By Andy Bensing
In my last post I talked about presenting a professional
appearance when dealing with hunters as a means to increase your exposure and
potential calls in your tracking area. Another thing I do to generate calls is
I frequent well used hunting message boards in my tracking territory. Many of
my calls come from there as I have become pretty well know on the boards. But
many people don't visit the boards regularly and don't know of my services so I
keep at least a once a day check on the message boards for hunters posting
questions about advice for shot deer they have not been able to find. Here is a
link to one of those messages I "intercepted" yesterday. The hunter did not
even know that there was such a thing as blood tracking dogs and even after
being informed on the board about them he did not think it possible to track a
deer 2 days later. If I had not contacted him via email in addition to my offer
to help on the board I would never had gotten the call! According to Jolanta I
may " need professional help" I think Jolanta is concerned I may be an internet
stalker!
Here is
a link to the thread I uncovered if you would like to
see how I generated the call.
Here is the map from today's track. After interviewing Andy (the hunter's name
was the same as mine) and his dad who was with him when he shot and did the
blood tracking the first night I did not think there was a very good chance the
deer was hit hard enough to die but especially with muzzle loaders I think it
real important to follow up to be sure. With all the smoke the deer's behavior
after the shot is rarely seen well if at all and often there is no exit and
minimal blood on the ground on even a very fatal shot. Andy and his dad were
game so I went and tracked the deer. At the hit sit the first thing I found
were 20 or 30 hairs that appeared to be from the brisket and only 2 of them
appeared cut off and the rest were still whole. Not absolute evidence but sure
implies a less than solid hit to the body and likely a glancing blow. It had
taken the hunter 2 hours to track 190 meters so you can imagine how sparse the
initial blood trail was. The deer was hit over a heavily used bait station so
with the track being 40 hours old and no blood at the hit site it took a little
time for my dog to get it figured out but when she did she tracked pretty
quickly down the line and through the hunter's point of loss. As you can see on
the map the deer went right up to the edge of a residential area but then back
tracked 30 yards before continuing on. After figuring out the back track Eibe
tracked along quite easily to a blowdown where we eventually saw the first blood
after the hunter's point of loss and there were 3 separate beds there as well.
There were a very few small drops and small smears of blood in the beds but
hardly anything. Definitely not enough to suggest that the deer was hit hard.
With the beds being cold and easily from the day before at this point it was
almost certain the deer was not hurt bad. If he was he should have been laying
in these beds when we got there. To be sure I let the dog keep going just in
case he got up and walked off a short distance further and finally died. After
a short distance my dog and I caught sight of 4 does running across a small
valley and that caused my dog some trouble. After confirming those deer were
the wrong ones, I eventually got Eibe back on the correct line and we tracked
1250 meters through very open woods to another thick bedding area. As we were
about to exit the bedding area Eibe stopped tracking and sat down and looked at
me as she sometimes does when she knows we are not going to get the deer. I was
considering quitting soon myself so we did. As is the case with 50% of the
tracks we take, at the end of this day I could say with great certainty that
this one will live to see another day.
2 comments:
Andy, Great posts on improving exposure in your tracking area. Tracking with dogs is a fairly new phenomenon where I live and I find most hunters don't even know it is an option at all. One tool that I have found to be extremely effective is Craigslist. I keep a free ad in all the local Craigslist websites and receive more calls from these ads than from any other thing I do. It's also the cheapest and least time consumimg way to get the information out in my experience.
I never thought of Craigslist. I will use it!
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