Minimizing the amount of unrecovered game

The grouse flushed straight at me passing just over my left shoulder. I turned, took the shot and instantly a large cloud of feathers appeared. The grouse kept flying out over a cattail marsh and died in the air about 150 yards and fell into the marsh.

Please take it on face value that this was an unrecoverable bird. It’s the part of hunting that we don’t talk about much, one reason for that is we dislike it to the point of feeling sick.

I stopped using smaller shot size in the early season because of that shot. Common thought says to use 7.5’s early and switch to 6’s once the leaves fall down. Shot size is the opposite of how large the BB’s are and smaller BB’s mean more per shell. I switched to only shooting six shot for grouse and woodcock because it always breaks bones and the birds drop instead of flying out over a marsh.

Loss of game often becomes a controversial subject. With big game hunters, archers get the blame. The trouble is statistics don’t back that up. Any late season grouse hunter can tell you that plenty of deer are wounded and die from gun hunters that are not recovered.

One study showed a spike in an area to 50% of the mortality from hunting being unrecovered game from a firearm elk season. Extenuating circumstances caused this. The normal wounding loss shows about 20%. Not that there isn’t wounding loss from archery – studies show it’s about the same. The state with the lowest wounding loss percentage for whitetail deer is listed at just over 10% unrecovered.

I have never lost an archery deer. I have had an ordeal of a track from a deflected arrow hitting a different deer, but we recovered it that night. I’ve had several shots go wrong while gun hunting, most involving brush. Shooting into brush causes poor shot placement due to bullet deflection and fragmentation.

I once had a bullet fragment into at least two pieces from a single twig, creating two entrance wounds. Neither fragment obtained optimal penetration. The deer ran twice as far as expected with a poor blood trail.

In over 40 years of hunting I’ve lost two deer, both shot with a firearm. One was rushed shot on a moving deer we tracked for three miles before the blood trail stopped. The other ran towards me and dropped seemingly dead and laid 15 yards from me for 20 minutes. While I climbed down from my tree stand the deer got up and ran off not leaving a blood trail. A grid search did not turn the deer up. Use of dogs was not allowed then for game recovery and drones didn’t exist.

Dogs and drones are options in Wisconsin now. They are underutilized.

I have had wolves eat two deer left overnight to track in daylight. Both were good hits, just circumstances made me feel like they needed time. Poor hits literally make me feel nauseous, deflated, frustrated and other hunters tell of the same. It’s agonizing. Hunters tell me they lose sleep over it.

Since the beginning of hunting, game loss has been part of the hunt. Even mighty lions have quarry escape wounded to die elsewhere. But there are things we can do to reduce it and save ourselves the agony.

European hunting organizations studied this very closely. Their wounding rates are less than 10%. The study identified causes of wounding and non-recovery come from uncomfortable shooting positions, rushing shots, shooting freehand, taking head and neck shots, animals obscured by brush, excessive distance, not enough practice shooting, and poor stalking skills.

They recommend hunters shoot from a comfortable position, use a shooting rest, take heart/lung shots, use heavier bullets, take their time aiming, take extra time aiming at distant animals, avoid shots where the animal is in brush, and practice shooting monthly.

Ranches and outfitters that have promoted these recommendations in the US have seen their wounding loss rates fall in some cases to less than seven percent. This is interesting since they came to the same conclusions without seeing the European study. It almost seems like we know what type of shots are good before we take them.

Wounding loss will never go away. The animal will move just as a hunter pulls the trigger, a gust of wind, an unseen twig, a bumped scope. In those cases the best we can hope for is a clean miss. May your aim be true.

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