Not terribly long. Maybe 50-60 yards. Average. I’ve had one that was no blood trail. Just a couple steps, a confused look, and a flop. Had one a couple years ago that was around half a mile. That was brutal, took all night, and some inductive reasoning to find once the actual droplets faded out. But most are about like this: spotty/splotchy with periods of light drops and usually under a hundred yards.

It’s an Eastern Redcedar (a type of juniper actually) that my uncle cut to clear out a walking trail on his land a couple years ago. I happened to notice it as I was walking back from hunting and asked would he mind if I tried to coax a bow out of it. He didn’t mind, so I took it home and spent the next ten months dithering about it and taking a few scrapes here and there. Finally sometime last Augustish I put three straight full days into. Took off about an inch or so of sapwood so that there would be some of that beautiful red heartwood left after tillering (You can get whitewood anywhere, but that red sapwood is hard to come by.), backed it with rawhide, and tillered it to #52 lbs at 28″. It’s 66″ long tip to tip and shoots really well. This is my second year hunting with it and it’s shot several thousand arrows with no additional set at all. Got a couple does with it last year and some assorted small game. I’ve made several other decent bows, but that one is my favorite by far.

ERC is a actually a type of juniper, hence why it does make a very good bow. It’s tough to find a good piece though. I have been actively looking and not found another that I wanted to try and work with. That particular piece has many knots in it, but they don’t go all the way through to the back. I just smoothed them off on the belly side. ERC typically needs to be backed with something such as rawhide or sinew. A very thin hickory backing can work, but if it’s very thick the back will overpower the belly and cause compression issues.

There is a guy over on the Primitive forum who drilled out the knots and filed them with osage orange pins. That gave his bow a really neat touch and prevented the problem of the knots crumbling and causing a weak spot over time.

If you do try ERC, make it fairly long and fairly wide. It’s a great wood, but is relatively tension weak, so needs to be long/wide, and usually backed with something. It is a great wood though. It’s very light in physical weight itself, so it shoots harder per pound of draw weight than you might expect. That bow pulls around 50 pounds, but shoots faster than my other 50 pound bows of red oak, elm, hackberry, etc. (Of course, that could be due to something I did wrong on the others that I managed to escape on this one. I dunno for sure.)