What a Bummer

[Bigfoot]

went for a walk today, figured i'd head out back got roughly 100 yards from the house and found this

ScreenHunter_01 Jan. 08 17.56.jpg (149.67 KiB) Viewed 595 times

had the warden come out to look at it,and he found on the other side where it was shot and their's an arrow hole 2 and a half/3 inches behind the front leg(back of lungs,front of liver), said the wound track went right to the rib and then straight down....said it was prolly 2-3 days old(so at least archery was still open and not some poacher running around)...and he issued my dad a tag for the deer to see what's salvageable on the deer.....

i can only imagine what the hunter must be going thru to see where the arrow hit and not have a deer at the end of a good blood trail[/attachment]

[umpiremark]

Very sad. Thanks for sharing the pictures and the story. My hope is that some of the meat is recoverable and that the head makes a great mount. At the very least, this animal's death wasn't a complete waste.

[bullwinkle]

Bummer - with the snow it is hard to believe this deer was not found!! They must have pushed it. Leaving this one for 8-10 hours and it should have been found within 150 yards

[Ohio farms]

What a shame. Where you able to back tract him at all?

[Bigfoot]

yesterday we just did a little circle around the deer to see, i will probably walk out their in a little while and walk around........the only downside is i'm guessing it came from the property to our east which is in Managed Forest Law and open to the public

[Bigfoot]

spent parts of the last 2 days walking around trying to find where the deer came from and in the process walked the entire outside perimeter of our property line found nothing,not even boot tracks on the other side of the fence like somone looking for a deer

[umpiremark]

It's hard to tell on the first picture, but the shot placement looks back. Also hard to tell if the shot went forward into the lung cavity or back into the intestines. Also cannot tell if that's an entrance or an exit wound shown; i.e. exit shot from above or entrance wound from ground level.

My point is, with a shot that far back, that deer could have walked a half mile or more (maybe a mile) before expiring on your property. Maybe none of your immediate neighbors are to blame (not that I'm blaming anyone).

That dead buck is just an unfortunate part of hunting. At the very least you were able to salvage the antlers - and maybe some meat - and wasn't all for waste. Hopefully a buck that beautiful got to seed his DNA around, a lot!!