Andy and Eibe are getting ready for Tracking Season 2014

By Andy Bensing

With tracking season coming sooner than you think, in addition to brushing up my dog’s tracking skills, I also want to make sure that she is physically and mentally conditioned for the long season.  The early season especially, with the higher temps, can be quite fatiguing. 

This 10 minute video shows a training exercise I did recently.  The main purpose of the exercise was to work on conditioning.  My additional goals were to work on line control and tightening up her check work on turns.  

My seven-year-old Eibe has quite a bit of experience by having taken almost 250 natural calls, and she has done upwards of 120 training lines in her five hunting seasons in the field. However, I still need to do some training with her occasionally to keep her in top form.  If I lay off training completely, she begins to revert to some of her natural tendencies that are not always the most efficient, specifically getting a little loose on her line control and inefficient in working checks.  Interestingly, with just a few exercises like I initially used when she was younger 

http://borntotracknews.blogspot.com/2010/04/journey-to-win-part-1.html  http://borntotracknews.blogspot.com/2010/05/journey-to-win-part-2-training.html http://borntotracknews.blogspot.com/2010/05/journey-to-win-part-3-pre-test-and.html 

she straightens right back out and uses what she had learned in the past.

This particular training line was 1100 meters long in a hardwood forest and aged 72 hours. I used tracking shoes with minimal blood along the way with stretches of upwards of 250 meters with no blood at all.  There were ten 90-degree turns and eight mountain bike/deer cross trails along the way.  The line configuration was actually designed for Eibe’s granddaughter, Addi, who ran the same line at 24 hours two days before. 

Initially I was going to run this line at 96 hours to make it very difficult for Eibe, but when we had a big thunderstorm that dropped almost an inch of rain on the line on the third night I ran it at 72 hours instead.  Sometimes tracking shoe lines do not hold up too well in the rain.  I thought there might be a possibility that the line would be gone but as you will see in the video, conditions were quite difficult but doable. Actually, they were perfect for what I was trying to do.  The point of the difficulty was to make Eibe struggle both physically and especially mentally.   A line of this length (1100 meters) would typically take my dog about 45 minutes or so to run but the minimal scent available created the desired effect and Eibe had to work very hard.  It took her over double the normal time, 110 minutes.

As you watch the video you will see that I put two ribbons on turns and on each turn there is either a wound bed or at the very least I put a pretty good squirt  of blood right under the double flag.  I often do my turns like this in training.  For my young dog it encourages close check work on the turns (which I wanted to refresh Eibe on). If the line were too difficult for Eibe and I needed to help her advance to keep the exercise going, I would absolutely know where I could find a good spot of scent to restart her.  Luckily that did not occur and Eibe required very little handling along the way.  In that same regard I also knew that within 2 or 3 yards of every bike trail/deer trail crossing there was also a little extra blood squirted on the ground.  That extra blood was for Addi to encourage her to cross directly over to the other side of cross trails/roads/paths and check for the line before checking left or right along the cross trail. 

As you watch the video I hope you enjoy Eibe’s careful hard work in the difficult conditions and perhaps gain some insight into how to set up training lines to maximize the learning opportunities for you and your dog when in the field.

The video can be accessed at 

https://vimeo.com/101682014

Eibe 7-24-2014 stamina HD from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

Evaluating Eibe's nose - part 2

by Andy Bensing

Below is a video of the first part of the evaluation trackdiscussed in the previous post.  Unfortunately, my camera battery ran out before the most challenging part of the exercise, the star and the deer feeder crossing.  You will just have to take my word for it that I was totally surprised how easily she worked through the hard parts, especially the deer feeder area.  Here are some photos from a trail cam I happened to have on the feeder.  Not as good as a video but you get the idea.

Breaking down the snow with my tractor.

Laying the tracking shoe trail in alongside the feeder.

Deer at the feeder overnight in the rain.

Eibe and I tracking past the feeder the next afternoon.

As you can see from the video https://vimeo.com/87635315  I can be pretty sure Eibe’s nose has recovered its ability to smell and differentiate hoof print scent between individual deer.  

Thank you to my sports medicine vet Dr. Robert Gillette   www.vetspecialty.com/staff/bios/84    from the Veterinary Specialty Center in Buffalo Grove IL www.facebook.com/vetspecialty  and my longtime friend and local vet Dr. Sherilyn Allen from Ironstone Veterinary Hospital www.ironstone.net   in Boyertown PA.  Dr. Gillette was able to diagnose that a low thyroid level was the source of the problem and Dr. Allen helped me successfully treat it.  I can’t wait till next September and get my Eibe back in the field at full capacity.

Evaluating Eibe's nose - part 1

by Andy Bensing

Some of you may know that about 1 ½ years ago I started to suspect that my dog Eibe was having trouble with her nose every time she had to take a course of antibiotics.  The problem seemed to be getting worse and worse.  She would recover but it took longer each time.  By this past season opener it became very detrimental to her tracking and was preventing her from finding deer I absolutely knew we should.  I eventually found an experienced sports medicine veterinarian and have been working with him since October 2013.

I set this exercise up to help determine the current condition of her nose.  I used tracking shoes only because the problem she was having was focused on her ability to smell hoof print scent.  Blood scent gave her a little trouble but hoof print scent was nearly impossible for her to detect and differentiate between different deer.  A previous similar track I ran a couple of weeks ago before the snow got too deep indicated that her nose was recovered.  I really don’t have a lot of experience to say how easy or difficult an artificial track laid in snow tire tracks is so I set this exercise up in such a way that my artificial trail would be mixed in with tons of natural deer tracks forcing Eibe to have to differentiate between the two.  Differentiation of hoof print scent was next to impossible for her at the height of her condition last fall.  I will run this track at 24 hours and see what happens and report in the comments.

I set up misdirection exercises in the snow by laying the line in the right hand tire track and then at the intersection just stepping into the left hand track and going straight instead of bearing to the right.  The dog will naturally bear to the right taking the path of least resistance.  How quickly and easily Eibe makes that turn will tell me a lot about the condition of her nose.

Approaching a deer feeding area.

Right in the middle of the deer feeding area I made a 90 degree left hand turn.  This is a difficult situation for any dog but when Eibe’s nose was normal she worked this type of problem out many times both in training and natural tracking.  In MD and NJ where I track deer are legally shot over bait.

Following the tracking shoe line through this will tell me a lot about how well her nose can differentiate scent.

Results of the exercise will be posted in comments.

A double-lung shot doe that went further than expected

By Andy Bensing

These lungs show how tough a deer can be and how far they can actually run on even a perfect shot. This doe was arrowed at 10 yards from a low tree stand with a crossbow. The deer was at full alert and had been grunted to a stop before the shot. With the loud crack of the crossbow and being at full alert before the shot the doe took off up hill like a bullet. There had been a very light rain during the evening hunt but immediately after the shot it began pouring and when the hunter was out of the tree there was no blood to be found except two small splashes at 60 yards down the trail the deer ran off on. A two hour body search in the ram at night did not turn up the deer.

I tracked the deer with my Eibe in the morning. We found the doe rather quickly even though the night's downpours washed all visible blood away. The scent was still there. Amazingly the doe had run very hard for 150 meters and would have gone even further. When we found her she was impaled on a box wire fence in the woods. It was quite clear she had hit the fence still going full speed 150 meters from the hit site. Look closely at the lungs and you will see it was a double lung shot and If you look real close between the lungs you will see the aorta was severed as well. Interestingly I was only able to collect barely 10 ounces of blood from the chest cavity. She must have bled out as she ran but the pouring rain washed it away very fast. The area she was in was very thick with vegetation and it would have very unlikely the hunter would have found her that far away just by grid searching even in the daylight. It is sometimes incredible how tough these animals are.

 

Another hazard for tracking dogs

by Andy Bensing

As an avid outdoorsman I usually love learning and experiencing new things about nature but sometimes there is a limit.  A recent blood tracking expedition taught me something I really didn’t need to learn. 

Last Tuesday night after a very routine blood tracking call earlier that day in MD I found myself lying in bed in the dark scratching like crazy on my legs.  The itching and small bumps immediately brought the thought to mind that I had again gotten into some chiggers earlier in the day.  Actually, the itching and bumps were less than I had experienced in the past from chiggers so I was pretty happy about that.  I found out a day and a half later it wasn’t chiggers that I had gotten into but instead my dog Eibe and I had gotten into a nest of tick larvae!  Tick larvae are very, very small and I had not noticed them at first on myself or my dog but by Thursday morning they had been feeding on Eibe for a while and had blown up to a size that I could now easily see.  Commonly called “seed ticks” for their close resemblance to small seeds, Eibe was covered in them!  Without exaggeration I would estimate there were at least 1,000 or more engorged tick larvae all over her body!  Upon close examination I could even see the discarded exoskeletons from some of the larvae who had molted into the nymph stage.  The engorged ticks were so small that I wasn’t even sure what they were until I used a magnifying glass and could see their legs.  A quick call to my vet and a little internet research held the solution to the problem.  Unlike adult ticks and just like chiggers, these larvae don’t attach very securely when feeding.  That’s why I easily rubbed them off my legs unknowingly the first night and did not end up with any engorged ones on me.  All that was necessary to get them off Eibe was a simple flea and tick shampoo and a flea comb through her hair once dry. 

Except for the fact that I can’t stop itching from just the thought of all those creepy little critters all over my dog and some inevitably crawling around my house the whole thing ended pretty easily.  According to the research I have done, the likelihood of tick borne diseases being transmitted by the nymph stage appears low.  Now the only big question left is what will be my next dog disaster?

Engorged tick larvae on Eibe’s back and belly.

Shed larvae exoskeletons after molting to the nymph stage.

Engorged tick larvae on Eibe’s back and belly.

Just a few of the dead ticks collected from the drain after Eibe’s tick bath.

This chart shows the comparative size of the larvae, nymph, and adult tick.

Adventurous Chihuahua Penny finally gets reunited with her family after 17 days on the run: part 2

Continued from the May 21 post.

The phone went quiet again but late on day 11 and early on day 12 there were two sightings close to each other in an area that made sense.  The day 11 sighting sounded very reliable and upon checking it with Eibe it was very easy to confirm.  When Eibe crossed the exact spot the dog was reportedly seen the night before she whipped her head and took off like a rocket.  With that sighting confirmed I directed Penny’s family to concentrate their search and public notification efforts in that area, which paid off with two more sightings on day 14 and 15 less than ½ mile away.

The day 14 sighting witness called in right away, and my wife and I were on site within 45 minutes.  We actually saw Penny along the side of the road on the way there.  My wife got out of the car and followed her and got within 15 feet of Penny but then she just took off.  After Penny ran off I put Eibe down on the trail just 10 minutes behind her.  But  two hours later after 3 ½ miles of tracking in the pouring rain without ever seeing her again it was obvious we were not going to run her down.

Yes, that really is a Teddy Bear behind that Blood Tracker!

Penny was spotted again the next day about 200 yards from where my wife originally saw her so at that point I set up a feeding station in the area with a game camera in hopes of eventually trapping her in a live trap.  Unfortunately, she left the area after that and the next place she was spotted was two days later on day 17, 2 ½ miles away on the other side of town just before dark.

Feeding station monitored with a trail cam set up in the area where Penny was sighted three days in a row.  Note live trap on left.  The door is wired open until the dog feeds regularly at the station and then the food is moved inside the trap.  Unfortunately Penny left the area after the feeding station was set up.

The next day, on day 18, I went out and confirmed  the previous evening’s sighting.  This was a really good sighting with very reliable witnesses.  Penny was seen casually walking up a grass strip along a school football field she wandered into.  The witness was aware of the missing dog from a Facebook posting and the Neon Posters we had blanketed the area with.  As the witness was slowly approaching the dog, it wandered into a neighbors unfenced yard. The neighbor really hates dogs, and he came out and angrily chased the dog. Penny ran up an alley and into a college campus.  I mention all this because the accurate information about the dog’s course and behavior allowed me to confirm for myself my tracking dog's actions.  As I worked Eibe to confirm the sighting, it was crystal clear that my suspicion  that scenting on these lost dogs changes according to their emotional state was correct.  When Eibe engaged the line where Penny was casually walking the night before, Eibe began tracking at a normal speed but when she hit the place where the dog was chased by the neighbor, she became excited and much more animated.  I thought I was seeing this in the previous tracks where she crossed busy streets and likely was chased but this confirmed it.

I first learned of a tracking dogs ability to interpret its quarry’s emotions and physical state while accompanying professional blood trackers in Germany several years ago.  My dog Eibe began to develop this ability this past fall in her 4th season tracking wounded deer.  There were some deer that we tracked that she began to realize were not gettable due to the minimal nature of their wounds and I believe the nature of their stress levels as we pursued them.  The deer being minimally wounded could easily stay in front of us and Eibe would notice this lack of fear scent and actually stop pursuing them.   From previous experience she could tell that they were not injured enough for us to catch up to.  Now I was seeing this same behavior in tracking lost dogs.

With the day 17 sighting so reliable and confirmed I directed the family to re-center their efforts in that area and after hours of searching and re-searching the neighborhood the next day, the owner’s son spotted Penny on the last pass of the day.  He chased her several blocks but this time she went to ground under a porch in a crawl space instead of just keeping on running.  Most likely tired and getting run down from 19 days on the lamb.  He got bit by the now 4 ½ lb. Chihuahua when he crawled in and tried to grab her but he eventually scooped her up in his coat and the saga was over.

Final map of the Penny case.  Red flags are neon posters.  Green flags are sightings.  Yellow dotted lines are places we tracked Penny or confirmed sightings.

This aerial map of the 3 ½ miles in suburban neighborhoods that we tracked Penny one day in the rain but could not catch up with her.  We started only 10 minutes behind her. 

As you can see there is a lot more to tracking lost pets than tracking wounded deer, but if you are a tracking addict like I am I highly recommend you give it a try.  The satisfaction you get will equal that which you get in the deer woods and the joy of the reunited dog owners is unsurpassed.

Penny Happy ending from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

Penny happy to be home and her owner very grateful to have her back.

A week after Penny was back home I was invited to a welcome home party for family and friends who assisted in Penny’s recovery.  When tracking deer for hunters I have been invited back to do some hunting but I have never before been invited to a party where the dogs wore hats!

A New Kind of Find. Andy and Eibe Get to Track a Lost Dog.

By Andy Bensing

Like many blood trackers I have always gotten several phone calls a year asking whether my dog could find a lost pet.  In the past few years I’ve been called about lost cats, dogs, horses, and even a pet chicken.  I’ve never taken any of these calls.  Never even given them much serious thought before but after a couple of interesting requests this past fall I decided to seriously pursue the tracking of lost pets.  As I researched the project I quickly found out that there is a whole lot more to recovering lost pets than just the tracking.  I still have a ton to learn about the whole process but this is the story of my first attempt.

The first thing I needed to know was if my blood tracking dog Eibe would even follow a healthy dog.  To do this I had my kennel staff take 3 dogs from my boarding kennel, give them a walk across a field, and let the lines age.  After an hour I took a piece of the blanket from one of the dogs, Target Dog 1, and used it to pre-scent Eibe.  This blanket had only the scent of Target Dog 1 on it.  Pre-scenting indicates to the tracking dog what scent you want her to find and follow.   To get started I just used the usual routine I would use at the hit site of a wounded deer call.   I put a piece of the blanket in an open plastic bag on the ground and treated it like the point of impact where Eibe would normally smell the blood and hair at the hit site.  As you can see in the diagram I started Eibe 50 yards upwind of the 3 lines and told her to “search”.  All these skills and routines Eibe was already proficient  at.  Eibe effortlessly searched across and ignored the first two decoy lines, hit the third target dog line and engaged it with no problem.  She followed it a short 100 yard distance to the end where I had some meat laying as a reward.  The next day after the lines had aged 24 hours I took the blanket from Target Dog 2 and did the same thing.  I was curious to see how the scent lines  would hold and whether or not Eibe would engage the correct line or just go to where the meat was the day before.  Again from the diagram you can see she had no problem.  In some ways I was surprised how easy it was but in other ways I was not.  Differentiating one dog from another is not really any different than one deer from another.

Knowing now that my dog would track a dog, I started watching the local Lost & Found ads for a real life lost dog to track.  I finally found one that sounded promising.  After speaking to the dog’s owner I was able to put Eibe on the trail 2 days after the dog escaped into a suburban neighborhood from a shopping center.  The six-pound Chihuahua called Penny got spooked as the owner left a pet shop in a strip mall. The collar broke and Penny ran off into a neighborhood and quickly disappeared.  My first guess was that the very scared little dog would not be far away, likely huddled under a porch somewhere, scared to death and hopefully easy for us to find.  I had an exact path  reported by the owner that the dog took between two office buildings before she disappeared so I used that as a starting point.

I started Eibe 50 yards up wind, perpendicular to the dog’s line of travel and told her to “Search” after pre-scenting her the same way I had done in practice.  When her head whipped to the left exactly where the dog had run, I knew we were on the right trail.  Everything seemed great.  Just like my practice test with the three kennel dogs she had no problem picking it up.  But after about 5 minutes I ran into my first problem when Eibe began to lose drive.  It was pretty clear to me that she was kind of wondering why we were following this scent.  In blood tracking I am sure a big part of her motivation is the hunt and prey drive.  The thought of tearing into the dead quarry at the end.  The scent of a dog clearly didn’t elicit the same motivation and my very brief kennel dog test had not provided any alternative motivation to any great extent.  I just kept verbally encouraging her and re-presenting the scent article which was Penny’s broken collar that I had in a Ziploc bag.  After about 45 minutes of occasionally coaxing and encouraging her she seemed to finally realize what I wanted and started working the suburban streets and lawns just like when we track deer in the woods.  We have often tracked deer through neighborhoods so this was not completely foreign terrain to her.  The track was erratic in direction at first but at one point scenting became much easier and the track went straight for over a mile.  When I punched the dog’s home address into my GPS, it appeared the dog was heading straight home just like a wounded deer heading back to his bedding area.

Penny Suburban tracking from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

The next problem I ran into turned out not to be a problem at all.  Actually I learned from it.  As we approached a big four lane busy Boulevard I wondered how we would track across it with all the cars moving.  I was concerned that picking Eibe up and starting on the other side, like crossing a highway when blood tracking deer, would interrupt the fragile drive I had built to continue tracking this new quarry.  To my surprise, Eibe sped up and flew across the boulevard  and the next two we had to cross as well. After tracking Penny three more times over the next two weeks I was able to confirm my initial suspicions of why Eibe sped up at certain places.  When Penny was spooked or chased, she put off more scent, perhaps “fear” scent just like very hurt vs. mildly hurt deer do, and Eibe could pick up on this fear scent much more easily.  Just like she does with wounded deer.  My 1st day of tracking Penny ended after 3 ½ hours of tracking Penny over 2 miles.  It appeared that someone had either chased her into an industrial park and almost caught her, or perhaps she was caught and put in a car.  Eibe had excitedly tracked into a tight corner of the Industrial park fencing but as she worked the scent out of the tight corner it faded away over the next ½ mile and completely dried up at an intersection to a very busy main road.

It was interesting to see when Eibe lost the trail at the busy intersection how she acted just like she does on a deer call when the scent gets sparse.  When struggling at the intersection where the scent dried up she first searched for a back track and finding none she went a half mile back to the industrial park where the scent was very intense.  Eibe would have re-tracked the last part of the trail again looking for a new direction but at that point I called it a day.  When I started the track I had hoped that Penny would have tucked herself in somewhere safe shortly after she escaped but that obviously hadn’t happened.  Being that we were two days behind her escape and having tracked Penny two miles from where she was initially lost there was little point in continuing that day.

Penny’s owner had posted small flyers in the area where she was initially lost the day she escaped.  The next step after I got involved was to expand the advertising. I found a family member of Penny’s who was an IT guy so he took care of all the lost dog websites and Facebook.  I went to work and created 10 large, 18” x 24” neon posters and placed them strategically in the area where I believed Penny was last chased or picked up hoping to generate a lead.  Over the next few days I put out 20 more posters encircling  the likely area Penny might be in.

On day 7 we finally got a call from a sighting in an unlikely area that would have matched the theory she was picked up in a car, transported away and perhaps escaped again or was let go.  Crazy things can happen.  I met with the person who called and found out the sighting was from 3-4 days before,  When I took Eibe  to confirm the sighting I also found two more witnesses who reported seeing a dog like Penny two days before in the same area.  Interestingly while checking this location I saw two other long haired Chihuahuas being walked on leashes and about 10 more Chihuahuas of various types in yards and front windows.  This inner city neighborhood was crawling with Chihuahuas!

To confirm a sighting I first got detailed information from the witness as to where exactly the subject dog was seen.  I then tried to go 50+ yards upwind if possible and started Eibe at a location where I was pretty sure the subject dog had not been present according to the witness.  I then pre-scented Eibe and directed her to search in a direction perpendicular to the reported line of travel of the subject dog.  If Eibe picked up a line and started tracking where the witness reported the dog,  it was a positive confirmation.  If she didn't pick up the line after several attempts, the sighting was not confirmed.  After several unsuccessful attempts to pick up a line I determined that the long haired red Chihuahua seen by the witnesses was not Penny.

To be continued….

Not all wounded deer can be recovered

By Andy Bensing

As all trackers know, not all deer that you track are gettable.  Notice how after we jumped the buck, which was heading right back towards the original hit site.  I see this quite frequently, and it helps me to confirm the jumped buck is the right one when you don't see him or there is no sign.    It would be too much of a coincidence for some other deer to take that path as frequently as I see it.  I have had confirmed sightings of this behavior of wounded deer in the past.  We did not see the buck go out but I was pretty sure this was the correct deer when the trail went hot since there was pulled hair in the bloodless bed he came out of.  Pulled hair and a path back to the hit sight confirmed it for me.    Also notice the buck made a classic "J" hook before he bedded.  Distance from hit to bed where we jumped him was 1200 meters and there was no visible blood after the point of loss.  This buck had been shot twice and knocked down twice from both shots with a shotgun slug.  He actually fell down and did not move for 5 minutes after the 2nd shot before he got up and stumbled away.  I found bone fragments that appeared to come from a large joint either leg or hip.  Since he was running well ahead of us 26 hours after the shot and he only bled for 150 yards after the shot in the first place I deemed him ungettable with a dog on a leash, and we quit the trail

Notice how the "active log" has made a nice clean line on Google Earth.  When you save a track on a Garmin and then transfer it to Google earth it displays all those annoying bread crumbs dots on Google Earth.  The "active log" does not display the bread crumbs.   I filled in the approximate path the buck took after I lost my GPS with the thin yellow line.  We did not get the buck but I was real happy when I found my dropped GPS as I re-traced my trail in the swamp.

I try to put my hunters to work as best I can. The hunter is carrying my backpack
and 2 sets of waders just in case we need them to go into the marsh.

This was not a routine track for Andy Bensing and his dachshund Eibe

By Andy Bensing

Cold, late season hunting draws very few hunters in MD and NJ where I do my tracking so a January 16th call in the snow was a pleasant surprise.  Maybe because it had been 3 weeks since my last track, but I got great pleasure from this call, and there were quite a few interesting aspects to it.  The doe was gut shot with a 20 gauge slug from 180 yards the night before.  The amazing report from the hunter started like this,
" I started tracking the deer 45 minutes after I shot and to my amazement I found her just inside the woods 50 yards from where I saw her leave the field and she was just STANDING there wobbling in some thick stuff.   I stood there 15 feet away for a few minutes in amazement that she did not run off and expecting her to fall over and die.  When she didn't, I made my way up to her through the thicket and decided to try and push her over.  I actually touched her and when I did she just kind of wobbled away into the dark.  I went home, waited 2 hours and went back with my wife to hopefully find her dead a short distance away.  We tracked a fairly easy blood trail about 100 yards past where she had been standing but the blood ended and that was it."

Here is a photo the hunter took with his cell phone while he stood there before he touched the standing deer.

When  got the call that night I decided to wait until morning before tracking.  I expected a pretty easy find of the gut shot doe. The hunter reported he got an excellent look at the location of the hit when he walked up to the standing deer. I doubted she would travel very far if she did not even want to run off when the hunter approached.  Well, for some reason when I started my dog, Eibe, she had a very difficult time picking up the line through the 4 inches of heavy wet snow that had come down during the night.  I knew there was good blood under the snow as reported by the hunter but Eibe just could not lock in at first.  I actually restarted her 3 times at the hit site in the first 45 minutes.  She could not even make her way all the way down the path the hunter had tracked visible blood the night before.  On the 3rd restart, I had the hunter dig down under the snow and find some visible blood. 

Eibe had tracked in the snow maybe a dozen times in the past and I never had to do that before but I gave it a try and it worked.  Getting a good nosefull of that blood seemed to set things in motion, and we started to make some progress.  We got to the hunter's point of loss with a little steering help from me and then Eibe picked her way along independently in a logical direction.  She would lock in and zip along for 50 yards or so, then the scent would seem to dry up, and she would search a few minutes, pick it up again and zip right along for another 50 yards or so.  Four or five places along the way I was able to see a comforting blood smear on a branch or a dot or two of frozen blood coming up from the disturbed snow off Eibe's footprints. 

After Eibe finally was able to lock in on the trail it took her 45 minutes to find the deer dead about 500 yards past where it had been touched by the hunter the night before. The deer took one last jump across a creek and died on the other side.  With the snow partially covering the deer, I thought at first she was just a rock but when Eibe dove into the frigid water, grabbed her tail and yanking, the snow fell off and there was no doubt.

When I got to the deer I could see the bullet sticking out her side, and it looked like it smacked into her, mushroomed but never entered her.  What the ??????  Further investigation revealed that I was looking at the exit side of the shot.  The 20 gauge Remington slug had mushroomed nicely and tumbled around in the deer as it passed through the guts on a 45 degree angle from back to front. It had just enough energy left to punch the tail end of the bullet through the deer's skin but the lip from the mushroom hung up in the skin and prevented the bullet from exiting.  I have seen arrows clog an exit hole but never a bullet doing the same.  Not amazing but pretty interesting to see.

Shot Analysis and Salvaging a Call

By Andy Bensing

I just finished my 50th call of the year with a live jump of a non-mortally wounded deer. I thought it was a gut shot by the hunter's phone interview, but when I got to the hit site it was quite clear what really happened. The ground hunting hunter reported a line of white hair on the ground making me think a low belly opening slice like I have seen often before with big mechanical broad heads. The big mature buck reportedly acted like a gut shot as well. He jumped slightly at the shot and stopped 30 yards away and stood with tail down and breathed heavily for 15 minutes as he milled around "acting oddly"  before walking slowly away. 

 

The hunter reported a lot of blood where the deer stood for 15 minutes and an easy blood trail leading away. I had tracked successfully for this novice hunter before so he called me from the hit site at 9am an hour after the shot and I advised him to wait until 2 hours before dark (3pm) which would be 7 hours after the shot  before tracking. The hunter called back after dark and reported the blood trail petered out after 600 yards with one big puddle along the way. From the phone conversation I believed he had pushed him unseen in the dark when he tracked him that night.

When I got to the hit site in the morning the real story was there to be seen. The "line" of white hair was actually a big oval "puff" of white hair and some of the white hairs had brown tips indicative of the white hairs at the border of the white and brown on the back of a deer's rear legs under the tail.

 

The hunter had been unable to find the bolt from his crossbow even though he reported a double thump when he shot. I  assumed one thump hitting the deer and a second one with the bolt likely striking a tree behind the deer a split second later. When my dog Eibe surveyed the hit site before taking off down the line she found the bolt embedded in a tree 15 yards behind the puff of hair.  The bolt had deflected left 30 degrees from the original line of travel after striking the deer. With the 25 yard shot hitting the deer so far off the point of aim and so many small branches in the line of sight I lined up from the puff of hair and the stump the hunter was leaning on for the shot I suspect the first thump was a deflection off a limb before the bolt hit the deer rather than the striking of the deer.

 

The puff of hair  and the brown tips on the white hairs told the story but the bolt confirmed it. It appeared to be perfectly clean but when I sprayed it with peroxide, as you can see in the photos below,  it showed a glancing blow. The shaft between two of the three fletchings foamed up but the opposite side did not. Also the rest of the shaft did not foam at all except for a very small spot on one side of the shaft  just behind the broad head an inch or two. After wiggling the broad head out of the tree,  only two of the three blades of the Grim Reaper mechanical broad head foamed as well. Also the large amount of blood reported by the hunter where the deer milled around for 15 minutes was just a bunch of drops. Lots of small drops but nothing even approaching "a lot" of blood.

 

 Note wet spots of peroxide with no foam on shaft between fletching.

 

Note white specks of foam from peroxide.  The shaft appeared perfectly clean before the peroxide was applied.  I was surprised to see it foam up.

 

Not seen in this photo but only 2 of the 3 blades foamed from the peroxide and a small speck of material foamed on the shaft 1 or 2 inches back from the broad head on the same side of the shaft as the 2 blades that foamed.

Looking at the small specks of foam from the peroxide on the bolt I could visualize 2 of the 3 blades of the mechanical opening as they contacted the back edge of the rear legs of the buck and sliced the skin open barely touching the muscle underneath and lightly spraying a little tissue on one side of the bolt's shaft.  As the blades created drag on one side of the shaft the back end of the bolt would kick away from the animal and as soon as the blades passed out of the skin the bolt would try to true itself thrusting the fletching back towards the deer's rump and smacking 2 of the 3 fletchings against the wound in the skin. This would cut an enormous amount of white hair as the blades raked across the back of the rear legs.

 

After evaluating the shot I told the hunter there was almost no chance of recovering the deer but since I had driven 90 miles and was there any way I would give it a shot. I was personally curious if this big buck who reacted so conservatively to the glancing shot would lay up and rest. And there is always the chance that somehow I miss interpreted the sign and he was more severely hurt. At the very least since I was so sure of what had occurred from the available sign I planned on using the call as a training exercise and learning more about my dog.

 

Well I started my dog and she easily followed the 600 meters the hunter had tracked and just kept on going through the point of loss without missing a beat. 165 meters past the hunter's point of loss the trail made a J-hook and we jumped the buck unseen but it was clear from my dog's actions that the trail had gone hot.  He was laying 50 meters off his back trail.  We chased him about 1½ miles in easy terrain just for the fun of it and to observe the pattern he would take. As expected for a minimally hurting deer he took minimal evasive  maneuvers at first feeling little threat from his pursuers being he was really not that hurt. He did make one small tricky move but that was pretty much it.  He ran out into a field and made a 50 meter circle and then cut back at a hard angle across an opposite field.  At one point after that  he busted through 5 or 6 bedded does.  We saw the does running hard ahead of us and tracked his single tracks across  their beds.  I wonder if he did that on purpose?   The does ran down the same trail he did for awhile. I was quite proud of my dog in that when the buck's single tracks branched off from the group at a Y in the trail my Eibe never missed a beat and was right on him and ignored the does' heavy, hot line.   When I was sure Eibe was just on him by himself I picked a convenient place to quite the trail when the buck veered in a direction that was not back towards the truck.

We had chased the buck live for an hour over a distance of about 1 ½ miles and he had shown no signs of weakness.  I had seen my dog negotiate the buck's evasive circle maneuver effortlessly, and I gained even more confidence in her ability to concentrate on the correct line when we busted through the bedded does.  This was a productive day for my dog and I salvaged out of a non-gettable call.  And a nice fat tip from the hunter topped it all off!

Thanks Andy for the great post!

Double lung-shot deer did not go far and were found by Andy Bensing and his tracking dog Eibe

Andy Bensing wrote that the other day he had two easy calls.  

 

In both cases rain washed  blood trails away.  Rather than grid searching on their own the hunters called me. Both deer were found in 10 minutes. One was in North Jersey, and then I drove 140 miles on Interstate 95 down to MD where I found the second. Both were high double lungs just nicking the edge of the lungs, and both deer traveled about 200 meters. One walked away and one ran away. The bow shot one walked away and the muzzle loader deer ran. Nice easy ones for the score card. I am cooking along at 10 for 25 so far this year! We have logged 3,400 miles so far. We are 13 calls ahead of 2 years ago when I took 47. I may raise my target to 65! Look out Tim Nichols! Sorry for the lousy photos, it was raining.

 

 

A mechanical broadhead produces unexpected results. A blood tracking dog finds the deer.

by Andy Bensing

 

Sometimes the Hunter Doesn't Lie, but Equipment Does, Another Live Recovery for Eibe

This video documents an interesting call I had this week. The hunter was using a crossbow at about 12 yards. Of course he did not see the bolt hit the deer but he pointed right to a quartering away heart shot when he showed me on my deer diagram. I did not believe him or I would not be there. There was almost no blood or hair to start the track and the bolt was not recovered so there was little to go on in figuring out what had happened. As you will see in the video, the hunter was exactly right. He hit the deer at a spot that should have been a perfect heart shot. Watch the video to see what really happened after the bolt impacted the deer.

Video - https://vimeo.com/49649786

 

 

Mechanical Broadhead Failure from Andy Bensing on Vimeo.

When this video was posted on Facebook, it generated quite a few comments. John Jeanneney wrote: "Bowhunters should be aware of the limitations of mechanicals. There are high risks on angle shots to the rib cage. In this deer case a good fixed blade head would have been much more likely to penetrate at that angle. Some mechanicals are better than others, but they all seem to have trouble passing though rib bones.  This makes for tough eyetracking, although it is not a problem for a good tracking dog that can follow the interdigital scent of that particular deer. As a tracker I have far more calls from hunters who shot mechanicals including Rage. Of course I don't have statistics on how many hunters use each type of head."

First successful recovery of the 2012 tracking season by Andy Bensing and Eibe: Spike buck in velvet in Maryland

In some states deer hunters have started their pursuit of whitetails already and we received Andy Bensing's  first report of successful recovery in Maryland. A big thank you to Andy for such a nice presentation of the call. Make sure that you check out his video.

By Andy Bensing

I headed out Friday night to take what sounded like a liver/gut shot so the odds were real good of recovering it. Normally I would let it sit until morning but with the temperature almost 80 overnight, a high fox population and the deer being gut shot, the meat would likely be gone by morning. I gave it 5 hours after the shot before tracking it with the dog. The hunter could find no blood trail at all. He saw deer run up over a hill 70 meters in a field but when he went to the crest, the deer was not visible down the other side. Hopefully I'd find him just inside the woods on the other side of the field.

It turned out that the buck was shot too far back just in front of the back leg.  Eibe jumped him from his initial wound bed about 285 meters from the hit site having found only a few drops of blood along the way.  After we put him out of his wound bed, we slowly tracked him for another 165 meters getting within a few feet of him 3 times until the fourth time when he did not get up and I was able to dispatch him.

An interesting note when you look at the map. Notice how he goes basically in a straight line. When we track we see this all the time. Severely wounded deer most of the time head as directly as they can for a place they feel safe, typically their bedding area, usually regardless of the difficulty of the terrain. Also notice how each time we jumped the deer he kind of cut back on us but then re-oriented himself to the original line of travel.

I had some interesting dog work from my Eibe on this line after we jumped the deer. I wanted to track slowly and carefully so as not to push the deer and keep him as calm as possible to make it easy to slip up to him and finish him off. Of course at the first jump my Eibe went crazy but I was able to calm her down with an "easy" command. After about 50 yards and for the rest of the hot track she stayed almost completely quiet and did not pull crazily but just tracked very slowly and matched MY slow careful pace. This enabled the hunter and me to walk very quietly and scan the darkness ahead with our lights and get close to the deer several times.

Another interesting point. Neither the hunter nor the landowner could reach the neighbor on the one side before we set out to track. I always try to get that done before I ever leave the house to meet the hunter. I knew that property lines might end up stopping this track but with the deer being gut shot there was a good chance it would not travel too far. It ended up being real close but the deer stayed on the landowner's property and died just a few feet short of the property line. It's frustrating but several times a year I end up having to give up on deer when we either can't locate the landowner or sometimes they won't grant permission. Check out in this photo I snapped with my iphone how close we almost were to loosing this one! Of course we could have waited until morning if it had crossed the line and went up to the neighbor's house but the deer would have been rotten and eaten by foxes. Just glad the deer died on the correct side of the line.
 

 

Here's a video depicting the recovery process for this call. There's some video of the dispatch of the deer with a spear at the end that you might find educational.

Spike Buck in Velvet Recovery https://vimeo.com/49090672

Classic Deer Behavior from a Classic Poor Shot Selection

by Andy Bensing
November 13, 2011

Here is the story of a track I had that encompassed many valuable lessons about blood tracking with a dog and hunting whitetail deer in general.  When the call came in the hunter reported having arrowed a mature buck from 20 feet up and at the close distance of only 5 to 8 yards.  When I got to the hit sit the distance was actually even worse.  It was only 4 yards at best.  To make matters even worse than that, the buck was facing directly towards the hunter when he shot.  In that configuration, there is absolutely no chance of double lunging the animal and only an extremely very low chance of hitting the heart.  This is a shot that never should be taken with a bow.  The hunter did not see the arrow hit the deer but he reported a bright red blood soaked arrow with short gray or white hairs on it. 

At the shot, the deer barely reacted and walked away 10 yards and stood wobbling for 20 seconds then walked another 15 yards away and lay down behind a tree in some brush.  The deer laid there, with no window for a second shot, for 45 minutes with its mouth wide open panting.  After 45 minutes the hunter reported the deer staggered to his feet and wobbled away out of sight without offering another shot opportunity.  The deer left a solid 2 inch wide strip of bright red blood from a few yards past the hit site to the place it laid for 45 minutes.  After it got up from the 45 minute bed there was not a single drop of blood found by the hunter or my dog the next day over the course of the whole track as seen below.

After hearing the hunter's account of the deer's behavior after the shot, I assumed he had hit back farther than he had aimed and gut-shot the deer.  When I got to the hit sight I quickly discovered that the deer had been single lunged, not gut shot.  There were 2 oak leaves in the 45 minute bed filled with coagulated blood still showing the typical hundreds of bird shot sized bubbles often seen in blood gurgling out of a deer from a lung shot.  From that point forward there was not a drop of blood found.

In retrospect, what likely happened was the razor sharp arrow cleanly slipped between the ribs and pierced one lung without touching any bone and the deer barely knew anything happened other than a sudden shortness of breath and sick feeling.  He walked over, laid down to rest, the lung collapsed and therefore stopped bleeding as Mother Nature had planned.  Mature bucks are masters of conserving energy.  They rarely panic.  That's how they get to be mature bucks.  Once the bleeding stops and the deer has been lucky enough to not go into shock (as a result of not panicking and running off all crazed and losing too much blood too fast) now all you have is a tired anemic deer with one lung.  No different than a person who just came out of surgery after having one of his two lungs removed.

When I started my dog Eibe on the 24 hour old track she had a bit of difficulty getting going.  I am guessing that with all the massive blood the first 30 yards the area was flooded with scent and she had a hard time figuring out what the deer himself smelled like.  We knew what direction the deer had walked out of the bed but I let Eibe take 4 or 5 trial runs in several directions for 30 or 40 meters each until she finally locked into the deer's individual scent.  There was no blood to be seen and she started poking her nose down into the fluffy oak leaves and checking hoof prints in the soft underlying ground.  Once locked into the correct buck we tracked bloodlessly for 1000 meters through open forest and field and up a steep hill to a briar and laurel thicket.  The trail went about 100 meters into the thicket on the top of the hill and then began to hook back. 

At that point I said to the hunter that I believed we were about to find a dead deer or jump him still alive. This deer had shown typical wounded deer behavior.  He had rested till he got his wits about himself and then headed efficiently back to a safe bedding area to hold up.  Deer will often make a button hook, as indicated on the map above, before bedding down.  This allows them to watch their back trail and see predators coming and slip away before the predator is right up on them.  And that is exactly what this buck did.  After hooking back 100 meters and laying on the edge of a bench 70 meters off to the side of his back trail, this buck saw/heard us coming and slipped away before we saw him.  Eibe got stuck for about 5 minutes at his bed in the button hook I assume because of the abundance of scent there from being there all night.  Once she got that worked out she shot off like a rocket and I suspected then we were on the buck's hot trail but could not be sure as there was no sign except for the classic pattern the track had been taking. 

After 500 meters on the hot trail with no confirming sign I was starting to worry that maybe we were not on the correct deer's trail.  Most of the hot trail showed no hoof prints or sign at all except I had seen some small fresh tracks that went with some very small, warm to the touch droppings.  Not a good sign as these could not possibly have been from our buck.  The small prints eventually disappeared and the trail then began to curve around to begin to make a circle and large prints from a running deer appeared on the line.  I believe the buck initially just walked away from his button hook bed but we eventually got closer and he began to run and therefore started making easily visible tracks. 

I still wasn't absolutely sure Eibe was on the correct deer but when I saw the path of the deer on my GPS circling back to his original trail from the day before my confidence level began to rise.  What are the odds that some other random other deer would take this course?  Not very high in my estimation.  I told the hunter that if the deer we were following continued to loop back towards the button hook bed then we could be pretty darn sure it was the buck we were after.  Deer, just like rabbits and other prey animals make circles back over their previous course of escape to confuse their pursuers. 

Well this buck did not use that strategy but used another strategy that I have seen before.  When he got to the place I expected him to circle back to the button hook, he instead ran right through an overgrown field filled with deer paths everywhere but took the exact course through the field that he had gone the day before but in the opposite direction for 250 meters.  Clearly no coincidence.  If I had had any doubts, they were gone.  This was the correct buck that had been shot the day before through one lung.  The other thing I was pretty sure of was that he was too strong to catch up to with a tracking dog on a leash.  I forgot to mention the other strong, evasive maneuver he used that worked pretty well for him. 

I am sitting here typing this out with my arm in a sling because at one point when he started the 250 meter retrace in the field, it appeared he purposely avoided an easy crossing of a 7 foot deep by 4 foot wide ravine and jumped across the ravine at an awkward spot.  Well, his pursuer, me, fell into that ravine when a log he used as a bridge broke!  But I am pretty tough too so I handed the leash to the hunter for awhile and hobbled along till I got my wind and could take the reins again.  The buck continued back right past the original hit sight and eventually got on the back trail of the trail he had followed before he was shot.  At this point I considered all the following information I knew about the deer:

1.    One lung hit that collapsed and stopped bleeding.
2.    Hole out bottom of chest but not really that much blood likely lost.
3.    Was willing to go up a very steep hill within one or two hours of being shot the day before.
4.    Never let us get close enough to see or hear him even in some very open hardwoods after chasing him
1½ miles after the button hook bed.
5.    Appeared to be able to run through the forest at will without struggling 24 hours after the shot.
6.    Made a very large 500m circle and had enough wits about him to throw in a 250 meter back track.
7.    Tried to kill his pursuers (and almost did) by setting up a booby trap at the ravine :-)

I decided to give up the trail.  As long as this deer can fight off any ensuing infection, this deer has a good chance to recover from his wounds.  I hope my shoulder heels as quickly!