I try to envision a tennis ball sized target sitting on top of the heart- I shoot at that. We all know where to aim to hit that ball on a perfect broadside shot, but the path to the ball could go thru the backstrap or the guts, depending on the angle.
I shot one last week that went in high in front of the shoulder - right thru the boiler room
You wouldn’t believe the track jobs we had this year in camp. If I wasn’t t there I wouldn’t have believed it. Found one, which was a miricale, other was found by the birds. Both double lung hits, both went over 1/2 mile logged on OnX for the non believers.
I lied and shot another with a slick trick vipertrick. Went about 75 yds down in sight, one red spot on a tree. If from a tree stand, I strive to hit them solid both lungs, and will either back the tree up for a different angle, or ensure I hit them mid body. One lung elk are a mess.
Other two were shot with expandibles.
i Kinda came a full circle though.....started out mostly hunting off the ground because all that was available was Bakers or homemade stands.
Then i kinda went through a "gotta be in a tree" mentality, dealt with shot angle.
now i'm swinging back to hunting much lower on average, staying in the cover, rather than climb above it, (unless there is none).
Last year i hunted off the ground 50% of the time....killed my buck with a longbow in a tree probably only 10' off the ground.....Shot placement not an issue.
watched him go down.
Figure the dotted line is the X-ring (or better yet, X-sphere) but anything that enters below the spinal column and exits above the sternum will get you both lungs.
Ahead of or behind the heart, those very steep angles keep to the periphery of the lungs, and that’s not great unless you clip a major vessel or two at/close to the mid-line.
So I don’t like too steep an angle — BTDT — so I don’t like to be real high.
If the animal is facing/bodily angled uphill, the innards hang to the rear and if downhill they move forward.
I practice straight down shots by standing on my picnic table and shooting a 3D animal part laying on the ground. Pick your spot and hit it. How you manage the lower limb is very important. My preference on a straight down is with the bottom limb between my legs. At about fifteen yards I can place the lower limb outside my legs on the bow side. My stand has no rail to contend with, more like a fixed hang on stand. I shoot a 60" recurve and I'm 5'7".
I tried the Wensel Woodsman for years but went back to a two blade because I wasn't getting many bottom of body exit holes. Most of my 3 blade kills were dropping within sight, but the one's I had to track were less colorfull, with only the spray from the top wound throwing out blood.
After the shot, mark the last place you could see the animal with a compass bearing from the tree. As you might know, the appearance of your surroundings changes dramatically between what you see from your stand and what you see on the ground.
Shot was 15 yards and I was roughly 12’ up in the tree.
Don’t have a picture of the entrance but I would say it was 2/3 the way up on the body. Entrance hole was right in the crease, so slightly quartering sway.
This is the exit hole.
The spitfire hit went through the vertebrae (where back straps reside) but never made it out. Really lucky on that one.
Here is the fixed head that didn’t get out. Angled a bit, but down in 60-70 yds but nada blood wise. That is the fletch broke off 2 inches below vanes hole is deceiving. Arrow end up in front of hip.
The zevr was nothing short of horrible.
Use a rifle.
The spine is about a 2” target on a deer. I have screwed up a neck shot with a scoped rifle (hitting just a shade low from 20’ up on a 10-15 yard shot), and that was the longest, slowest recovery of my entire career.
JMO, you’re better off staying behind the shoulder and getting the double-lung with a moderate-width, crazy-sharp, fixed COC 2-blade with a well-tuned arrow that’ll zip clean through and leave the animal standing there wondering WTF was the deal on that Jumbo horse fly.
Plenty of Trad guys have done it, and the animals just stand there (or walk off slowly) and tip over.
It’s not how fast they die. It’s how fast they run after the hit that determines how far away they crash.
JMO, but Math is on my side.
But common sense…. I’ve heard a lot of stories of spine shots which include the part where there’s a lot of bawling and thrashing, which is unpleasant for all concerned and (in a built-up area) may attract unwanted attention….
WhattheFOC, I shoot SevR broad heads now days. The last 14 deer I have shot have been with a SEVR. Of the 14 deer 2 were not pass throughs (spine hits), 5 of them hit the offside shoulder but no major bone was hit. I wouldn’t say any of the blood trails were great but I did have blood trails that could be followed without searching to find blood.
I shot this doe at about 40 yards with my 50 cal. flintlock. She was looking directly at me and I could only see her head and the white patch of her throat below her chin. That's where I aimed and that's where I hit. It's the only time I've taken a shot like that but I knew it would be a clean miss or a clean kill. She dropped on the spot and never moved. I also know that my flintlock hits a lot harder than an arrow.
That’s what I thought… right up until I tore out the major vessels on only one side of the throat. I’m not saying that I would necessarily pass up that same shot with my .54 roundballer, but I got myself pretty thoroughly humbled just by having my line of bore a little bit farther below the crosshairs than I accounted for at LW-Approved hunting range…..
Similar thing happened with my one Contraption-Killed WT, only in reverse; a smallish doe came through at very close range and while I floated the pin for an appropriately high entry, at that range the arrow struck a little higher than the pin and passed between the spinous processes just above the spinal cord, topping the off lung… See the line marked “tree” in this post….
She panicked, but fortunately for me, rather than sprinting off at Mach Schnell, she went full-on Rodeo— crow-hopping and sunfishing like the meanest bucking bronc on the PRCA — until she finally rid herself of the arrow by slamming herself down on her back, which snapped it off and allowed the two pieces to drop out.
That could’ve been a recovery job from hell, except that she offered me a follow-up shot from about 20 yards out, which I placed correctly, just under the spinal column. A few inches lower would have been fine, too, but I opened up the descending aorta and the vena cava and she just lurched forward and went down on her chin.
Anyway, just a reminder to know where your arrows hit at close range and steep angles so that you don’t have a similar mishap. I followed her blood trail all the way to where she fell (there’s no better practice than the real thing, right?) and it was not particularly difficult, but the trail on a high-exit, single lung hit sure could get thin in a hurry… And had this deer not snapped the arrow and shaken it off, I suppose she could have walked around looking like an old Steve Martin sketch for who knows how long, which is not a good deal when your landowner’s girlfriend is not favorably disposed towards hunting….
But yeah, I shot my first deer ever through both shoulders and the spinal column. Perfect placement for a DRT result, but it destroyed so much meat that I’ll never do it again….
