Turkey hunting with a bow: the setup, the shot, and what to buy first

What actually changes

Everything you have read on this site about finding birds, picking a tree and calling still applies. What a bow changes is the last fifty yards, and it changes three things at once.

• The range collapses. A patterned shotgun is a 40-yard tool. A bow, for a turkey, is a 10 to 25-yard tool. Darron McDougal, writing for the NWTF on bowhunting basics for spring gobblers, puts his decoys at “10 yards or less” and says plainly why: “I like slam-dunk shots.”
• You have to move. A shotgun needs a few inches of barrel swing. Drawing a bow is a big, slow motion made in front of an animal whose eyesight is its primary defense. Solving that is most of the problem.
• The aim point moves. The shotgun answer is the head and neck. The bow answer, for a body shot, is a small window in the top third of the bird, and it is not where a deer hunter's instinct puts it.

None of that makes a bow a bad first-season choice if you already shoot one well. It does mean the gear order is different: the blind and the decoys matter more than they ever do with a gun, and they come before anything else on the list.

Check your state first

Draw weight, arrows and broadheads

A turkey is not a hard animal to penetrate. It is a hard animal to hit in the right place, which is why nothing in the published guidance pushes you toward a heavier bow.

Brandon Ray, in the NWTF's Shooter's Bench on turkey bowhunting, says he “routinely kill[s] turkeys and deer with bows that pull 55-60 pounds” and adds that “even less will work at short distances.” His own rig is a compound set at 55 pounds at a 28-inch draw, with finished arrows between 450 and 500 grains. McDougal writes for the lighter end of the same range, noting that at 45 pounds and under, shot placement does the work and mechanical heads open more reliably than fixed blades.

Broadheads split into two schools, and the split is worth understanding before you buy a pack.

• Body shots, with a wide-cutting head. McDougal's advice is a mechanical for its “larger cutting diameters,” or, on a light setup, “a shaving-sharp fixed-blade, but don't go smaller than 1 inch on cutting diameter.”
• Head and neck shots, with a decapitating head. Ray prefers “head/neck shots instead of body shots” and shoots “100 grain Magnus Bullhead broadheads on the end of stiff carbon shafts fletched with three, 4-inch feathers.” A guillotine-style head is a wide blade array designed to miss nothing in a narrow band around the neck.

Both are legitimate and they are not interchangeable: one forgives a few inches vertically and the other forgives a few inches horizontally. Pick a school, buy the head for it, and practice that shot specifically. A broadhead is also one of the few turkey purchases where the cheap option is a genuinely bad idea, and the same qualitative rule applies that we use on turkey loads: the cost of the projectile is trivial next to the cost of the season.

Where to aim with a bow

This is the section to read twice. The shotgun aim point on this site is the head and neck, and we say so on where to aim on a turkey. A body shot with an arrow is a different problem, because a turkey's vitals sit higher and further forward than most hunters assume: the feathers make the bird look twice the size of the animal inside them.

McDougal publishes four aim points, by the bird's posture:

• Broadside: “slightly behind the wing joint and just beneath the spine” — in the top third of the body, not the middle.
• Facing away, upright: “dead center on its back, both up and down and right to left.”
• Strutting, facing away: “right at the base of his fan where all of the quills meet.”
• Head-on: “right at the base of the neck,” at the waddles.

Pennsylvania's hunter-safety course, which we cite for the shotgun aim point too, calls the preferred bowhunting shot “broadside, aiming for the heart or lungs”, and Texas Parks & Wildlife's hunter-education material on shots to the vital areas is worth reading alongside it for the same reason: both describe a small target high in a feathered body.

Why the blind stops being optional

We argue on do you need a blind that most gun hunters do not. With a bow, the calculation flips, because the blind is not there to hide you — it is there to hide the draw.

Both NWTF pieces take a blind as given, and both spend their setup advice on the same details. McDougal faces the blind west, north or south for a morning hunt so the sun is not in the windows, and wants a blind that “deploy[s] quietly and has a silent window system.” Ray sets up in shade with the primary shooting window facing north or south, and then does the thing almost nobody writes down: “Clear out leaves and sticks from inside the blind and lay down a blanket to muffle sound.”

Three specs matter more for archery than for anything else, and they are the ones our best ground blinds for bowhunting turkeys ranking is built on: peak height, because you may want to draw standing; shoot-through mesh, because an arrow through mesh is quieter than an open window and the mesh hides your face; and the width hub to hub, because a drawn bow is wide. Note the one trap in the category — shoot-through mesh is usually rated for broadheads only, so if you ever hunt the same blind with a shotgun, that shot goes through an open window.

The decoy spread that buys you a draw

A decoy does two jobs for a bowhunter that it only half-does for a gun hunter: it stops the bird at a known distance, and it takes his eyes off the blind. The published distances are tight and consistent.

McDougal sets decoys “at 10 yards or less,” and if he is hunting without a blind, puts them 10 yards off the field edge while sitting 3 to 5 yards back inside the tree line. Ray sets his “about 8-10 yards from the blind” and names his spread: “a bedded hen with a half strutting jake and an upright hen.”

That spread is the whole argument for a jake in the setup. A gobbler coming to a lone hen can stop at 30 yards and wait for her to come to him, which with a gun is an easy shot and with a bow is no shot at all. A jake standing over a hen is a provocation, and a bird that comes to run the jake off commits all the way in. Our jake vs hen decoy page covers when that works and when it backfires on pressured birds, and how to set up turkey decoys covers the facing and spacing.

One safety point specific to archery. The NWTF's piece on how turkey decoys can affect the shot is written about gun hunters shooting past decoys, and the lesson transfers: know where your decoys sit relative to your shooting window before a bird is in front of you. On public ground, carry decoys in a bag, never on the outside of your vest.

What to buy first

If you already own a bow you shoot well, the archery-specific spend is short: a blind tall and wide enough to draw in, and the two decoys that hold a bird at 10 yards. Broadheads come from an archery shop rather than from us, because the right head depends on which school of shot you have chosen above.

Practice that matches the shot

Ray sets one pin for 20 yards and practices “for shots from 10-25 yards.” That is the whole range, and it is worth saying out loud because an archer who practices at 40 and 50 is practicing the wrong hunt.

Three things to rehearse before opening day that have nothing to do with the target. Draw while seated in the chair you will actually use, in the blind, with the window where it will be — a surprising number of bows will not clear a knee or a hub. Draw slowly, because speed is what gets caught. And practice drawing while a bird is behind cover: McDougal sets up so the tom “will walk behind a tree or two, allowing me to draw back undetected,” which is a setup decision made before the hunt, not a reaction during it.

The rest of the morning is the same hunt everyone else is having. If this is your first spring, how to turkey hunt for beginners is the start of it, and turkey hunting setup covers choosing the ground you put the blind on.