Yesterday i shot my first deer ever. It was amazing my plan came together perfectly and i slung an arrow straight through a big fat doe. It looked to be a little far back but the blood looked good. After sitting for two hours i began to track. Three hrs later i lost the trail and still no deer and it became too dark. This morning i went back to try again. Now over 24 hrs later i still haven't recovered the deer and probably wont. I feel sick i wasted a beautiful animal and all because i couldnt find her. So im asking all you veterans out there. What do you do whe. The trail runs dry? Have a ruined my spot by tromping all through the woods on pursuit??? Im feeling pretty crappy about this one and i just want to be better prepared in the future do this doesn't happen again? Thanks for any help you can give.
Sounds like paunch/liver. The deer is likely dead, but without knowing how long ago it expired and your location/temps it is hard to say if it is edible. A shot like that should have been 6 hours minimum and more like overnight. More detail on both blood color and pools or drops would be needed. Once the blood runs dry you have two options really. Blood tracking dog, normally free of charge but tipping is recommended or grid searching from last blood. Check water sources and areas in between, grid search from point A to B and then B to A. Start at A amd head to C then back to A. With as thick and green as it is now most areas it is the most difficult time to grod search, especially alone. Other than that it is often like a good barbecue. Low and slow, I've crawled in circles on hands and knees for 45 minutes looking for that next drop.
use toilet paper to mark your blood trail. keep looking at your paper trail and you can tell the general direction the deer is heading. one thing nice with tp is that it is biodegradable. be careful sometimes I have had deer double back on their same blood trail. another idea is to take and start griding off your entire area by gps or marking with TP. look along all the creeks and ditches. if she is hit bad she will only go down hill. a mortally wounded deer will not be able to go uphill. look in brush piles or down treetops. I have had them crawl inside them as well. the time to stop looking is when you have gave it all in your pursuit t o recover your deer. anyone that has shot at a lot of deer has been in your position and have lost deer. if someone tells you they haven't lost a deer they either haven't shot at many or are lying! good luck!! hope this helps!
Always carry a good light. I will mark the last spot where you last saw blood. Always look for the faintest drop of blood. I have continued on trails following what seems like pin drop size blood splatter. Shot placement is key, and a good light...
cls74 pretty much has it covered but about it ruining your spot, I would say the next day it should be good. I had people put a stand up the next day after I shot a deer and a few hours later they came right back through. But it could be different in your area.
Lots of us have been in your shoes before. Its a terrible feeling, but a great incentive to learn from it and try not to have it happen again. Pardon how long this is... Like tc racing I carry a roll of toilet paper in my pack and mark the trail with it too. Leaving more pieces makes is easier than leaving less, I tend to tear off corners of paper and leave them on the ground near small spots and leave full squares pinched onto low hanging branches and goldenrod over large spot of blood. It's going to help you a lot if you widen your idea of what it means to track a deer. Even though your adrenaline is going to be raging, you have to track the moment the arrow leaves your bow. If you can, try to see where the shot is, but also follow the deer as long as you can and pick a marker that is going to help you find the last spot you saw the deer. This can be tough because if you are up in a tree everything is going to look different the moment you get down, so try to mark with something that you will recognize from the ground after you move aways. After the deer goes out of sight stay still and keep listening. If you made a good shot you'll often be able to hear the deer crash down. If you can't hear it go down then thats a clue to tread lightly. Try to find your arrow or the place that you shot. Mark that spot first. If you have your arrow smell it. If you can smell stomach contents then immediately back off, don't even go any further. If you don't smell any thing then look at the blood and hair on the arrow. There is another thread on this site that will help you with what to look for. The arrow, blood, hair and anything else on the arrow give you clues right away on how the deer was hit. I try to make a determination right away about how well the deer is hit, whether I'm seeing good blood or just drops. (It will help you a lot once you get a deer with a heart/lung shot. You'll have a much better idea what a good hit looks like. Most heart/lung shots will have blood pumping out of the deer, not dripping a few drops here and there). If I'm not sure about the shot I back out. I'm not fond of trailing a deer at night for a number of reasons that I'll get into in a few moments. When you are blood trailing you need to make real sure that you do not step into the blood trail. Not only can you obscure the drops of blood that way, but you can even leave a false trail if blood is coming off your shoes. As much as possible try not to move until you find the next spot. Be careful where you stAlso remember that you have a lot more to work with than just drops of blood. Look for the deers scuff marks in leaves and pine needles. Get in the practice of tracking deer without drops of blood, it will pay off when you do run out of blood. If I'm not seeing a lot of blood after the immediate hit and the tracking is going longer than expected then I back out and come back the next morning. Here are a couple reasons why - even if you made a shot far back you are probably still going to kill the deer, so you want it to go bed down somewhere and die, and then still be able to tracking it from the initial blood trail. If you bump it out of its bed then your job just got a lot tougher. Lots of times the intestines will plug the wound and stop the blood from dripping out of a gut shot deer. Its still bleeding, but all of the blood is in the body cavity. If a deer like this gets up its a lot harder to track than when they were heading into that first bed. Also if you are moving through the woods in the dark with a flash light you are likely missing drops, walking over the deers scuff marks and unintentionally obscuring the scene. So its a lot easier to not push the deer initially and come back later. If you know the area well then you also will start to have a good idea of where deer want to travel anyway. If you loose the blood trail you might recognize the trail that the deer is on. You can move parallel to the trail and then pay special attention when the trail splits. Gut shot deer are often attracted to water and the thickest cover near by that they can bed down. Also another thing to look for is crows and ravens, they're really smart and know when a deer has died and can often give you an idea where to head (if the deer has already bedded down and died that is). Remember the part I said about learning from this? One of the hardest parts here is to try to reconstruct the shoot and figure out what happened and how to avoid it again. Many things can lead to a shot too far back, i.e. a gut shot. Lots of folks the first time they shoot at a deer will aim right at the middle of the deer, which will lead to a gut show. Some are so nervous that they are shaking enough to affect their shot. Some pull back too early and have muscle fatigue which causes them to shake too. Deflections can cause a shot too far back. Shooting beyond your effective range will magnify any left to right errors. Sometimes a deer will step into a shot which will lead to a gut shot. You have to try to figure out what went wrong and how to overcome it next time. Its all about learning. Everything is not going to go perfect all the time, unexpected things happen (I remember a hunt about 20 years ago where I was shooting at a buck and the lanyard on my grunt call got caught on my string and the call took out my arrow rest on the shot. I never in my wildest dreams thought about that happening. I don't wear calls around my neck any more!) Beat yourself up enough to do things differently next time, but not so much that you don't go out again. Its the guys who are always learning that make good deer hunters, no one starts out that way! One last thing... when I get a deer I frequently return a day or two later. I take a look at what the faded trail looks like, whether I can still follow the trail. It gives me a chance to learn a little more from the shot and hone my tracking skills. Charles
Yeah, It's like that. Very good Charles! I wish I would've read this 20 years ago when I started bow hunting. The school of hard knocks was a lot tougher.
this is worth a read: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-list...43144798&sr=1-1&keywords=finding+wounded+deer Havin said that I'll add that its one of those things you have to do yourself before you can really get the hang of it
I would agree with most said it is likely a dead deer. If you hit liver in the future you should wait longer to track. Only one thing to do now is to get back out there and again do the grid search...if you blow out the area oh well...a few weeks and some good rains will clear that up for you...deer will move back in if you let it lay unpressured for a while.
how many hours did you gave the doe to expire? id give her an hour or two. just to make sure shes a dead deer so that you dont bump her while youre trackig her. dont worry. theres still a long seaso
Yea learning curve. The part where you said hit her a little far back.... especially if you dont have video to review, if you think you might have hit guts, give a minimum 6-8 hrs. Longer if weather permits. It sounds like you may have bumped this deer. You know what Not to do next time. Congratulations youve just become a better hunter.
How Long did i wait? Most of you asked how long i waited. Admittedly not long enough only a little over an hour. My feer was that it was getting dark and i couldn't get anyone to come help me search. Also it was 78 degrees out. I understand it was a rookie mistake but i my nerves got the best of me. In your opinions how long can you let a deer lay in 80 degree weather??? ALSO THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR POSTS
That's a tough call to make. I know I would not want a deer to lay in 80 degree weather for long. I might have waited about 2 hrs if I knew it was a liver/gut shot. Longer in cooler weather. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Probably not much more than 2 hours in 80 degrees but based upon where you hit the deer you need to estimate how long it will take that animal to die and go from there. Check out the arrow to predict where you hit the animal if you don't know. If you hit lung there should be bright blood on the arrow and tiny air bubbles in the blood. If you hit liver the arrow will have dark blood on it. If you hit the stomach or the guts there will be watery blood on the arrow with possible some stomach matter. It will smell fairly bad too..... Liver/gut I'd wait 4 hours. If you caught just gut 6 hours at least. Double lung 30 min, and liver & one lung wait 2 hours. Good luck in the future. I hope this helps.
A shot like that will send the deer to water and I have seen most of the time they will break into the wind once the first burst of escape has slowed down. If water is close by give it a check and see what direction the wind was blowing and how long did it stay in that direction. Now look for Crows or Buzzards and see what the shot really was. Charles and the others have given you great advise Good luck
I totally understand. I shot a buck low one time. It basically sliced the belly open where some of the guts were hanging out. I totally misjudged the distance and used wrong pin. So i backed out but it was warm so i came back 5 hrs later with help. We searched and found good blood trail. I found the buck staring at me in a patch of cedars. It had bedded down and layed right on the wound, slowing and clotting the blood. Thats the only deer i didnt recover and it still haunts me. Moral of the story, if its going to take the animal 8hrs to expire then if you find it 9 or 10 hrs later then the deer has only been laying there 1 or 2 hrs. Its a hard thing to do but its best to back out and come back way later.
