Best Broadhead for Turkey Hunting | Fixed, Mechanical, or Guillotine Style
Turkeys are tough critters to hunt no doubt. Superior eyesight and downright stubbornness at times, are a nightmare combination for a hunter to combat. Adding a bow into the picture is a different ballgame entirely. Shotguns are easy…to a point, but trying to slide a draw past the keen eyes of a turkey at 10 yards is a near impossible task. For those advanced hunters seeking a more challenging hunt, bows are the way to go! Turkeys are notoriously hard to kill and you’ve just made it harder. A list of many things could go wrong when turkey hunting with a bow. Your call might not sound right, your decoy could have scared him off, and he might have seen you draw, and all this is not yet even considering if you will be presented with the ideal shot. With all this to ponder, the last thing you need to worry about is if your broadheads will do the job when you hit your mark. Going into the field confident that you have the best broadheads for turkeys will insure a successful season.
Fixed, mechanical, and guillotine style broadheads are favored by turkey hunters, but what type of broadhead is the best? It mainly comes down to personal opinion, what works best with your bow, and how you like to kill them, but there are advantages and disadvantages of all three types.
Guillotine Broadheads
Let’s start with a turkey hunting video favorite! Yep guillotines, the broadheads responsible for literally giving us a visual of the phrase “A chicken with it’s head cutoff”. These long bladed broadheads are specifically designed for shooting the heads off gobblers. It makes for unforgettable footage and carnage…but the negatives far outweigh the benefits. You are narrowing your window for success. There is a whole lot of blade, without the forgiveness to go along with it. This leaves room for something to go terribly wrong. That “something” about to go wrong, could be anything from twigs and branches, to slight wind, grass, or worse yet your finger! The collision with any obstacles, whether turkey hunting or practicing at home, nearly always result in a missed target and damaged, broken broadhead. This makes them an expensive investment with little to show.
The other huge negative yet to be discussed with this type of turkey broadhead is what you are aiming at. We aim at a deer’s vitals when bow hunting for deer. We have all heard of “aim small miss small” but there is room for mistakes with a deer’s vital area. When it comes to bow hunting turkeys, the target area gets a whole lot smaller! Aiming high and back, where the butt of the wing connects to the turkey’s body when he is broadside, just above the beard when he is facing forward, or at the vent (anus) of the fan when facing away, is where you normally would aim when hunting turkeys with a bow. However, the guillotine broadhead will have you aiming for a turkeys head. Anyone who has ever hunted, or have witnessed a turkey in action, knows that they move their head a lot, which makes for a very hard, unpredictable target. You have got a lot of blade, but your shooting equipment best be on its mark or you will leave the field empty handed. If you do happen to hit your mark, there is no doubt that the turkey is dead, you’ll know immediately…
So the question is, if everything comes together just right, and you get away with drawing you bow back, will you chance aiming at the head or will you go with a body shot? Selecting the safer body shot means you will need either a mechanical/expandable or fixed blade broadhead.
Expandable Broadheads
Now let’s talk mechanical and expandable broadheads. Expandable broadheads are the usual choice for most turkey hunters. The one thing most bow hunting turkey hunters know is that a compound bow and broadhead combination that punches a turkey and leaves the arrow and broadhead in the vitals, will kill turkeys every time. Leaving the arrow in the turkey instead of a straight pass through will not only result in a massacre inside the boiler room, but will hinder fly off and running through thick cover. This makes the harsh impact of an expandable deploying, and extreme cutting diameters more effective at getting through the feathers, into the vitals, but at the same time sticking and staying inside the bird.
With this in mind we go back to the basics of the expandable vs. fixed blade broadhead argument (the one favored by deer hunters). With expandable broadheads it’s a common perception that you increase accuracy and cutting diameter, but decrease durability. Fixed blades offer durability, penetration, and peace of mind knowing it will function on target.
The G5 Havoc and G5 T3 broadheads offer field point accuracy with shot placement forgiveness due to cutting diameter, making those small vitals not so small. Both the Havoc and T3 make perfect broadheads for turkey hunting. Watch the video below to see G5 broadheads in action from Prime and G5 hunting pro-staff members from the Growing Deer TV team.
(Video description) GrowingDeer.TV- It’s longbeard time! In this video: we have Heath Martin taking two Kansas Rios with his new Prime Impact bow! You’ll get to see how the G5 T3 broadhead works on a pair of gobblers.
Fixed Broadheads
The timeless fixed blade broadhead has been proved over time… over and over again as the most reliable type of broadhead available on the market. Some bow hunting fanatics never switch from the classic 3 blade fixed blade heads that fly straight, stay intact, and hit there mark hard with outstanding penetration. But are fixed blades really designed to take into the turkey woods?
Let’s look at the G5 Striker(pictured in feature), G5 Striker Magnum, and the G5 Montec for example, they have traditional durable head with replaceable blades to switch after flying through feathers, making them ideal fixed blade broadheads for turkeys. Now again “to fly through feathers”…just how do feathers effect the broadheads effectiveness? The heavy feathers and quills make for a decent armor platted target, but there is a fine line between sharpness, penetration, cutting diameter, and sticking in the bird when it comes to turkey hunting with a bow. To fast, too much cut means your arrow zips right through the bird, to little and you do not make it to the vitals. Both G5’s fixed blade and mechanical/expandable broadheads have what is necessary to make it to the vitals, but beyond that personal preference overrides beyond anymore explanation.
When you’re aiming for a small target behind a wall of tough feathers it helps to go into the field confident in your choice of broadheads. Make the smart choice this spring, don’t risk your spring gobbler with a bad shot, or even worse, a wounded turkey because of your broadheads. Go with the best broadheads for turkeys, a G5 fixed or mechanical/expandable broadhead and make yourself more effective in the field.