Advanced TURKEY SHOT PLACEMENT for Bowhunting

Hey everyone, I'm Chris with Afflictor Broadheads and we have a great video for you today on advanced shot placement for archery hunting turkeys. We're actually going to take this bird layer by layer and show you the anatomy and the bone structure so you can make a decision on your own about shot placement. We had a good youth hunt with Carter and he donated his turkey for us to use as long as he gets his meat and his tail fin and his beard back. Thanks again Carter, we appreciate you donating for some education today. So let's get right into this. When you first look at the turkey from the broadside, you have, there's a lot of feathers to deal with. So anytime you're looking at your shot placement for turkeys, you want to make sure that you're considering that you got this fluffy layer of feathers, especially when they're in strut. You can see that it's very high here. There's a lot of room and you want to make sure that you're accounting for that. And you'll see that here in just a second. So as I begin to bring this stuff over the back here, you can start to see now this leg is way forward. Normally you would be in a little bit better position back here or straight down, but you can see what you're dealing with here from the side. So a lot of people, you know, they are looking at this zone here as where to shoot their turkey. When in fact, when you look at this, all that is here is the breast meat. Up here is the breast sponge, which is the fatty portion. And then underneath here is the crop. And when the crop is full, it will stick out here and even give you more of an exaggeration of all this room that you have over there that you think is target area, when in fact, it is not. If you're looking at this front portion here, that is all area that should be avoided with archery equipment. So there you are. There's the breast. Here's the leg. Here's where it comes down. Now, when we look at the vitals of the turkey from this position, we have the wing right here is the wing joint where it comes up. And this is the humerus. The ulna and the radius are right here. That's where it connects. And that is the actual joint that people talk about all the time in the turkey is where the humerus attaches to the body. So when we look at this like this with this layer, again, you can see where the leg is. Now, right here, this is all bone. You can kind of hear it. Okay. This is the ilium, which is this front portion and the ischium, which is the back. And it sits just like this. And underneath here, this is helping to protect the vitals. And then underneath that, of course, we have the breastbone here or the sternum, if you will. And that is lying underneath here, approximately right here, just like that. When you're looking at the vitals here, you're not looking at any of this forward. You're looking at this area right in here. And as we take this away, you're going to see what I'm talking about. All right. So you can see here, I've separated the wing joint here. So this is the humerus coming up. The ulna and the radius of the wing is right here. This is all breast meat in here. And then right here starts the ilium. And now the ilium also contains the spine, connects right here, comes all the way down, all the way to the neck. So if you want to think of it proportionately, you have this connected right in here like this, but there's also some fused vertebrae that are along here that connect right to this ilium. And then that compromises the neck. So that gives you a great idea of how much neck there is from the head coming into the front of the body. And then you come back in here to this whole top plate under which all the vitals are. So let's go ahead and remove this leg and we'll get a good idea of what's going on in there. All right. So here we are. This is how the leg was positioned here. You can see the structure towards the back. It's high. But the top of this leg, all this meat here, and a little bit of the bone of the leg is actually covering some of the vitals in here. And you're going to see that here real clearly in a second. All right. So here you can get a really good idea. Now that we have all of this breast meat removed, all in here, it starts here, goes all the way back, comes around the sternum, attaches back here. And again, just for reference, this is what you're looking at here. Just like that. So here's the protuberance right there. It's how that is sitting in there with this sitting right here on top. Just like that. It gives you a good idea where the bone structure is. Now we're going to see it really good here. It's like keep doing the cut down. But what I want you to see from this position is you can see where we've removed all that breast. Okay. This is all crop right here. And this is all breast spun. This is all the fat that they've been storing up to get ready for the breeding season. This is all here for energy for them to use while they're focused on other things. And again, this crop, which can hold over a pound of food, is going to be sitting right here as well, taking up a lot of this space. Again, we're looking at this as our vital zone. So let's go ahead and take the front of this off so you can see where the vitals are exactly. So the first thing is right here is this is the small little rib cage that turkeys have here. Very thin. The bones aren't strong. Very strong. Easily penetrated by a broadhead. No problem. But right here, this bone that rides across here kind of helps protect the spine. This is their scapula. And this bone right here, which is kind of a really big bone too, is the coracoid. And that's what attaches to the sternum. But that is also where the joint is for the wing bone, where the humerus attaches right here. Even though these bird bones are hollow, they are very sturdy and very tough because this has all got to pick up the weight of this bird, get it up into the roost, down from the roost, fighting, strutting, all the stuff that they're doing. You know, there's a lot of it controlled in this area. So these bones are a little bit formidable. So the rib cage here though is not. And as you can see, this hole starting to appear here underneath the ischium and ilium is now a sudden we can see we got some goodies in there. Now there are goodies up front. Our lungs are going to be right in here as well as our heart. Back here we're going to start our liver and our gizzard and the intestines. The actual spot, if you look, this is the wing joint, the scapula. The best vital area when you're looking is just about the size of your fist right here on the side of the bird. You can see you have all of this neck here coming down across the top. This is a fast dump. When you shoot a turkey, you hit him anywhere in here, along here, and of course anywhere from here to the head, they're going down like a rock because you have essentially severed their spine. But when we look at the vitals here, back here we have gizzards and guts and we get right into this little rib area. This is where the heart and the lungs are located. So let's remove it and take a peek. All right, so here we're starting to remove the ribs, clear out some areas you can see. So as I remove the clavicle here and get it out of the way, set that aside, you can see I've removed the ribs here. You can see how tight the lungs of the turkey are attached to these ribs. They're really hard to separate. They're actually attached to the ribs very well. From this side, now that we have a little bit of a cut down and I'm standing over here, I can give you a good idea of what we've done. So the breast meat attaches from here all the way up front to here and comprises this entire section. This is the breast on the other side of the bird right here. This is the crop. This is the breast sponge. You can see how much stuff is here below the vitals. Make sure you're really focused on where we're looking at right here. This is the primary wing joint right here. I'll go ahead and pull this down so you can get an idea. Okay, if I line up the wing joint like that, that's the wing joint. This is the top of the bird. If I squish the feathers down, now just pay attention to right here, I lift that up and here I'm exposing the ribs. Again, here's the wing joint right here. This whole sternum area right here, here's the tuberosity. Here's the tuberosity here. That's that white ball when you butcher your turkey that you see on the bottom. So that is sitting right here, cradling all this, again with this sitting on top just like this. You can see here we have the trachea coming in, but then we had the lungs in here and then right behind the lung, we're going to have the heart. So if you look at the position of the heart, you can see it's right here, sitting down in this cavity, nice and protected. Here the ribs are here and as we come back, we immediately see the liver exposed here and we can see after we've come out of the crop, the esophagus comes through right along here and goes to the gizzard. The guts are on top of the gizzard in through here and your gizzard is huge, right? It lies right in here. It's a giant muscle and always keep in mind inside of that giant muscle is a bunch of small stones, gravel and food. So this is actually a good thing to slow down your arrow. So if you can avoid that as well, it's a good idea. Heart and lungs, guts, gizzard, liver. Let's pull everything down. So here's the wing. Again, we're trying to do the best job we can here. It's a little bit off, but still you get an idea of where the anatomy actually sits in the bird. So it kind of gives you a really good idea of the anatomy of the turkey when it comes to archery equipment. Now again, these bones are all pretty thin. The ribs, they're not formidable at all for archery equipment. You can easily get into all this. Where people run into problems are these bigger bones. When you start talking about the turkey leg, you know, and how that's all attached in here and that wing bone attached here to the top. All right, so if you take a look at this mounted broadside of the turkey, we're going to get a little bit of an idea on this position where the vitals are. Now if you want to see a really detailed video of this, the link is below. We did a shot placement video for archery gear using this mounted turkey a while ago. But when you look at a strutting gobbler, you have to be paying attention to all of this fluff, okay? We have this whole giant batch of feathers that is sitting extremely high. So now what we've done, he's strutting, he's pushed his chest out, the crop is now exaggerated, the breast meat is now exaggerated up front. He's now tipped the ilium and ischium back a little bit and his spine is in a big old curve as it comes down into here. So from what we've learned earlier, we know that this is sitting way down in here and this is sitting underneath here, down in here. Here's our wing crease. So our shot here, because we know that this is all fluff in here and we don't want to be down here, our shot in this wing crease area is going to be high. The shot in your turkey for a good kill is always going to be higher than what you think in this zone right in here. This is where that spot is. So if you want to use the wing crease, keep in mind when the bird is in strut, that little wing crease, even though the joint doesn't change, the position of that will change with the feathers. So it's a good idea to keep that in mind if you're shooting a bird in strut. So hunting turkeys with archery equipment is a lot of fun. I hope this video helps you out with some detailed anatomy where you can make some of your own choices about where the heart, the lungs, the liver, the guts, the gizzard, everything sits within the body of this turkey to make sure that your shots are effective every time.