Field Dressing a Wild Turkey

So after all your hard work learning how to hunt the birds, you've just shot your wild turkey. What now? I'm not sure what the right way to do it is, but I can tell you how I did it. After killing my bird I carried it out to the truck over my shoulder like you see in the books. I think there must be an easier way to do it since my grip was cramping halfway back and the wings spread out making the bird very awkward to carry. In addition I got blood all over my backpack as it dribble out the holes in the bird’s neck. Next time I might try something different to carry the bird back to the truck, although I'm not sure what that is yet. On the other hand maybe I just need to cowboy up and carry that bird out the way God intended. Anyway, I didn't expect that much blood. I put down my game bag and a tarp to protect my dad’s truck from the turkey blood. Later, he said I shouldn't have done that because game blood in the bed of his truck would be an improvement. When I got back to camp I pulled out the camp trash can and plucked the feathers around the vent area of the bird. I was surprised by how much dandruff my bird had in its feathers. I cut the abdomen open from the vent about two inches towards the breast and then using that opening tried to carefully cut all the way around the vent. I remember this was very difficult at the time and I ended up nicking the large intestine while cutting around the vent. I was very careful to not get any of the green gunk from the intestine on anything and then after carving out the vent and starting to pull out the guts the intestine along with the gunk came out of the bird and didn't really get on anything but the guts. Next time I'll be more careful. Once that first set of digestive organs were out, I cut along the original two inch slit another two inches or so up so I could get my hand inside the body cavity. I was struck by how hot it was inside the bird. Once I could get my hand in, I started pulling out the rest of the organs. I would carefully work something loose by feeling around in there and pull out what ever I could get my hands on. I tossed the liver in the trash and my dad was really disappointed. He wanted to cook up liver and onions on the spot and have a little mini feast. Since I had tossed it in the trash it had feathers all over it and I was afraid that the other stuff in there may have contaminated it. Next time I'll save it. I was a sizable piece of meat and I'm sure it would have been very good with onions. The reason I had tossed it in the first place was that the bile duct looked like it would be hard to get off without getting bile all over the liver. In retrospect I don't think it would have been that hard. Someone hard warned me that while cleaning the bird it would smell awful. With my bird this couldn't have been further from the truth. Most of the time I didn't really smell anything, since I was expecting a horrible smell this surprised me and I really opened up and took a good whiff right in the body cavity. The smell was very faint, far less odor than a regular store bought turkey. The smell was rather pleasant like butter. After digging out all the organs I really felt around and got a couple more things from near the spine that where hiding up in there I think they were the lungs. I took some paper towels and sopped up the blood that had pooled in the body cavity and tossed the towels in the trash. Then I put some ice in there and shook it up and then dumped the ice and repeated. Then I took some more paper towels and dried it out in there again and tossed the paper towels in the trash. Then I stuffed as much ice as I could into the body cavity wrapped the whole bird in my game bag and let it sit in the shade while I waited for my dad to come back from his hunt. The air temperature that morning was probably around 40 degrees F. When my dad got back about an hour and a half later, I drained the water from body cavity and stuffed in more ice. Then I wrapped it up again in the game bag and put the package into a trash bag. We drove to the nearest town about 45 minutes away and bought a foam cooler and some ice. We put our camp food in the foam cooler and then put the bird in the big cooler with ice for the trip home. I think putting ice in the bird’s body cavity was a good idea, but if you’re going to have your bird mounted, you'll want to remove it and dry out the cavity with towels after the bird cools off because when the ice melted the feathers got wet and would have not looked good on a mount. I hadn't planned to have my bird mounted because my wife wouldn't have liked a mount on display as it doesn't fit the decor of our home. Once the bird was in the cooler I felt good about the 3 hour trip back to my parent’s house. Don't miss my next post "cleaning and butchering the turkey". I'll try to get the pictures from my mom.