets.

I’m so thankful to have experienced a time of pure turkey hunting before the sport became infiltrated with politics, anti hunters, hollywood wannabes and morons.

Seems overly complicated to me. Turkeys seem fairly straight forward to me


You yelp, they gobble. Full fan + gobble= shoot and then move on to the next one.

Back in the golden years one could carry binos and check out the spurs
TTM

Seems overly complicated to me. Turkeys seem fairly straight forward to me


You yelp, they gobble. Full fan + gobble= shoot and then move on to the next one.

I will walk away from a round gobble 2yo to get made a fool of by a probable limbhanger, though. That's turkey hunting to me.

Ain't nobody checking beard nor spur length before shooting. At least I hope not. That's as boring as deer farming.

I will walk away from a round gobble 2yo to get made a fool of by a probable limbhanger, though. That's turkey hunting to me.

Aging turkeys and dominant gobblers etc.. sound exactly like trying to make it like deer hunting.


Full fan + gobble = shoot.

Aging turkeys and dominant gobblers etc.. sound exactly like trying to make it like deer hunting.


Full fan + gobble = shoot.

I can see where you'd take it that way, but no. Most people into antlers only care about measurements. In fact many of the serious ones I know think in terms of sweat equity, cell cam pics and killing on a food plot with no real hunting. The only qualification for trophy status is the tape measure. You can't measure what makes a gobbler a trophy.

That's why I'll walk away from a 2yo, after I've already killed one. Older birds offer more of a hunt, most of the time. I like hunting turkeys much more than killing them.