Before you waste time and money on expensive ways to celebrate your turkey season, take a look at one of the best ways to memorialize your turkey harvest this spring.
People are always looking for ways to commemorate their latest or best successful hunt, and in most cases that results in a large, expensive taxidermy. While a mount is definitely a great way to celebrate your achievement, a full body mount takes up a ton of space, and it can be insanely costly way to memorialize your turkey harvest.
With turkey season, there is always the option of doing a fan with the tail feathers, but that also takes up a lot of wall space, and unless it's constantly taken care of the feathers will fade over time and will never look as good as it did the last time the bird was strutting.
If you really want the best way to memorialize your turkey harvest this spring, you need to look into having your harvest made into a custom call. Think about it all you need is a few of the bones from the inside of the turkey or maybe even a leg or spur and then you can have those parts built into a custom call that you can then use on a future hunt to help you kill more turkeys.
Let's take a look at a few of the ways you can have your harvest made into a custom turkey call...
Memorialize Your Turkey Harvest with a Wingbone Call
Image via Facebook
The wingbone calls above are made by Kevin Lynch of Kevin Lynch Wingbone Calls, and are made using a wing from a turkey. The example above are a matching set that were made personally for myself and a hunting partner a few years ago. After successfully both taking a turkey on opening day of turkey season, we sent Mr. Lynch the wingbones from our turkeys and after a few weeks were very pleased to receive the calls shown above which are inscribed with our names and the date of the successful hunt.
Wingbone calls can be made to look many different ways but always use the wingbones from the turkey you've harvested. You can talk to different custom callmakers and find out what their calls look like and have your call made exactly the way you want it to look. The call is also a wingbone and was crafted by Andy Snair and uses wingbones as well as part of the leg of the turkey harvested.
Image via Facebook
Memorialize Your Turkey Harvest with a Pot Call and/or Striker
Image via Facebook
If you are not the kind of person who wants a wingbone call, or maybe you already have a ton of them and want something a little different, you will probably be interested in a custom pot call and/or striker made out of part of your harvest.
The photo you see above is a wingbone striker. This particular striker was crafted by Kevin Lynch but you can find numerous custom call makers who can quickly and easily make you a striker out of part of your harvest.
If you want more than just a striker, then you can also look into having a glass pot call made with part of your bird inside.
Image via Old Gobbler
The glass pot call above was made by Ricky Padgett using the spurs from a harvested turkey and is a great way to show off the spurs and use the call to help call in new birds in the future. There are many other ways to showcase a harvested bird, you can put spurs, tail feathers, part of a beard, and many other things inside a glass pot call so that everyone can see.
The first step is planning. Start contacting custom callmakers now and planning out what you want, so that when you actually harvest the bird you know what parts you need and how to prepare them so that you can get your call quickly and share it with others.
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