Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Elk square off

This video was taken in early fall from our kitchen window. We live in a national forest, with enough acreage, feed, water and shelter/privacy to make it appealing to wildlife, allowing us to be spectators to some powerful scenes.

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Only one bull survived this battle.

Great video.

Had to copy/paste it.

copy/paste it where? I can't get it to play.

Didn’t work for me.

Not sure of the correct terminology. I copied it and pasted it in the search bar and hit enter.

working link

Yes! One does not want to get between any of our antlered game when the fight starts.

Thanks for the link. Good video.

Did the bull live for a while before he died?

How many punctures did you count?

Great video thanks for sharing.

The fight ended very shortly after the video and the winner came out of the obscuring brush and trees, heading for the herd of about 35 cows off camera to the left. We presumed the other bull to have been chased through the brush, down into the creek, which is off camera to the right. Lots of previous skirmishes in our orchard had that pattern, so we didn't intrude on the sunset scene while the herd was feeding. We walked along the creek two days later, after the elk had cleared out, and found that the other bull had not gone across the creek but was quite dead, leaning/propped against a big tree trunk in the middle of the thrashed bushes. He had two puncture wounds on the facing side, one @ 8" circular opening that was barely containing the guts. It looked like it started with a puncture/laceration that did not penetrate the abdomen initially, but was stretched by the expanding gut gasses and ready to blow. A 3" gash was between @ rib #6 - 7 that penetrated into the chest cavity, causing a pneumothorax, plenty enough to have caused his quick death. I don't know what damage may have been done to his left side, but it looked like he had collapsed into the blackberry bushes while he was standing. The winner had no discernable injuries and returned with his harem several times in the next three weeks.

Both bulls were of respectable size and well-antlered, with strong rutting courage. I might have gone ahead and gutted and retrieved the dead one, in spite of all the testosterone and epinephrine in his system (probably would have regretted it later) if I had believed that he hadn't escaped to fight another day.

Great video, thank you for sharing it with us. !

Thank you for that interesting video. What magnificent animals! Too bad one did not survive.

L.W.

Amazing how fast and powerful they are. I don’t know why there aren’t more deer and elk blinded even from fairly mild sparring. Thanks for sharing.

I was bow hunting elk in NM last September. One of the other hunters in camp spotted a 5x5 bull bedded and was able to stalk and arrow it. When the arrow struck the bull, it attempted to rise up but was unable. Another arrow finished it. Upon examining the bull, the hunter found several deep puncture wounds that would have eventually killed that bull.

So elk are not included in a list of dangerous N.A. game? I've added moose to mine. Cow moose with calves are potentially very dangerous to humans, and so are bulls in the rut - they've been known to charge transport trucks and even trains in Newfoundland! Without an adequate rifle, I wouldn't want to be in the same field with either of those two aggressive elk!

Thanks for sharing.

Bob
www.bigbores.ca

Border Doc, thanks for sharing. Very neat footage. That was intense. I've killed two mule deer bucks in the rut, with infected eyes from wounds, not sure if they would've regained eyesight or if they were going to be blinded. Seeing your video, I'm impressed they survive this stuff as well as they do.