The wife and I were splitting black oak for fire wood today, up on the property that I hunt deer on. This stuff is super hard and stringy, darn near impossible to split by hand.

As I ran the hydraulic ram into a round, I saw something that I instantly recognized. There was an expended bullet. Perfectly mushroomed smack dab in the middle of this piece of wood.

I know this isn't really unusual. In fact when I was a youngster pulling green chain in a local veneer mill we would occasionally have parts of bullets, nails, spikes, wire and even a broadhead or two come bouncing down the belt on top of the veneer. They had been sliced into segments by the knives during the peeling process.

I think this is a .30 caliber Remington Corelokt bullet, based on the recessed base of the bullet.

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If only it could tell us the story.

How deep was the middle?

The woodshop at the Pella plant in Pella iowa had a big can full of bullets and pellets. Round balls, buckshot, every caliber. Maxi balls, perfect mushrooms, FMJs, you name it. Pretty neat find.

Pretty neat! I seen pics of pistols and rifles grown into trees before.

Something like this: 2 days before the season, Cletus and Mortimer got drunked up and went to sight in Cletus new rifle. He had some Craiglist ammo in a paper sack. First one missed the tree, second one hit it. Good enough, says Cletus. The end.

A eight inch diameter trunk, the bullet was pretty much in the middle.....

You could probably get $50 for that with the current reloading supply shortage.

Deadliest mushroom in the woods!

-Jake

Was wondering where that one went...

neighbor at camp found a round ball in a big oak round a few years ago. none of us know anyone in the past 50 years who would have been shooting a round ball that close to the camps. the area where the camps are built was woods until the early 50's when the camps started going in. it was really corroded too. he still has it. looks like its under 45 or so caliber.

You guys are luckier than me, found a hell of a fungal infection last year doing wood. 10 days in the hospital and still dealing with it. Trade ya for the bullet...lol

Cool when you find them because you always wonder about the story behind it.

When I worked for Howard Miller Clock Company every once in a while you'd have to pull a grandfather clock off the line because there was a big old lead spot in the middle of the clock.

Wait, what? You caught a fungal infection from the wood?

A guy at work came in with a plastic bag.
"Karl, you ain't gonna believe what I found in a piece of firewood
last night."

It was a squirrel.

Sawed in half.

Somehow while he was cutting, he sawed it in half.

Would love to have seen that from inside the log.

According to the the local health department and my infectious disease doctor, yeah. Going by my recollection and what my family has done, they believe it was cutting.

Usually if I do hit a rotten section, I stop and either get rid of that log or cut further up. I was on humira for my crohns at the the time and it was like the perfect storm. According to my doc, a normal system with a normal immune system it would have been a non issue.

I call it my precursor to 2020.

I usually find nails.

Cut ones.

Not old fashioned cut nails.

Chainsaw cut nails.


$#@@&*((*&%@!×$&*(((!!!

Neat find. If only it could talk.

Heh.. ain't that the truth.

In the last 45 years in the carpenter business I've found half a dozen or so bullets in framing lumber and v-groove cedar ceiling boards.
The last one was in a piece of barn wood I was installing as wainscot. The barn it came from had stood for 80 some odd years and the bullet was in the wood for a while before it became a barn board judging by the way the tree had healed around it.
All those bullets we shoot in the woods go someplace. Someday the one that went through the deer I shot last week might turn up in a board.
That little 4 point whitetail was the 11th buck that died from a bullet sent from that particular WW SuperX casing. It also has two coyotes to its credit.

Only if he found the spent primer.

I dug a well mushrromed .38 wadcutter out of some plywood roof decking while stripping off a roof.

Went and inside the empty rental and seen old spot of dap putty in the sheetrock ceiling.

Realtor said someone sucked a pistol a few years back in that bedroom.

Built a couple of additions, and remodeled the kitchen of a house near Santa Fe.
When I sanded the tongue and groove floor in the office addition, I turned up a shiny spot.
It was a 22 lead slug, embedded in a board - in the middle of the entry doorway
(Would have been a pain to remove that board, in that location)
The lady of the house (Swedish immigrant) decided it was kind of neat, and to just leave it there.
Bless you, Eva !

If you don’t mind if I ask, was it histoplasmosis?

It tells me the sumbich tree jumped in front of a deer someone was shooting at.

I noticed a bulge in a bathroom surround and thought it was a nail or screw from the garage side.
I investigated and found what looked like a small caliber hole in the sheetrock - then noticed a lead streak along the side of the freezer.

Lining everything up, I found a .22 caliber hole in my garage door! It went through the door just grazing the freezer and hit the sheetrock, putting the bulge in the surround!

My wife gave me the stink eye...but I said "Hell No" it wasn't me.
Anything stupid I did would have been out going......:)

*Chain saws.... where we're cutting is all low land just outside of town. Small towns.
Lot's of hunting over several generations has taken place here and there's little doubt that there's a bunch of wounded tree out there. Most of what I find with the saw is old wire fencing and that sure wreaks havoc on a good chain!

Yet the tree lived . . . .

That's right! They'll do it every time.

The base also resembles a Nosler Partition IMO.

Good thing the trees catch a lot of the stray bullets. I had a buddy in high school that caught a stray 30 caliber bullet in his butt hunting deer in Texas...We had no ideal where it came from. All the shots we heard that evening it happened were way far off in the distance...

found an 8mm FMJ in a piece I was splitting a few years ago. Had about 2 inches of discolored trail behind it and the tree was about 4 inches in diameter when hit, the log was about 18 inches when I split it

I've found a few 22 lead bullets in oak tops from the farm splitting firewood from a select cut....made me wonder if they were shot by gramps, dad, brother or me nobody else has hunted squirrels in that woods in the past 80 years....

I worked in sawmills for 42 years, as a saw filer.

Somewhere in my "treasures" I have a steel core military bullet we hit with a saw.

Someone was target shooting with old military ammo.

I had to weld in about a dozen teeth back in that saw.

Seems we were always hitting some kind of hard stuff. Rock, nails, bullets, insulators, etc.

Virgil B.

Interesting thread here; and I'm sure there's a few trees in this world containing bullets deposited by me back in my younger days. At least I had a good back stop. Years ago a buddy clipped a small branch with a T/C Contender with a 444 Marlin barrel while aiming at a deer. Deflected the bullet just enough to miss the deer but hit a big oak (?) tree not too far away.

Sure, you did recover the log. Nevertheless, I prefer "premium" bullets to assure a "pass through" for a good sap trail.

When Dad was a representative for a company that sold baler and binder twine, he was sent to a warehouse (I think in Kansas) to check on some complaints. It seems that people were complaining about their balls of twine coming right in the first few feet. No one had bothered to check any deeper as they assumed that whole ball would be in short segments. Dad went to the warehouse and looked over some some the bales of twine stacked there. Right away, he found one with a small hole in the paper wrapping. A little investigation revealed that someone had gotten the bright idea to do a little indoor target practice with the bales of twine as a backstop.

I used to hunt occasionally with a guy who used a 375 H&H on deer and elk. He jokingly said that it was great in timber because he could shoot through a tree to hit a deer.

I like this one

I actually did this myself a couple of years ago cutting a hollow tree in my back yard.

Fell the tree, limbed it and was working my way down the trunk when a squirrel missing its rear half came crawling out. Freaked me out until I figured out what it was.

I believe I would have crapped all over myself if I found that while cutting that log.

My neighbor to the south, cut and split a dead oak that was in our fence line and found a musket ball in it a few years back.

Reminds me of the Gettysburg stories and photos of all the balls and minies that collided in mid air...

I remember a picture of a fence post or tree trunk that was cut in half to a point like a beaver had chewed it.

Also accounts of battle field rifle pick-ups that had multiple charges in them (I think one had 13). Apparently with all of the noise, confusion, and adrenaline, people would think that they had fired when they really hadn't and just kept on ramming charges down the barrel. (You would think that after a number, especially 13, the fact that the ramrod was only going in part way would set off some alarms.)

It was JeffObama/GunTRuck50's bullet. It didn't "overpenetrate"....

Me too, not sure, but I think the log cutter lost the dog.

Yup. My sodium level was so low, I was 1 point away from going to the ICU.

A fungal disease that gets in your lungs and little calcified lesions and scarring. Mainly but not always associated with digging in ground around old wild bird roosts, pigeons in walls, etc Disturbing spores and inhaling it

Some try to lump farm chickens and coops in that but some of that has been debunked pertaining to domesticated fowl.

Some think that was a hunting dog, coon dog that got stuck in there.

Blastomycosis -AKA Loggers disease.A fungus found in rotten wood and damp ground near streams.A logger I was working with got it.He had to take massive doses of steroids to get rid of it.

Back about 1980, I was on an elk hunt in eastern Oregon with some much older companions.
One, Jerry, had a pre64 Winchester in .375 H&H. He was running 270gr Hornady rnsp bullets and I just had to shoot it. We tacked something on a lodgepole pine and I shot it several times. Later in the week I just happen to come down that same draw after a hunt and came across the targeted tree from the back side.... I was amazed to find large blown out splintered exit holes in that tree!! Maybe a 10" diameter trunk.

Jerry, did tell me of an elk he killed after his .375 bullet went through a pine burl and struck the elk knocking it down. It took another shot to settle him down, but he got his game.
Those guys were toting a .375, .338's and Ackley "06's..... I was in Looney heaven!

That’s a great one. Perfectly mummified. And in the virtually extinct American chestnut I think? Makes me sad for the dog though. Clearly a good one. Got in after that vermin and wasn’t coming out without it. Must have been a terrier of some type. Poor thing. Terrible way to go out - slow. Trapped.