6.5mm No Blood Trail

A sample of 1 really means nothing I've seen the nosler partition fail to open and an accubond make a mess #### happens is it a super accurate load in your rifle is job 1 you may want to try it again before making any judgement
 
I had this happen last spring with a small black bear and a 270 130 at close range, maybe 120 yards. Bear ran ~75 yards lay down then made the most half hearted attempt at a charge I’ve ever seen and I shot it in the shoulder head on and it died immediately.

First round hit the lungs and some shrapnel broke the distal elbow.
 
Little high and back of the lungs is my guess as I have shot more than a few, in close, with a .50 muzzleloader, using several different .45-.357 bullets pushed fairly fast. Result is usually the mad dash, little blood but dead as a stone within 100yds. I think a deer holds 6-7 pints of blood. Envision a five gallon bucket, turned sideways with a hole in the top third. Not a great deal of blood is going to reach that hole but with deflated lungs, more than enough room for total blood loss.
 
I shot my whitetail doe this year with my 1910 Ross in 303 British.
I chase the Sierra Pro-Hunter to just over 2600 MV with a good
charge of IMR 4320 or Norma 202.

She was shot at less than 100 yards, and the hit was perfect.....
bullet exited, but she still managed to run about 85 yards. No
significant blood trail either, but still found her without any hassels.

Just the way it works sometimes. Dave.
 
OP, your description of what happened with your Doe, can and does happen with just about any cartridge. Especially if you happen to bust the Diaphragm, which separates the lung/heart cavity from the guts/stomach.

No, I'm not implying that you gut shot the animal by any means.

At 50 yards, your bullet was moving pretty fast. The Hydrostatic shock released inside the chest cavity must have been impressive. Easily enough to shatter the lungs/heart/diaphragm and dumping the blood into the chest cavity and down into the gut cavity.
 
The lack of a blood trail is very frustrating. I sympathize with you there.

I shot a small buck with a 308WIN at 75m a few years ago. Shot quartering towards me, load was Winchester Powermax. Deer dropped like a sack of potatoes, laid on the ground for about 30 seconds, got up and ran. It was in a food plot with thousands of deer tracks in it. No exit wound. No blood. No way to track due to the literal thousands of other tracks. Luckily it only went about 40m and curled up under the low branches a spruce tree, but I was quite concerned for a while
 
shot a big buck a few years back, 25-06, 110grn Nosler Accubond, blood trail was a drop here and a drop there for about the first 25m, I was getting really worried, then it looked like someone turned on a fire hose, blood trail even my half blind brother-in-law could follow, in the dark using a flashlight. Good thing he was hunting somewhere else :)

Big buck managed to go another 30-40m before collapsing.
 
hawk-i said:
Yeah, I get that but so are young bucks and they don't impact the population the way shooting does do.
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In my case we have nuisance antlerless deer tags on top of our normal deer tag for areas where the deer are overpopulated to try and purposely bring the population down.

We have a ton of deer in town and around the farms and no deer out in the woods because of spraying off all of their food supplies.
 
If they are overpopulated to the point of starvation then yeah it makes sense as they would have a low survival rate during the winter anyways.

Other than that its IMHO just taking away from future opportunities that could be shared by existing or new hunters.

We as hunters need to maintain and hopefully increase our numbers if we want hunting to survive...just my opinion though :)
 
gyates93 said:
Gave her 15 min before proceeding to the site of the shot, probably 30 before going into the woods after her. She was almost certainly dead because I was 20 yards or so away in the dark and I would have heard her otherwise.

There was an exit wound approximately 3/4in through the opposite ribs and visible through the pelt, but there was absolutely no blood on the ground even where she died.

It was a high lung shot and the deer definitely couldn't have been more dead, but I believe the bullet did not expand fully based on the close range and high velocity.

I agree with above that sample size 1 is not sufficient to judge but I certainly do not want to lose a deer in the thick stuff.
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That's not how expansion works. The more velocity you have, the greater the expansion. As for the ELD-X, it isn't a particularly rugged bullet. Fo rthe close shots that we have here in NS I would want a bullet with a little mor eass behind it to prevent it from hitting far more violently than it needs to. Keep in mind that the 6.5 CM is the darling of the long range crowd and, even though the velocity is modest, the bullet is in for a hell of a test when you smash it into a deer at, essentially, full muzzle velocity.

But you had a couple of things working against you.

1) High lung shot. They are notorious for not bleeding much because, well, the hole is up high. They bleed into the cavity but it doesn't fill to the point where the blood can run out the hole.

2) Leg position. If the legs are extended out (say on a deer feeding on a pile o fapples or carrots) then that can cause the hide to pull forward. On impact the deer runs and the hide goes back to the rear where it belongs, effectively sealing off the hole. Again, the deer bleeds, but it's all internal.

Keep in mind that you're not shooting a particularly large bullet which obviously causes a smaller hole which is easier to have blocked off by a shoulder blade, or skin, or fat.
 
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