Disgusted-lost a deer!

[JerryToth]

I'm disgusted. I hit a deer with my 50 caliber and couldn't find it. Only second time in my lifetime I've lost one, and that's twice too many. Darn!

I can't for the life of me figure out what happened. It was a 25 or 30 yard shot. Perfect broadside. I was seated on a stool and perfectly braced off of the tree that I was hiding behind. I'm a darned good shot when braced. I'm certain the shot was perfectly on.

I placed the ball exactly half way up the body of the deer and exactly 2" behind the "crease" at the rear of the front shoulder. I have a 38" barrel flinter, and I load with 82 grains of Goex 2F.

I had thought of taking out the front shoulder and breaking the deer down, but I decided to not waste the meat. I guess I should have!

I was certain that I would get both lungs, and that at 25 yards, I would get pass through, with consequent good blood trail.

At the hit, the deer ran 50 yards to the tree line, jumped a 3 foot fence, and ran another 50 yards through open woods before plowing into some very thick habitat. It ran like the wind. The leaps were high. You couldn't even tell the deer was hit! There was blood forced out when it landed after jumping the fence. Other than that, NO hair knocked off where she stood when hit. NO blood trail at all.

I set up a grid pattern and walked the entire area for about 200 yards from where the deer entered the thick stuff. The deer was not to be found, at least not without a helicopter search. I don't know where the deer went, but I can guarandamntee that it went at least 250 yards from where it stood when hit. I just can't explain it!

I'm disgusted. This is my first year with Roundball and quite honestly, I expected better. I've always hunted with Maxiballs and Hornady conicals, and absent some good suggestion(s), I'll either go back to conicals, or up to a 54 roundball for next year.

I'm open to suggestions and comments. Darn, I hate to lose a deer!

Safe hunting and regards to all,

Jerry.

 

[Stumpkiller]

Assume the deer is dead. Deer can hide it tiny little spots. There probably is hair where it was hit, it's just scatterred and hard to find. Go back to the spot where you last found blood and start crawling in an increasing spiral.

Try not to disturb the ground (you'll foul the sign) and get right down on your hands and knees. You owe it to the deer to find it, and you'll feel much better.

 

Was tha blood you found "frothy"?? (sure sign of lung hit)

Critters don't usually "drop" right'a way from lung shots.

Did you enter tha thick brush fairly soon after the deer did?? (Give'em time to lay down'n die)

I'd go back and look agin but expand my search 'nuther couple hunert yards.

I've found tha best thing ta do after shoot'n a "true" shot, is watch wher tha critter goes but stay wher I am fer 'bout 30 minutes. If it drops within veiw then yore "wait" will be'a short one.

If yore shot was'a lung shot like you say, thet deer is dead somewhers, and probly not to far from wher you stopped yore first search!!

I wouldn't blame tha roundball jest yet!!
YMHS
rollingb

 

[Stumpkiller]

Click on the link below to a related discussion we had months ago.

Tips on round balls and finding wounded deer - earlier forum topic

 

[roundball]

:agree: with the others.
If everything happened exactly as you described it, the deer is dead.
As high up as you held (halfway up) you most likely went right over the top of the heart, only hitting the lungs...and if high enough up on the lungs, they can sprint a long way before they go down even with a .30-06.
There was nothing wrong with the round ball in this scenario...round balls fill tags every year like clockwork.

 

[leadball]

Hmmm. I have hit 2 deer with prb and they went a max of 50 yards. There is a hit called no mans land that works something like if you hit a deer high on the lungs when it has exhaled, you hit space. read that somewhere once.

 

[Rat]

If the shot goes high and back a little, the deer can go a very long ways. Been there done that with a .44 mag rifle. There is indeed a little "zone" in there. Your shot certainly could have been off a bit, no fault of yours. (possibly a little higher, and a little further back, then you thought it was)

Making any kind of shot to "save meat" has never made sense to me, and I believe does result in sometimes losing the whole animal. No offense.

Rat

 

[Tim]

Don't loose faith in your shot. Go back to where you took your shot and look for blood. Follow to the fence and get a good read on the direction the deer was heading then with a partner do a grid search. I once had to follow a doe for 3/4 of a mile after shooting her with an arrow. The broadhead passed between the heart and the lungs, barely nicking the lungs. Take your time and go slow. Good luck.

 

[buckknife]

Id say load up an get back in the same area tomorrow.yor hit may not as been as fatal as thought.they can be tuff sometimes though.My first roundball deer with a .50,a shot i probablly souldnt have took resulted in a 6 hour tracken job threw woods an open field.Its tuff tracken open grassy fields,any way i barley cliped one lung.The next year i used a 54,the deer never even got up out of its bed,just laid over and gave a few kicks.
Last year bow huntin i shot at a deer from a tree stand but it was up hill from me.what i thought was 35 yards turned out to be about 45.the arrow didnt penatrat well but looked like it was in the lung area.i gave him plenty of time and went looken.quit bleed after 200 yards and i found my arrow.
This was a 40 acreas of the thickest small trees an rabbit briers you can imagine but i search it over and over for 4 hours with no avail,did jump 4 other bucks but none looked like my runt.I gave up at dark after a 4 hour search.
Next day i went in on foot,wasnt long here come a buck,another runt.did a little foot work fer a shooten lane and sunk one threw him at 30 yards.he folded after a very short distance.Got him home an skint him out,well it was the same buck.The arrow shot the day before over shot the lung and stoped when it hit the spin,but didnt penatrate it enough to hurt him.
So load up an get out there,you may run accross it dead or alive.

 

[Keith]

A couple of things come to mind. When the deer jumped the fence and left a spot of blood he might have caused something to move in the wound and plug it. Thus, no or very little blood from then on.

Second, can you legally use a tracking dog? NY has a few licensed for this reason. Otherwise can't use dogs here. Does PA allow this?

The thicket he ran into is very likely where that deer is. Try to get in there and search it carefully.

Good Luck.

 

[Huntinfool]

Don't give up on the RB Jerry your hit wasn't as good as you thought. Sometimes it happens you might have hit a twig or something to make it go a little high. :sorry:

My .490 RB's have stopped five deer pretty much in their tracks. Two went about 15 or 20 yards the rest fell where they were hit!

Chuck

 

[musketman]

It's been two days since you posted it, if found, is the meat still good???

 

[leadball]

It's been two days since you posted it, if found, is the meat still good???

It depends if its hot or not. I helped track a buck once that we found 4 days later. Bowshot. some meat was lost but the shooter said it was still good. Buy the way, you be surprised how in what little cover deer can hide in. This particular buck was found underneath an uprooted tree.

 

[leadball]

It depends if its hot or not.

i mean the weather, not the deer :redface: :crackup:

I have thought of getting a .54 but the local store only sells 45 and 50 balls plus the 50 is good enough for my hunting(deer at <50 yards)

 

[roundball]

I made a broadside heart shot on a little 6 pointer last fall, with a .45cal / 128grn Hornady ball at 55-60yds.

Hit a rib going in and flattened one side so the ball looked like an igloo when I slipped it out from under the hide on the far side...he sprinted 25yds and piled up in sight of the stand. http://members.aol.com/wjcutbush/45cal6pointer.jpg

 

[olgriz]

If you hit the buck where you said you were aiming, it's dead. Please, please don't shoot a deer in the shoulder thinking you are going to break it down and be able to find it. It does not work that way. The shoulder blade is a flat bone mounted to muscle. A round ball makes a hole in that bone, but doesn't do much more than that, and it's not where the deer lives. The ball will probably not penetrate the skin on the oposite side of the animal, and there will be very little blood trail, and it will travel quite well. It probably won't jump any fences, and it probably will travel down hill, but it will travel and be very hard to follow. I've had many of my heart shot deer travel up to a hundred yards before they die. Many times when you shoot a deer with a round ball muzzle loader you don't see the hit or the effects of the hit on account of the smoke. If someone is with you they might see the critter kick at the hit with a hind foot. I've dropped bucks where they stood, and when the smoke cleared I couldn't see I'd hit it until I walked up there - what I'm saying is I didn't see it fall through the smoke. Here is an example. Three doe's were walking single file about 50 yards out. I'm watching my friend shoot the center one. My friend thought he missed. None of the three deer broke stride, the hit one cow kicked (kicked forward with a back foot) at the spot she was hit, but walked 50 yards down the hill with the other two, and fell over dead. Upon removal of the innards, there was a .54 caliber hole dead center in the heart, with a clot of blood hanging out each side. She walked 50 yards and left no blood trail. I hunted with a .50 caliber for the first few years of muzzleloader hunting. As I recall the load I used was 80 or 85 grains of FFFg. This charge, using a pure lead ball, flattened the ball two about twice it's size. Mike Nesbitt wrote several articles in some the the now out of print ML magazines about velocity and round balls when hunting. He maintained that if you want the best hunting results with a round ball, work up a super sonic load, which you could tell by the sound of the rifle, which was a crack rather than a boom. But the main reason I'm writing is please don't think that shooting a buck in the shoulder is going to break it down. With round balls, a neck or spine shot puts him down on the spot. A heart shot he'll travel. Anything else you better be a good tracker that can follow a meager blood trail. This isn't book learning, this is from experience because for about 20 years before my ex-wife owned it, I was fortunate enough to have a ranch in Oregon. It was like going to the zoo to hunt. My children were young, they had young friends, and what I'm saying is that a very large number of kids killed their first buck on my place. At the same time, it isn't just kids that get buck fever, I've seen adults that I thought were good hunters go bonkers and blaze away. What this boils down to is I've seen way more than my share of poorly hit deer, and hopefully I learned a few things. Using a round ball muzzleloader you need to understand a few simple rules imposed upon yourself. Number one, shoot targets and know what your limitations are. Number two, if you can't hit a target the size of a deer's heart at 50 yards, then don't shoot that far, because hitting the body doesn't count. Number three, figure your round ball muzzleloader is twice as good as a bow and arrow on a sunny day. On a rainy day the bow is better. I've run on long enough, so I'm going to quit now, but there is way more I could say on the subject of shoot 'em in the shoulder and break them down. Please, shoot 'em where they live, in the neck or the heart, and you will humanely have made meat.
:m2c:

 

[AgesofDays]

iron sights i just got back from sw pa tonight from doe hunting ,I got 3 down there with my pennhunter t/c dont feel to bad as there where many in my hunting party that was useing inlines and hit there target and lost them blood all over the place but no deer to be found also about a month ago I shot a bear that was getting into my pigs and I couldnt find it talk about upset, a once in a lifetime setup

 

[Dave K]

A true heart or a double lung shot will give the animal approx. 12sec. of life. It takes that long for lack of oxygen to the brain, for the brain to shut down. In that time, the animal can travel a max. of 150yds. This is, if it is a true heart or double lung shot. No living creature can survive long without oxygen to the brain. It gets there by either the heart or oxyginated blood from the lungs feeding the heart. Now if you missed these vital areas, that doesn't mean the animal is alive, but it may have traveled further because we are now looking for death by blood loss or gut infection. A gut shot animal should be left alone for approx. 6 hrs., if not addrenialin, will push the animal further and there will be probably be no sign of blood to help you track.Unfortunately a hunter never knows exactly where you hit the animal until you are looking at it laying on the ground. We all think or hope we pulled the perfect shot. This has been my experience as a bowhunter for 25yrs, but----- :results:

 

[Stumpkiller]

I just checked Dave K's figure and, sure enough, if a wounded deer could make 25 mph (a healthy one can hit 35 mph) it will travel 147 yards in 12 seconds. That seems to be a good figure. I've taken over 30 deer with unjacketed lead (slug, bullet or ball) and never had a double lung hit go farther than that. I always try for the double lung shot.

 

here is a post i made on one of our foums just a few days ago . the person i was replying to had much the same thing happen to him . double lung hits are not always sure thinks, the lungs do not alway colaps as we think they would. lastly there will be hair , if you hit the animal there will be hair.

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Re: Re: Deer Hunting Post #26

captchee
Senior Member
Joined: Feb 2004
Location: idaho

Man I hate things like this, and I will say it happens to the best of us, all you can then do is do your best to try and find the game.
Along time ago when I was small "really long ago " I was as I am sure many of you here taught to track from my father, uncles and grandfather. They made it a game and who ever won got to drive the old truck home " LMAO sorry memories"

Anyway one of the best things to learn is blood color and taste, bone from gristle, and the hair that grows on different body parts of the animals we hunt.

I will admit I know little about white tail and moose so I will use elk and mule deer to describe some signs.
First off the blood, is it clean no green flecks, what color is it?
Remember deer blood is darker then ours so when you look and say dark is it really dark. What im getting at is blood from say a liver hit will be very, very dark, almost black, while a hard hit on a from limb will be a normal deep red and a lung hit will be pink and many times foamy. A bad hit to far back in the middle will most times have a green tent from the bile in the gut.

Now to the bone, is it really bone? You have to look real close because the gristle and cartilage from the brisket is very hard and of the same texture however the key is in the color. Gristle and cartilage will be a little translucent and normally will have a clean cut edge from the bullet or broad head while bone will has most times at least one jagged side.

Now many times if I don