Retained bullets in animals, specifically deer....

tod osier

tod osier

Well-known member
Over the years we have had soem really interesting discussions on what projectiles have been found inside game when cleaning. Lead in ducks, healed up pellets, etc... I've always been fascinated by that sort of stuff and as many folks have, I've found my share of projectiles that aren't mine in animals.

Last Fall I shot 2 deer with retained bullets in them. One was a little crop damage deer with a .177 cal pellet in its front shank/forearm. The other was a big bodied old geezer of a buck with a fragmented bullet above the spine that contaminated literally 12" of the front of the backstrap and shoulder with lead flakes - the tissue was gray and clumpy, I bet the bullet had been in there a while. Both deer were completely healed, although the one shot above the spine clearly had lots of scar tissue and the top broken of the vertebra.

Anyone else have deer stories such as this?

T
 
Well, Tod, it isn't about deer but I was once preparing a Dall sheep cape for a customer. I ran into buckshot all over the place. The guy shot it out of an airplane then must have walked up to get it.
Another time while in Alaska, I was skinning a 10 foot brownie from the Alaskan Peninsula. It had bird shot in its back. Of course the pilot had his client in a particular spot on the ground, then flew his plane over the bear and by shooting bird shot out of the cockpit window he was able to haze the bear to his client.
Both of these examples are sick. How any "Big Game Hunter" can claim that as a trophy is beyond me. How any guide can claim "Fair Chase" is also beyond me.
Yes, I was young and dumb while in my 20's. I pointed this out to my boss, saying that we should turn these guys in but he said, if we did that we would run out of business!
Al
 
Well, Tod, it isn't about deer but I was once preparing a Dall sheep cape for a customer. I ran into buckshot all over the place. The guy shot it out of an airplane then must have walked up to get it.
Another time while in Alaska, I was skinning a 10 foot brownie from the Alaskan Peninsula. It had bird shot in its back. Of course the pilot had his client in a particular spot on the ground, then flew his plane over the bear and by shooting bird shot out of the cockpit window he was able to haze the bear to his client.
Both of these examples are sick. How any "Big Game Hunter" can claim that as a trophy is beyond me. How any guide can claim "Fair Chase" is also beyond me.
Yes, I was young and dumb while in my 20's. I pointed this out to my boss, saying that we should turn these guys in but he said, if we did that we would run out of business!
Al
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Amazing stuff Al, blows me away.
 
I have taken two deer that were previously shot. One had 00 buck in the brisket and another had a healed scar from a broadhead high in the shoulder. I was hunting with a friend who shot a deer that had a pussy oozing wound in the brisket from a bullet of some type that passed through.
 
My very first deer was a whitetail buck that had a broadhead embedded in his shoulder blade. Before we even field dressed the deer a buddy said to me, "I shot that deer three years ago in the left shoulder." Sure enough, there was the broadhead in that badly scarred left shoulder. I guess he needed a bit more weight on that draw.
 
Not really bullets found stories.

The first buck I ever shot was a nice little 4x4. I knew when I shot him something was wrong and was basically putting it out of it's misery. Since it was opening day we hoped it was just an earlier shot that wounded him. My brother started to gut it and it was clear it had been shot days, or weeks, before with a shotgun. Never want to smell that again.

One of the guys I duck hunt with has a nice buck mounted that he shot in MN. The weird thing is that it had perfectly round holes in both ears the size of a 12ga slug. It must have been running with it's ears back because they match pretty well. I have no idea the odds of that but I trust him that he didn't add them for a joke. Looks like those guys stretching out their ear lobes. :)

Last week I was watching a hunting show and the host had a nice buck come by limping badly. He couldn't get a shot and felt bad because he wanted to end it's suffering. When he got back to the lodge and told the guide he said "Oh you saw Limpy. Yep he's a nice buck, been limping like that since he was young." They figured he had been that way for 4 years. Made me think about how much wild animals can go through. I shot a doe once that had a badly broken and "healed" back leg. Never noticed anything wrong with her before the shot but the lower leg had nothing holding it together. Just lumpy, wiggly and sticking out at an angle.

When I pheasant hunted a lot it was not uncommon to find old wounds and shot in them. Sometimes pretty gross sometimes healed up. I'd guess it depends on if a lot of feathers were pulled in.

btw Tod did you ever figure out an age on that old buck. He looked ancient from the picture.

Tim
 
the worst i ever saw was at our hunt club in Western Maryland. my uncle shot a small buck with something protruding from his nostril. when we stripped the hide, we found about 8 inches of arrow shaft with an intact expandable lodged in the nasal passsage. obviously, someone had tried a head shot with a bow. even more amazing is how healthy the deer looked overall given how old the arrow looked. we swear that thing had been in there for at least a year.

skull is at my uncles...i'll have to take a picture and post it next time i'm up there (hopefully October if I draw a bear tag this year!)
 
Neat Tim, amazing stuff. I have an uncle who has a one slug hole in the ear deer mounted.

The retained bullet deer is actually another deer than the one you are talking about, I shot this one with the rifle. He was a grizzled old thing with a white muzzle and really large bodied, although he weighed in at only 150# (every bit of fat on him was dried up). Since I haven't told this story, I'll do it now... :). He was courting/mating a doe behind me for a long time, I could hear what sounded like a herd of dancing and prancing cows just out of sight. Doe comes behind be, and sees me on the ground, but doesn't bolt. I'm on the ground against a huge rock and get my gun up in the position I assume he will come from having gotten a peek of him over my other shoulder behind me. Anyway, he steps into view at 12' and in the scope staring at me, I put the scope on his neck adn pull the trigger before he can react (I thought). I caught him in the back of the neck as he bolted - shot went in and out as the neck was broadside, not as him looking at me, so I barely got him. I went to slit his thoat and he winced and started to get up - I've played the game long enough to know a live deer, so I shot him again quick! That was almost the second time he got away from a hunter after taking a bullet. I only had a tiny piece of him in looking at the shot on butchering. Cooler yet is after that, I look down hill and see a very nice younger buck with a larger 18" spread (but not too much mass to his rack) standing 30 yards looking at me. The second buck trots up the hill after the doe and gets killed a couple minutes later. Even cooler yet was that the guy that shot the second buck went and got his quad while I dressed mine out and drug mine out for me.

Anyway, I haven't gotten that archery buck you are talking about aged, I have the jaws, but I haven't had someone look at them who knows.
 
Tod If you are ever in Eastern CT I can age it for you.

We have found old 22 bullets in geese before, I think that is fairly common in some places!
 
Tod If you are ever in Eastern CT I can age it for you.

We have found old 22 bullets in geese before, I think that is fairly common in some places!
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Bill, can you do it from a good photo? I coudl get any angle you wanted.

On a second note, you may know this and you may not, do you know if "they" age the deer when they collect for CWD samples here in CT. I donated the head of the deer from the story above and wished I knew its age.
 
Like John, I shot a whitetail buck that had a broadhead in it's front shoulder. A "sack" had grown around the broadhead and kind of sealed it from the reat of the meat. As I recall, there was very little meat loss.
 
The biggest buck I ever shot was back in 1980 in NW Arkansas while in college (Go Hogs!). It was an old deer and when we skinned him out he was full of healed up #6 shot in his chest, front of his neck and under his jaw. All we could figure is that he walked up on a squirrel hunter that was sitting down. It was obvious that it had occurred long ago as there was no indication in the hide, just very well healed up pellets. Cool stories. Trip.
 
About 1971 or 1972 my mom took a small buck and a large doe in northern Nevada. When chopping up a hind quarter from the doe into steaks Dad found a plastic stake embedded in the muscle. It was like the stakes used for plastic cemetary flowers. Fully healed wound with no obvious scaring when she was skinned in the deer camp. The funny thing was that there was not a flourist or modern cemetary within 100 miles of where they were hunting.
 
Tod

I don't have any embedded bullet deer stories, but i have some data on waterfowl for you. In 1983, while conducting my M. S. field work I collected 200 tundra swans in coastal North Carolina. Swan hunting was not legal in North Carolina, or the Atlantic, Mississippi or Central Flyways at that point. It was only legal in Alaska, Montana, Utah and Nevada at the time. In fact, it had been closed everywhere except those states since 1916 and it only opened in Utah in 1962. During the dissections, I detected that 9.5% of the swans (adults and juveniles) were carrying embedded projectiles. My efforts were not designed to detect or quantify embedded shot so I consider this to be a minimum percentage. I found a .22 caliber bullet fully healed in the neck of one bird, a fully encapsulated 00 buckshot pellet resting against the sternum (after passing through the breast muscles and it was completely healed) and loads of other shotgun pellets (pb #2 and #4 most frequent). It had been 75 years since it was legal to harvest a swan anywhere within 2000 miles of NC (and recent telemetry data would suggest that swans from coastal NC would rarely if ever encounter legal swan hunting in the Pacific Flyway) and every grandma in Hyde County offered me a recipe for roasting swan, so I concluded that harvest regulations were occasionally violated. :)
 
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Paul,

Too bad I cannot use your excerpt in my grammar lessons ;) -insert juvenile snickering-

"I have taken two deer that were previously shot. One had 00 buck in the brisket and another had a healed scar from a broadhead high in the shoulder. I was hunting with a friend who shot a deer that had a pussy oozing wound in the brisket from a bullet of some type that passed through. "

Nothing like a well-placed comma, or the lack thereof!
 
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I took a deer in to a processor a few years ago and when I went back to pick up the venison (most of which I had asked to be ground into burger), there was a plastic bag taped to the box with the message, "found these inside, hope we found them all". Inside the bag were 3 of the little broadhead inserts that slide into the main blade and two full broadheads, one of which had about 2 inches of wooden shaft still attached.

That deer must have been hurting most of its life.
 
Quite a few years ago I shot a small 6 pointer buck and then I took him home to butcher. Hung him up in the basement and started to pull the hide. Barely got it past the shoulders and I had to go barf. This one had been shot with a .22 in the front shoulder and was walking rotten dead. Lost the whole slimey mess, no grilled chops that year. Now I am a whole lot more careful to take a good sniff. With a split season we used to have the second weekend there would be some wounded ones around so we all got a lot smarter about that.
 
Tod,
Back in the mid 80's I shot a doe on Nantucket Island,when I went to retrieve her I noticed that one of her front legs was swollen immensley,I tagged her and the bioligist weighed her and aged her,she was 11years old at 113 pounds. An old deer and big for the island! Anyway when I dressed her out her front leg where it was swollen above the ankle had 3 oo-buck pellets in it and healed over for what seemed to have been for years.Another time I shot a small doe on the island 70pnds and when I retrieved her she had an easton 125 grn arrow sticking out of the back of her head just below the ear and I never seen it till I got close to her,I still have the arrow,that was 20 years ago!
 
Tod

I don't have any embedded bullet deer stories, but i have some data on waterfowl for you. In 1983, while conducting my M. S. field work I collected 200 tundra swans in coastal North Carolina. Swan hunting was not legal in North Carolina, or the Atlantic, Mississippi or Central Flyways at that point. It was only legal in Alaska, Montana, Utah and Nevada at the time. In fact, it had been closed everywhere except those states since 1916 and it only opened in Utah in 1962. During the dissections, I detected that 9.5% of the swans (adults and juveniles) were carrying embedded projectiles. My efforts were not designed to detect or quantify embedded shot so I consider this to be a minimum percentage. I found a .22 caliber bullet fully healed in the neck of one bird, a fully encapsulated 00 buckshot pellet resting against the sternum (after passing through the breast muscles and it was completely healed) and loads of other shotgun pellets (pb #2 and #4 most frequent). It had been 75 years since it was legal to harvest a swan anywhere within 2000 miles of NC (and recent telemetry data would suggest that swans from coastal NC would rarely if ever encounter legal swan hunting in the Pacific Flyway) and every grandma in Hyde County offered me a recipe for roasting swan, so I concluded that harvest regulations were occasionally violated. :)
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Amazing stuff, did you publish that? I would think it woudl be on interest.

The number of times I've found lead in ducks it is clear that there is a whole lot of lead in use somewhere.
 
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