If you have ever opened a deer’s stomach to see what it had most recently eaten, you’ve noticed that the contents of the front of the stomach can easily be identified. In the Southeast where I hunt, the stomach usually contains plenty of browse as well as acorns when available. There are numerous species of oak trees here. The small water-oak acorns and larger white-oak acorns usually make the trip down the esophagus intact. The bulky chestnut-oak acorns are always chewed a bit to make them small enough to comfortably swallow and regurgitate.

If humans regurgitated food as often as deer and other ruminants (cud chewers), the acid from our stomachs would eventually damage our esophagus. Deer were designed to handle this. The regurgitated food is heavily covered with saliva. The first stomach chamber, the reticulum, doesn’t use an acid digestion system like ours, but instead employs a fermentation process where resident microbes begin breaking down the deer’s food. So the regurgitated food isn’t very acidic.

LINDA ARNDT

Esophagus Bug

At least one parasite, gongylonema

pulchrum, a nematode, can live happily in a

deer’s esophagus. The female parasite, up to 6 inches long, can leave visible tunnels in

the lining of the esophagus. Severe infec-

tions can produce observable inflammation

of the esophagus.

The parasite can infect humans, but

transmission is unlikely because the infective

larvae of the nematode live in dung beetles, cockroaches, and similar insects. Deer

become infected when they eat insects,

either intentionally or accidentally.

— Phillip Bishop

 

The deer’s mouth and tongue are designed to squeeze out most of the water, and the deer contentedly re-chews its cud to reduce it to very fine particles so that it can be more easily broken down to extract the nutrients.

When Schmidt found the greenish goo, he was seeing the finely ground foodstuff and saliva that was in the doe’s esophagus at the moment of the shot. When he found the white foamy

substance, it was most likely fluid mixed with air from the windpipe. The esophagus is tightly attached to the back (top) of the windpipe. A broadhead cutting the esophagus is very likely to at least nick the windpipe, and in Schmidt’s case probably went right through it. Unlike the esophagus, which is soft and collapsed when not in use, the windpipe stays open.