My first tom and my heaviest tom ever.
My second tom of the season.
And my third.
Another one of the smokey gray.
Those are really nice ... congrats
Good Looking birds, thanks for sharing!
Couple really cool color variations !!!
CONGRATS !!!
Thanks.
I don't know what color variation to call the wing/fan mounted one. At first I thought it might a red morph, but now I'm pretty sure it isn't. Maybe a partial? When I saw the smokey gray bird, I thought "you've got to be kidding me!".
Very nice! That third Tom is unique. I like it!
When the small flock came out of the timber into the small field, it was two hens a tom and a jake. Then I see something white-ish moving through the brush in the timber. When it came out of the timber and into the field, its head was down in the knee high grass and brush clumps and I thought it was a coyote trailing them. I was 300 yards away viewing them through 10 power binos. When it raised its head and I saw it was a turkey, I rushed over to get into position, hoping it was a tom. Really glad it was.
Those look amazing, congrats!
Sent from my moto g power 5G - 2023 using Tapatalk
Awesome looking mounts guys.
Thanks.
I mounted them myself, so they are far from perfect, but good enough to represent the birds and remind me of the hunt.
Nice Mounts. Good Work.
Nice job. Congrats.
Awesome birds! love ole Smokey...
As far as taxidermy work goes #1 is my favorite but they're all good
Thanks every one.
Quote from: Capt long beard on September 10, 2023, 05:43:20 PM
As far as taxidermy work goes #1 is my favorite but they're all good
I agree. The first one had one flaw. It was missing its right scapular (shoulder feather) tract. I borrowed one from the wing/tail mount one. The smoke one on the other hand had lots of problems that I didn't notice until it was ready to mount. It had a near perfect right side, which, is not the show side unfortunately. I had already set the pose and would have been difficult to tear apart and change the pose. The problems were hard yellow scabs all over that caused the feathers to not co operate, a deformed wing, which, left the wing feathers messed up, it was missing a lot of the over tail covert feathers on the show side. I shot it at 13 yards and it had blood matted feathers in its upper neck. I cleaned the blood off of the white feathers and froze it.
When I went to mount it, it had a lot of missing feathers on the upper neck. So, I had to cut and patch it, causing me to have to pull the neck up higher than natural to minimize the damage, thus causing the whole skin to be somewhat unnaturally pulled forward. Kind of a bummer for a somewhat rare bird.
Dealing with a shot up chest is always a nightmare with turkeys, The close up head shots with minimum chest damage is the only ones I want to mess with anymore.