Opening day I hit a doe high and almost parallel to the spine. Tough tracking, sparse blood. Took 3.5 hours and almost a mile to retrieve. Thought I lost her twice. Since then I've read up on the mystical "no man's land" between the spine and lungs. What say you brothers or Orion? Can you hit a deer high and have it live?
Sure you can. But there is no magical space between the lungs and the spine. The spine comes down much lower than most think. I've seen deer hit just above the spine and live....my buddy shot a doe there and lost her. A week later she was alive and on a trail cam with two scars on her upper third. If you puncture the thoracic cavity, you can clip a lung and a deer can live.....but most likely that deer will go a long way and most likely die. When you poke two holes in a deer you can kill a deer by collapsing it's lungs (from the pressure differential), the diaphragm can't fill the lungs up, they pass out and die from lack of O2.
If what you said is true on your doe, your arrow didn't enter the thoracic cavity and caused death by blood loss on muscle and the vascular system. Upon field dressing and butchering your doe, where did your arrow penetrate and what did it destroy leading to her demise?
3 broken ribs. Blood wasn't bubbly until the last couple hundred yards. Pretty sure she wiped out on a dead log just before that. I figured one of the ribs finally worked its way into a lung and it finally collapsed. It's amazing how a shot set up can go from good to horrible once you release the arrow. Started quartering away. Must have squatted and turned in the 17 yds from release.
Ace, Dr Williams and Dr DeNicola and I were hunting a white buffalo in Redding with Cross Bow's over a corn pile. Well, actually a feeder. We were using Rage mechanicals, but turned down the poundage so the Kinetic Energy was really low.
We discussed how a high fence could really improve private land hunting in CT...
Ha ha ha. Just trying to help my neighbors page views :)
That all said in fun. I 100% fully agree. It's impossible to shoot under the spine and not hit lung, so long as you are in the lung area. There is absolutely, positively, no "void".
Could a high lung hit sort of plug up a bit and result in minimal blood trail making recovery real hard perpetuating the belief that there is a "void", sure. But it doesnt make it so. Most of the time, when people hit one a bit high they went over the spine and as was noted, that runs lower than most think over the lungs and thus can really surprise folks.
Sgt York, its awesome you found her - well done. That makes for a damn hard tracking job. Are those ticks on her?
I hit and 8pt once above the spine I had hair and fat grease on the arrow and 2.5 hours on my hands and knees found two specks of blood. I saw him run almost 150yrds before he was out of sight. The void is above the spine
For the future of bowhunting and to keep archery as the favored urban deer management technique, practice, practice, practice and let's keep crippling shots to a minimum. Archery is the preferred urban deer management tool and the antis love to point to crippling rates. You shoot at a deer, make sure you kill it and give them no reason to be opposed to archery. If Nothing else, at least out of respect for the resource.
Those be flys. I did not see one tick on her and I fully expected to pick off a couple off me but nothing. Scouting season lots of ticks, since August no so much
Dr Williams - So true. I attended a meeting up here at Mass DFW headquarters last week. It was a legislative hearing where the main bill being debated was something called the Massachusetts Outdoor Heritage Act. Broadly, this bill is a composite of several sub bills which emphasize wildlife and fisheries decisions being done by the professionals at the MDFW and not up for debate by the legislators in Boston... But it also includes things like legalizing crossbows, legalizing Sunday hunting, bear baiting etc. I'm not super optimistic... But man, I sure hope it passes, or that they can at least pass the Sunday archery hunting thing.
Any way, the MSPCA folks that got up to testify against the passage of Sunday archery hunting included a stat, which I have not found anywhere since, that said 50% of bow shot deer are un-recovered.
I did some Pub-Med and Google Scholar searching and found some studies of various suburban areas, a few of which folks you know did: (Kilpatrick and Labonte), and nothing came close to 50%.
So, no clue where they got that info, but you could sort of see the legislators cringe a bit at that thought... Those who testified on the hunting side were not prepared to offer a specific number which was lower, and simply could say that 50% is far beyond any thing they have ever seen. I'd agree, maybe I just know a lot of good shots, but I dont think I've ever known a hunter with a 50% recovery rate, I'd say everyone I know is, over the span of that persons career as an archery hunter, at 85% +
The point here though, is that you are totally right, folks against hunting LOVE to point to wound/unrecovered rate as a reason not to allow archery hunting. We are the only ones who can prove them wrong!
I hate no mans land, but it's you own fault for entering it. Tough place to go. I lost a giant to that. Then a year later in the winter a neighbor found the shed antlers and the deer dead of old age. 180in 9 point.
I am going to take a stab at this one Bob. The deer died on its left side and he flipped it over before taking a picture of her good side. Those are impressions in her coat left by the sticks she was laying on on the ground.
Looks like that hit was high enough to just skid across the tops of the ribs; gotta keep your hits lower when you hunt from the ground so that the chest cavity can fill up and start to spill over sooner.
FWIW, I use to swap posts with a guy from Maryland who wounded a HUGE, WHOPPING PILE of deer with a crossbow before he figured out that the deer were just turning themselves inside out at the noise of the thing. Inside of 10 yards, they still blew up, but it was already too late.
And No, there is NO VOID. High hits to the lungs are survivable if the entry and exit seal off with fat/hide/muscle AND the bleeding is pretty much confined to a smaller portion of the lung(s) - you hit a low-pressure circuit with a blade that's not as sharp as it should be - maybe from centering a rib, which would add some smash&bash to the nature of the hit, which would release clotting factors , etc...
So yes, it's possible, but it really takes kind of a perfect storm of what-ifs all lining up just so.
Probably most "no man's land" stories begin with a deer that was shot a bit too far forward, above the spine, and in between the spinous processes - you hit one of those pretty hard and you might get a knockdown, though I wouldn't count on it with any of my bows.
But overall - if you were able to trail a deer with very little blood for a MILE? DANG! That's awesome.
