Skull & Cross-Bones Turkey Mount (Mother's Day present)

[VGJ5]

your tail fan is one of the better ones i have seen, fine detailed job, those are some nice spurs too

Didn't notice that until he pointed that out. How did you do that? Cut off other feathers and hot glue them onto the tail? You don't see those rings descending towards the base of the tail naturally. That's pretty cool how you did that.

Thanks everyone, for the positive feedback! 

Man, I wish I wish I would have thought about hot glue, doh!  I used messy old brown gorilla glue and the gorilla super glue.  The expansion from the regular gorilla glue thankfully didn't happen, but I did have a bunch of nasty 'dry-white' spots from the super glue.  I wasn't sure what to do about that, so I went out on a limb and painted the spots with the water-based polycrylic (satin) that I had used on the skull and bones (I used oil-based semi-gloss on the board, spurs, beak, and finger nails).  To my surprise, the spots completely disappeared!  A nice little tip for the future.  And to answer your question, yeah, I saved a bunch of the colorful feathers to make those rings around the base. 

I'll post a couple pictures of her hunt and the stories of both birds later.

Thanks again!
Gaines

[albrubacker]

          Nice!!

[VGJ5]

Here are a couple kill-photos from the 2012 one.  She said he really landed and stayed like this; feet straight up in the air like a cartoon. 

The hunt was the opposite of most of my grueling turkey battles.  She was up at our farm, woke up and put her camo on, but decided not to go because it was so foggy.  So she's out feeding the animals (still in camo, though) when my uncle calls at about 7:00.  He had been hunting down in the swamp (different area) and said he had to leave a gobbling bird to drive back to Mobile for a work thing, but that she should get out there.  She obliged, grabbed her gun, and headed to the woods (about a 3 minute drive).  So, she parks in her spot behind the pines, right in front of one food plot, facing the power company's easement that runs straight through the property.  She walks down the road, and right on the other side of that easement she hears a bird gobbling CLOSE behind a different food plot/tree house.  She said it was so thick once she got in the woods that she just had to jump down and hope he was willing to come in close (a mistake I made at least twice this season: busting a gobbling bird by trying to find a last minute 'better' spot).  The bird apparently liked her calling because he came running to her, and she called me with a kill before 7:30! 

[TRKYHTR]

Here are a couple kill-photos from the 2012 one.  She said he really landed and stayed like this; feet straight up in the air like a cartoon. 

The hunt was the opposite of most of my grueling turkey battles.  She was up at our farm, woke up and put her camo on, but decided not to go because it was so foggy.  So she's out feeding the animals (still in camo, though) when my uncle calls at about 7:00.  He had been hunting down in the swamp (different area) and said he had to leave a gobbling bird to drive back to Mobile for a work thing, but that she should get out there.  She obliged, grabbed her gun, and headed to the woods (about a 3 minute drive).  So, she parks in her spot behind the pines, right in front of one food plot, facing the power company's easement that runs straight through the property.  She walks down the road, and right on the other side of that easement she hears a bird gobbling CLOSE behind a different food plot/tree house.  She said it was so thick once she got in the woods that she just had to jump down and hope he was willing to come in close (a mistake I made at least twice this season: busting a gobbling bird by trying to find a last minute 'better' spot).  The bird apparently liked her calling because he came running to her, and she called me with a kill before 7:30! 

Thats a great picture. Congrats,

TRKYHTR

[VGJ5]

Thats a great picture. Congrats,

TRKYHTR

Thank you there, familiar face!