A buddy of mine and I went hunting at my place last week. Neither of us had ever "turkey hunted", meaning that we never setup with the sole intent on calling and bringing in a gobbler. So we decided to give it a try. With an unsuccessful first calling set (we got busted by a bearded hen), we made our way to another. However, although we got busted, within a minute, we had her responded to our hen calls, but she had the drop, coming in from behind us. Needless to say we were pretty confident in how the day was looking.

Our next set produce 5 younger jakes, responding and heading our way within about 5 minutes of calling. It took just under 30 minutes or so for them to reach our field we were hunting. Once within sight, my buddy, who was running the hen call, put himself in a bad position and due to the closeness of the gobblers, wasn't able to setup his gun in time before they reached our decoy. Originally, the plan was for me to record the hunt, and my buddy take first shot. However, as stated before, his position wasn't good so he just slouched down and waited it out, not wanting to ruin the hunt.

So with one hand on the camera and the other on my shotgun, I pulled the trigger on the last gobbler in the line. He dropped like a sack a potatoes and as I sort of expected, the others were spooked, but they didn't run. Instead they ran towards their downed comrade and as this was going on, I told my buddy to get him one. I was still recording and while looking through the screen, I knew just by the turkeys position, that was the one my buddy was going to shoot. Once again another shot rang out and instead of one turkey going down, two did. Looking back at the video, seems like one of the others did sort of a 360 during the commotion and ended up behind the target bird.

So I guess my question is, how many of you all have seen this or heard about this before? What are y'alls thoughts? I know my buddy and am behind his shot judgement 100%. We are in a 4 gobbler/bearded hen county, all seasons combined, so legally we are well within our rights. Also the footage I got was pretty good so I was wanting to share it online, however I wanted some feedback before so I know if people will see this as over kill or simply the mistake that it was.

Thanks for reading and for any input.

Very common, especially with rios

Sounds like an awesome hunt to me man

Congrats. No problem harvesting jakes..but now that you have a bird, concentrate on longbeards.

Not uncommon for other turkeys to attack their own when they are down. All animals have a pecking order, you probably harvested the top bird and the others were just getting even.
If you're going to try to film hunts, build or get a pop-up blind. Those longbeards will bust you..they are a lot more wary than those hens or jakes.

Gman

What they said.

I have done it a couple of times (2 with one shot) and more often than not, shot 2 if several came in. Many times they are so fired up, when a tom goes down, they dog pile his butt and commence to an azz whoopin, you could almost stand up and take a shot during that short time.

Me and my buddy hunted his place this last Sunday. There were about 4-5 toms all together in this field. Well one was headed our way so we got set up to intercept him. When he came in I told my buddy to take him. He shot him (twice) and the other toms came running from about 100 yards away to whoop his azz. Shot another one in the middle of the gang pile.