Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Serious Deer Talk Forum How many deer are shot and not recovered?

That, combined with "lack of taking responsibility for our actions cause we want to blame everybody/everything else", deer don't get recovered. "Eh, it's just a deer - there's a million of 'em in AL." I hate this attitude.

This is going to come across as bias with me being a tracker and I acknowledge that upfront so I hope it doesn’t take away from the message I’m trying to relay. I’ve been hunting my whole life and lost a lot of deer myself over that time period. Three years ago I straight up gut shot one heck of a buck trailing a doe midday across a small powerline. I was sitting there eating lunch and it all happened so fast at 200 yards out that I goofed in the excitement and just yanked the trigger hitting the deer mid body. One of those situations where you just find a big wad of hair and nothing else. To make matters worse this was in the middle of a big arse cutover that had grown back up to that good and thick stage.

Anyways, I looked and looked and looked for that deer, coming back for two days making circles in the cutover trying to find it….looking for buzzards, etc….with no luck. The thing that I sit here now and really kick myself about is that at no time did it ever cross my mind to call in a tracking dog. I had never been around anyone with a tracking dog or for that matter ever even seen a tracking dog called in to a club I was in. It just was never a traditional part of hunting for me or something I had ever seen done before…… so it never crossed my mind as something to do. I did the same old thing that happens to the vast majority of those 40,000 deer estimated to be lost. I walked around blindly searching for “x” amount of time until finally giving up and chalking it up to a loss. Calling in a dog was just not the natural next step in the process.

Fast forward today….now that I’ve gotten my own tracking dog, met numerous other trackers, been to tracking conventions, etc……and I‘ve seen the capabilities of a good tracking dog….I look back on that deer and my actions/approach to finding him seem absurd to me. I knew as soon as walked out there and saw that big wad of hair that I had gut shot the deer and my head just dropped. If I’d only known at that point in time that all I had to do was to walk back to the clubhouse, call AJ Niette who was only 45 minutes up the road with some jam up tracking dogs and wait on him to get there…..then that toad of a buck would very likely be on my wall today instead of just being a story about another one of the 40,000 lost.

That’s easy for me to see now because I’ve been around tracking for the last couple of years. It seems now like the obvious next step after realizing I had gut shot the deer. I completely understand how it’s not though for the vast majority of hunters out there because that was me just a few years ago. I wish that we could change that mentality. There’s no need for folks to lose these deer like in my story. Calling in a tracking dog is just something that ‘s fairly new to everyone and isn’t the natural next step so it doesn’t cross the mind of most folks. Having a tracking dog be a natural part of hunting camp is what I’ve told some other folks that I think needs to change in the future….that mentality of it being the natural next step in finding your deer. There’s zero reason for anyone to be trying to compete against one another when there are an estimated 40,000 deer lost and only 15-20 trackers names on the list. This is where I know it sounds bias in my favor being a tracker myself but I’m saying it because I believe it’s the truth.

I think 5-10% is a good estimate. I killed 2 and lost one hit with an arrow but club wide, we probably lose 4-5 each year and our harvest generally runs 60-80 deer per year.

The irony of this happening is crazy but the very minute I posted my last post earlier the phone rang and it was a tracking call. The hunter explained to me that his buddy had shot a pretty good buck last night right before dark. He said that he knew he had flubbed the shot and the arrow confirmed it by being coated in nothing but stuff that looked like gut slime. They explained that they had given the deer overnight to expire and knew that it had run out into a thick cutover so they wanted to call in a dog to try and find it.

I took Otis to the hit site and cut him loose. It took him a minute or two for him to get his excitement under control and to calm down. Once he did though he got focused on the trail and it wasn’t anytime before my GPS alerted me that he was on point. We waded out there into the thickness and sure enough, there was Otis standing by the buck looking like a happy dog. Fun times. These hunters did the right thing and now that buck is going home with them. Something else we noticed too is that the buck was still a little warm and very flexible…..no rigor mortis had set in at all. I don’t think the buck had been dead very long. Had they went out into that cutover last night searching they would have surely jumped him up.

I asked permission to post this picture and the hunter was fine with that. I told them that I would not mention anything about name and location so if anyone does recognize him please keep that information private. You can see the exit hole in the back. The entry hole was through the hind quarter on the opposite side. Hey, it happens to the best of us.

CNC, I was actually about to comment what a good post your initial one was concerning tracking dogs when I saw your photo post.

Good stuff for you and Otis! I think you're probably right. If they waded in there looking for that deer last night, they probably don't find him.

Way to go Otis!

Crimson, do you know anyone with a tracking dog around Calhoun or Talladega counties?

Thanks 3FFarms!....

That’s the most excited I’ve been in a long time. Me, Otis, and the hunter all three were jumping up and down, high fiving, fist bumping, hooping and hollering……Man this is some fun stuff! Really looking forward to this weekend. I’m crossing my fingers on getting a call to go out on a track for a kid’s first deer.

I'll have to look on some of the tracking lists blum......Daniel White is not far from you there but I don't think there are any others. Let me check though.

Here's a couple more I found for that area blum.

Tim Goode
770-550-0792

William Smith
256-689-8117

I've killed 57 total deer in my 19 years of hunting. 13 of those were bow kills. I've only lost one deer that I wounded, my very first deer to hit with an arrow. I hit that deer in the paunch just in front of the hind legs after deflecting off a branch at 7 yards.

I've had one deer found by dogs, and one deer found by grid search. So if I had given up on those (no blood trail) then I would have lost 3 deer of my 57. So I've historically lost 2% where others might have lost 6%. That's my N=1 experience.

Thanks.

a lot more than 10-15 % how many times have you heard someone shoot and know it was them and they come out and you ask did you shoot NO NO it wasn't me must have been across the road.

I got one 4-5 years ago that my son had missed the week before. He actually had hit (sorta) the buck when he shot.

His shot was perfect area wise except it went under the brisket and split the hair and hide like you'd drawn a razor across it. 2-8" higher and that deer would have been stone dead.

Fwiw and in full disclosure I didn't make a good shot either. The landowner and his son and a dog found it the next morning before I could get back to help look (I live about 120 miles away from there and had a work appt first thing the next morning). The son finished it off for me.

I've killed three good ones on that guys place over 17 seasons. The other two dropped where they were hit.

I have only experienced one, not mine but a cousin...

Straight on chest shots are never recommended...

Blood but no recovery after days of searching...

The more I think about it, some of you guys are probably right that we are lowballing our estimate. I’m running around 8-9% or so myself and I’m far from being the worst shot in the woods or just lobbing hail maries. I’m at least somewhere in the middle I’d think. I’m probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 130-140 deer killed… having lost I’d say around 10-12 that I knew I’d hit but couldn’t find. Honestly though when we get into the kinds of numbers we’re talking about….whether its 40,000 or 60,000 or 75,000….that’s still a heck of a lot of lost deer out there anyway you cut it. That’s averaging somewhere between 300-600 lost deer per day of hunting season around the state if I'm doing the math right. With those kinds of numbers, you would think that every tracker’s phone in the state would be ringing off the hook. I’d bet that option will never even cross the mind though of most hunters even though its by far the best chance those deer likely have of being recovered. From what I gather by talking to other trackers…..for the ones with experienced dogs, they account for the vast majority of deer they track. By “account for it” I mean that they either find the dead deer or they catch up to the wounded deer and determine that it was not hit good enough to be a fatal wound. Either way, that’s far better than that sick feeling of knowing you’ve hit a good one but having no idea what happened to it after that. I’ve been there with you and it sucks….bad!...it’s one of those you can feel in your gut.

Well, I have bowhunted since 1987. I have killed and recovered well over a 100 deer with my bow. During this time, I have shot and not recovered 9 deer. I had gone 12 years without losing a shot deer until earlier this week and there is still a chance that I might recover him later today, but I feel he survived despite losing a significant amount of blood.

I actually enjoy the tracking aspect of the hunt more than anything related to the hunt. I feel that your ability to successfully recover a shot animal closes the circle and ultimately determines what type of hunter you are as opposed to someone who just goes out there to shoot up the woods. It is all about RESPECT to the animal that you are hunting.

I've been around a lot of clubs, and I work in forest management. I find remains of deer all the time, and a higher concentration around food plots. And a lot of them never get 100 yards out of a plot. I've killed deer on plots and try hard not to judge, but that way of hunting goes hand in hand with this issue. If it didn't fall right there, I'm not tracking it in that thick stuff, I'm just gonna stroll down this open road back to my truck.

I've had friends who fit the stories written above concerning the lack of checking for blood and wounded deer. It's frustrating.

Concerning bow vs gun. The myth is that more are lost to bow hunters. The percentage is likely the same, and the number shot at with a rifle is way higher. More are lost with a rifle - period. Plus a higher percentage of those hunters are young, inexperienced, and overall less motivated for one reason or the other. That's not very true with bow hunters.

Based on that - percentage is probably 25%. It's just hard to accept this as truth.

Me personally, I have lost two. One bow and the other with a rifle. I was very green and young on the first one with a bow and should have called for reinforcements and did't. The second I had a seasoned veteran help with the tracking and evidently we needed back up since we couldn't find him. Both were poor shots and shot placements with minimal blood.

After watching people shoot off sand bags and bench rests at the old Mobile shooting center, for years, I'd say 30% are lost or missed completely. I'm a perfectionist on guns and go nuts if any of my guns dont group 1"/MOA. There will be 25 shooters and 50 people waiting in line right before season starts and half the people there are perfectly happy to just be on the paper at 100 yds and putting 2 out of 5 in a 6"-12" group. Lotta people just cannot shoot worth a flip.

Knock on wood, I have yet to loose a deer with a rifle. I have lost three with a bow. One of those was found the next day (hot day) only about 40 yards past where we lost blood.