Turkeys and 22 rifles

[Bucksnort1]

Yes, you can kill a turkey with a 22 long rifle round.

Today, a friend's grandson killed a small turkey with a 40 grain Mini-mag cartridge fired from a rifle. The shot was from about 30 yards. The bird flopped around for a few seconds then died.

 

[Chainsaw.]

Its like all the Texans I knew who HAD to hunt 110# white tails with a 300 weatherby mag. Its a 20# bird. Of course a 22 will kill it. My neighbor kill a black bear with a 22. Folks get so hung up on power.

 

[Bucksnort1]

Chainsaw,

So you know about those 110# white tails in central Texas. I leaned to hunt white tails on them.

 

[briandg]

You can't hunt with anything but shotgun here, with all of these guys hanging around in full camo, calling, and other guys shooting blindly into brush, what you have is just like the scouts in vietnam, but not so smart or talented.

There were people who hunted with .22 magnum and hornet in the past, but I never heard the LR being recommended. Maybe the segmented ones would be good as well?

Turkeys didn't exist here fifty years ago and aggressive programs of introduction have made us among the best success stories in wildlife development.

 

[Pahoo]

Not to hurt but to kill !!!

Yes, you can kill a turkey with a 22 long rifle round.

Of course you can but is this a preferred round? There are states that do not allow .22LR. If you do, shot placement is important as there have been turkeys that run off after being shot and die off somewhere. Once while on stand, I had a turkey walk under my tree with and arrow sticking out. ....

I get strange looks during the ethics portion of Hunter Safety when I state that we are not out there to hurt animals but to kill them. ........

Okay, call it "Harvesting if you will" ....

Be Safe !!!

 

[briandg]

You get strange looks when you try to pass on ideas about ethical behavior? My oh my, what a peculiar world you must live in.

 

[Pahoo]

It's the real world !!!

You get strange looks when you try to pass on ideas about ethical behavior?

Not as strange as the ones given by the younger students to their fathers, big brothers and uncles who sit-in on our classes. They ignore the younger eyes and look straight ahead. .......

Be Safe !!!

 

[buck460XVR]

Not as strange as the ones given by the younger students to their fathers, big brothers and uncles who sit-in on our classes. They ignore the younger eyes and look straight ahead. .......

I experience the same thing at the hunter safety classes I teach. We teach ethics as doing the right thing, within the limits of the law, even when no one else is around.

That said, taking a turkey with a .22 caliber rifle is not really an ethics thing as much as it's a legal thing in most states. Very few states allow rifles for hunting turkeys, not because of the ethics, but as a safety thing, along with the quality of the hunt. If it's legal, than ethics matter only to the shooter and his peers.

 

[samsmix]

Rifles are legal in my location. I think the .22 mag might be more appropriate as ranges approach 100 steps, but within 50 yards or so I can't see why not. I have long thought that a .32 cal front loader might be a fun tool for the job.

 

[Doyle]

My first "called-in" turkey was with a .22 pistol at about 25 yds. He didn't go 10 ft from where I shot him.

 

[bamaranger]

.22 wound on big gobbler

About 20 yrs ago, , a group of Hispanic tree planters were working on our hunting lease. They got caught plinking turkeys with a .22 rifle by one of our members. There was a big stink with the employers, but we had little say as we simply leased the land..... we were not the landowner.

As I recall, this happened early spring, before gobbler season. A year later, the following spring, I got on a big gobbler I named "Goliath". That tom had the biggest white head and stood taller than any I have ever seen. He was uncallable, and walked away from my calling on two separate occassions, not a real confidence builder. I ended up killing Goliath when he made the mistake of following some hens down a club road on a PM hunt. I had seen many gobbler tracks on this road, and set up at an intersection, and he tried to hustle past, keeping up with his hens, who were doing there best to give him the slip and get back to roost.

When I dressed out Goliath that evening, low on the breast bone, there was a peculiar funnel shaped hole. The center was just a tad over .22 size, and there was no exit wound on the breast bone. Appearance's were the shot had come in low from the front and just clipped the breast bone, then exited through the soft tissue of the abdomen, low enough not to catch any abdominal organs it would seem. That would make sense on a standing turkey. Healed completely, and one super sly tom was the result.

So yes, you can kill a turkey with a .22 lr, but you can wound one, (and he might survive, or he might not) as well.

 

[bamaranger]

Oh yeah........

I was raised as a lad in a state where rifles were legal for fall turkey. The .22 lr was universally recognized by all as a weak sister for taking turkeys, and the .22 mag was pretty much considered the bottom line. I'm sure lots of fall turkeys got plinked by squirrel hunters who happened upon a shot, but the little rimfire was not the choice of anybody hunting turkeys on purpose.

The .22 Mag had a following,( the FMJ bullet was illegal,but sometimes used) but the .22 Hornet and the .218 Bee were popular centerfires as well. If I ever carried a rifle for fall turkey, I took my 5mm Rimfire Mag, but never got a shot. I was such a novice in those days, I never did kill a fall turkey.

 

[briandg]

I'm not sure that I would take a shot at a turkey with a .22 unless I could take his head or neck, or right there at the top and take out something. A body shot, especially a big tom, hoping that you would hit something that could cause enough damage is just kind of iffy.

I've killed squirrels with colibri and shorts. It can be done with a torso shot. I know that a rabbit is easy enough to kill with a .22 to the chest. Turkeys are just pressing the absolute limits of how big you can go. So darned much bird there.

I personal;y would not use one. I'd use a .22 magnum or hornet, and the new segmented rounds, maybe. something that breaks up will cause a lot more bleeding and maybe hit an organ that an intact bullet would miss.

I've always kind of wondered if the shotgun laws for turkey are as smart as they seem. Get someone out there with #2 or even larger shot at 1500 fps or so, tungsten shot, and shooting into bush with a hunter behind it, it's kind of a moot point whether or not it's a rimfire shot or ten pellets of heavy high velocity shot.

The problem I have always had about turkey hunting around here is that there isn't enough room. There will never be enough space to be shooting directly at ground level to be certain that either a bullet or shot won't slip through. People hunt turkey with bows, here, too. Camo and calls just give me the heebies. If everyone stayed in stands, staked out a territory and stayed there, it wouldn't be so bad, but you can't countonthat.

How many injuries are there in a turkey season, I wonder?

 

[Bucksnort1]

The 22 rifle was the only choice for the boy for this year's hunt. Colorado allows fall hen/tom hunting with rifles.

 

[briandg]

Wasn't criticizing the choice. If it is what you had and couldn't get anything better easily enough and it was a success, as many others have had success. as long as it's legal, do what you can with what you have. I'm personally very paranoid about using an appropriate hunting firearm that has more than the minimal. The mini mag is as good as you can for an LR to use on a turkey, but it isn't something that one should count on to do what needs to be done. It's going to make a pass through hit on solids and expanding may not help. It's pretty much like a gut shot on a deer with an FMJ 9mm.
There is a pretty large difference between lr and wmr.

There is a lot of game lost because of using too little power or penetration. My dad had me hunting squirrel with a 20 gauge shotgun, using #9, said shoot a foot or so off, and let the pattern edge hit it. He got really irritated that I was "missing" with a shotgun, but the things were taking hits from a few pellets of #9 and tearing off into the distance with a handful of pellets stuck in them. We found a bit o blood from a few.

Some moron once posted a comment on WM praising his new pellet gun. 177 at 1k fps rating. He said that it would make a great turkey gun. Those things won't even kill a squirrel without a dead certain hit. It must have been a child, at least I hope it was.

Hope the kid has a great time.

I'm not really certain, but I can't think of any "ordinary" centerfir round that makes a good turkey hunter other than the hornet, maybe 222, or a rimfire, other than the wmr. 17 hrm seems like it would cause an awful lot of damage to the meat in the area you need to hit.

Way back in time when you couldn't get decent magnum loads, only lead or fmj, there were people who pulled them down and put in hornet bullets. They didn't like the LHP.

 

[Old Stony]

I've shot them with a 25/20 using a lead bullet loaded lightly and never had a problem. They dropped right there...
On the other hand once when I was sitting in a deer stand bored to death and about to give up hunting for the morning I had a bunch of turkeys walk in under a feeder at 100 yds. I followed one around until the shot was just right and put a .270 just under it's eye. This was a rifle that grouped under 1/2 inch and I was shooting from a good rest. Surprisingly something like that doesn't do a lot of damage as there just isn't enough resistance to the bullet going through...it just left a pencil sized hole and dropped the turkey on the spot.

 

[Mobuck]

22lr is not adequate unless the head, neck, or spine is hit. Too much chance of a "run off" with body hits--and there won't be a blood trail unless on snow.
22WRM JHP or 17HMR(not the polymer tipped stuff) are better choices although meat damage will be greater. Keep in mind, a mature turkey is a fairly large bodied critter. The bones are fairly fragile(as are most avian bones) but there's a lot of muscle, too.

 

[NoSecondBest]

I've shot pigeons that flew after being hit with a 22lr. I once shot a large gobler at twenty-five yards with a 22mag and it flew away. I found it later in the day about six hundred yards from where it was hit. Anyone who says they once shot on and it dropped dead right there.....shot ten more and give us some statistics. One time with anything is meaningless. I've shot turkeys with a bow and gotten complete pass throughs and had them fly away. I know they died, I just don't know where they died. Yes, a 22lr will kill a turkey. It will also wound a turkey.

 

[briandg]

I think that you would be awfully hard pressed to find another turkey that survived being hit by a modern broadhead with 1" of razor sharp steel pushing through pretty much any part of it. Anywhere in the body, that thing is probably going to bleed out in a matter of minutes.

Any animal with a solid torso hit that lives on a pint of blood is going to croak like a toad from pretty much anything from wmr or up in about the time it takes to eat a sandwich. Anything can get lucky, however, and have whatever round you are using slip between everything that can get hurt. That's why you should avoid an lr, and why a good expanding bullet matters. That's another reason for shotgun rounds for turkey hunting. People want to use minimal power cartridges, such as .22, to save the meat. A shotgun hitting with a few BB sized shot at 1.5k fps is probably going to do more damage than a .22 lr without tearing up the meat.

 

[NoSecondBest]

I shot one turkey one time as it flew in to roost right where I was bow hunting for deer. The arrow passed through the bird and it didn't even fly off the roost. It sat there for about three or four minutes and I could hear the blood dripping on the leaves under the tree. Finally the bird dropped out of the tree. It could have flown a long ways in that time if it had decided to fly. I always try to speak from experience when I reply to these types of threads. I always notice that 90% of all replies are from keyboard experts who "guessed" the answer or regurgitated something they read someone else posted somewhere. Just about all that "info" is useless.....more or less.