I'm finally getting around to posting a brief story summarizing my 2024 Spring turkey hunt. For starters, I missed a bird on opening day. I've been hunting turkeys for 21 years, and this is the first time I missed with a shotgun. (bow hunting is another story entirely). The Tactacam video shows the shot pattern hitting very low, completely missing the tom. I re-patterned the gun and made a subtle adjustment, but that didn't explain the miss. I flinched, BADLY, and that's all on me. At least I didn't wound the bird, which brings me to the primary reason I'm posting this story. As you know, I did manage to kill a tom, and on the very last day of my season. That's a first for me. Another first, at least as far as I know, is taking a bird that had been shot during a previous season and managed to survive. Looking at the attached photo, note the two very distinct pellets I pulled out of the tom's breast tissue (I shot a bit low!). The small silvery pellet came from my gun, a #9 TSS piece of shot. The much larger gray colored pellet was also embedded in the breast and appears to be a #6 tungsten shot pellet, although rougher in appearance (lots of flat sides) compared to the TSS pellet. Turkeys are very tough animals!
